Baritone Christopher Maltman (from his SFP event page)
Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its replacement for its past annual Vocal Series. Under the new name “The Art of Song,” SFP plans to expand the scope of vocal programming beyond traditional “art song.” Last night English baritone Christopher Maltman launched the new series with a recital that definitely took the art song repertoire beyond its usual traditional boundaries. Along with pianist Audrey Saint-Gil, he presented a program entitled Carnival of the Animals, which had nothing to do with Camille Saint-Saëns and everything to do with texts, primarily in French and German, involved with animal life.
There was certainly no break from tradition in his choice of composers. The French texts were set by Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, and Emmanuel Chabrier. Those in German were set by Robert Schumann, Max Reger, and Hugo Wolf. However, the Poulenc and Ravel sets were both collections conceived by their respective composers consisting entirely of poems about animals.
Before he began the performance, Maltman explained that the program had grown out of his desire to sing Ravel’s Histoires naturelles. From there he realized that the literature abounded with other songs of animal life, and it was not long before he had accumulated enough material for a complete program. Before last night I had known the five songs in Histoires naturelles only through recordings, so Maltman’s initial motive was sufficient to draw me to his recital. It is easy to think that the title, taken from the source of the texts, a collection of prose poems by Jules Renard, means “natural history.” However, in French “histoire” is the noun for “story” or “tale;” and what struck me most about Ravel’s selections was how each embedded rich description within the setting of a narrative, each of which is rich with connotations.
Maltman clearly appreciated this narrative infrastructure. Without ever compromising the many details (some subtle, some blatant) of Ravel’s settings, he knew how to approach each song with the rhetoric of a storyteller, always keeping the listener curious about what would happen next (even if that listener had the “full plan” in the text sheet on his/her lap). One of the more shattering moments comes in the very first song about a peacock in search of his mate. At the very center of the text is the bird’s “diabolical” cry, elicited by Renard with just the right chilling combination of phonemes and rendered by Maltman with all the shock value the poet had in mind.
Poulenc’s Le bestiare ou Cortège d’Orphée (the bestiary or procession of Orpheus) is based on a book of animal poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, each illustrated by a woodcut by Raoul Dufy. Each poem is a miniature. (The longest has five lines.) Yet, as is often the case in a haiku, the description provided in the text discloses an underlying narrative. Maltman’s evocation of the imagery behind each of these poems elapsed with such spontaneity that the momentum allowed him to advance to the two Schumann settings with only a barely noticeable break.
Those two Schumann selections, composed at different times in the composer’s life, were both about lions. In both of them description is subordinated to the unfolding of narrative; and both of the narratives evolve as chilling Gothic tales, each climaxing in a gruesome ending. The Reger selections, taken from his Opus 76 Schlichte Weisen (simple airs) collection, are far more light-hearted, if not downright cheerful. It is hard to think that these little gems of simplicity came from a composer best known for pushing the technique of prolongation to extremes in his compositions for organ.
The penultimate coupling of Chabrier and Wolf provided a study of rhetorical opposites. The Chabrier settings were unabashedly cheerful, given just the right lightness of touch in Maltman’s delivery. Wolf, on the other hand, was notorious for expressing his neuroses through his music. Each of Maltman’s accounts proceeded down a dark road, at the end of which was his setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s account of a rat catcher with sinister overtones of the pied-piper of fairy tales.
All of this programming led up to a “dessert course” of three songs setting the English texts of Michael Flanders, composed by Flanders’ “partner in crime, Donald Swann. The two of them compiled enough songs about animals to fill an entire album. Maltman selected “The Armadillo,” “The Warthog,” and “The Gnu.” Some of Flanders’ texts no longer hold up under the test of time; but all three of these are absolute gems, each with its own characteristic take on eccentricity.
After taking his bows Maltman acknowledged that his encore selection was inevitable. “The Hippopotamus” is probably the most beloved selection in the entire Flanders/Swan catalog. Audiences around the world can sing the “Mud, mud, glorious mud!” chorus at the drop of a hat (shamelessly appropriated from the title of the first Flanders and Swan show taken on tour from London to Broadway). However, one must not overlook Flanders’ mastery of light verse at its best (read “a regular army/of hippopotami” aloud to see how well it scans).
The World Wildlife Fund never had it so good.
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