Last night marked my first “physical” attendance at a student recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) since the onset of the pandemic. On the recommendation of a “reliable source,” I went to listen to the Second Year Master’s Recital given by mezzo Hope Nelson, accompanied at the piano by Kevin Korth. Her program encompassed selections in French, Italian, German, and English, focusing primarily on the art song repertoire. The diversity of that repertoire made for a thoroughly engaging listening experience.
Nelson began the program with four of the five songs that Maurice Ravel collected under the title Histoires naturelles (natural histories). The texts were poems by Jules Renard, each portraying a different animal. With the exception of “Le grillon” (the cricket), all of the animals are birds. The poems endow each of the animals with human qualities, and Nelson managed to capture the essences of those qualities in her deliveries. If I had any quibbles, they were with the first of the songs, depicting the peacock. This is the one “auditory” text that tries to capture the “cri diabolique” (devilish cry) of a peacock waiting for his mate; and Nelson’s delivery of that cry was not as “diabolical” as I have encountered in other performances.
The Ravel selection was followed by a cantata for solo voice and piano by Gioachino Rossini entitled “Giovanna d’Arco” (Joan of Arc). Rossini wrote this piece in 1832, which would have been about three years after his final composition for the stage. The text is basically an interior monologue of “the Maiden,” which is endowed with little narrative context. None of my sources provide any information about the author of the text, leading me to wonder if it had been written by Rossini himself. While the music itself is a bit on the overblown side, Nelson clearly knew how to capture the different emotional dispositions associated with each of the cantata’s movements.
More in the German tradition of vocal recitals, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 14 Lieder des Abschieds (farewell songs) consisted of four text settings, each by a different poet, on the topic of departure. These were composed between 1920 and 1921. Those familiar with Korngold’s Opus 12 opera Die tote Stadt (the dead city) would probably have recognized a few of the thematic tropes from that opera, along with an occasional nod to Gustav Mahler’s own “farewell” composition, the final movement of the orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (the song of the earth). The Opus 14 cycle provides an engaging examination of Korngold’s rhetorical techniques before those techniques were repurposed to serve the needs of Hollywood producers.
The Korngold set was preceded by “I Want to Die While You Love Me,” Undine Smith Moore’s setting of poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson. Moore, who died on February 6, 1969, was known as the “Dean of Black Women Composers.” Given all the attention given to female composers recently, I was a bit embarrassed to realize that this was my first encounter with her music. One might describe the rhetoric of Johnson’s poem as one of delicate intensity, and Nelson’s delivery engagingly captured the balancing of those opposites.
The program then concluded with two songs composed in the service of narrative. The first of these was the “Barbarasong” from the first act of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, sung in the original German of Bertolt Brecht’s libretto. I have always preferred the coarseness of Brecht’s rhetoric to any attempts to translate this libretto into English. The text sheet included with the program provided both the German and the English, but Nelson’s delivery of the the German had me fixated from beginning to end. She knew just the right amount of dramatic embellishment to keep audience heads from being buried in that text sheet.
The program then shifted over to English for “The Madame’s Song,” which Stephen Sondheim wrote for the film version of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. (This later resurfaced in the Side By Side By Sondheim revue as “I Never Do Anything Twice.”) Sondheim’s edges were as sharp as Brecht’s in this song. In this case, however, there was no text sheet. It was not necessary. Between the clarity of her delivery and her judicious sense of dramatics, there was no need to be looking at anything other than Nelson herself.
The same could be said for her presentation of an encore. This was Liza Lehmann’s setting of Rose Fyleman’s poem “There are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” The text is a somewhat loopy account of a child’s imagination, and Lehmann knew just the right way to capture that eccentricity. Nelson clearly had fun with her delivery, which was readily shared by just about everyone in the audience.
