Schwabacher Series Concludes with Four Vocalists

Martin Katz, Christian Pursell, Zhengyi Bai, Patricia Westley, and Ashley Dixon (photograph by Matthew Washburn, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Last night in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater, the San Francisco Opera Center and the Merola Opera Program jointly presented the final recital of the 2019 Schwabacher Recital Series. The program was prepared by pianist Martin Katz leading a quartet of vocalists, all of whom were Merola Alumni: soprano Patricia Westley, mezzo Ashley Dixon, tenor Zhengyi Bai, and bass-baritone Christian Pursell. Dixon, Bai, and Pursell are all currently San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows.

Katz has had a long (about four decades) and distinguished career of accompanying vocalists. (I have enjoyed his work on both coasts of this country.) He is also a perceptive coach, and many of the Merola participants have benefitted from master classes that he has conducted. He prepared a program that could almost be called a celebration of the vocal repertoire. The evening was framed by the opposing nineteenth-century Viennese aesthetics of Hugo Wolf and Johannes Brahms; and between them was situated the bold strokes of Samuel Barber from the middle of the twentieth century.

The concluding Brahms selection was the most delightful, particularly since it afforded the only opportunity to listen to the vocalists singing in groups, rather than as soloists. This portion of the program consisted of four songs from the WoO 33 collection of 49 German folksongs, concluding with “Vergebliches Ständchen” (futile serenade) from the Opus 84 collection of five “Romances and Songs,” scored for one or two voices. Three of the songs in this set had texts involving dialog between a man and a woman. In the score for “Vergebliches Ständchen,” those “roles” are explicitly labeled “He” and “She.” Last night it was sung by the full quartet to conclude the program with the men doubling the “He” texts and the women doing the same for “She.”

The other two dialog songs were sung as duets by Westley and Bai. The first, “Feinsliebchen, du sollst mir nicht barfuß gehn” (my little love, you should not go barefoot), was between a pair of lovers, while the second, “Schwesterlein” (sister dear), is between brother-and-sister siblings. Both of these were delivered with minimal but effective staging; and Westley knew how to engage just the right amount of character-acting to reinforce the presentation of a ring at the end of the first song. Pursell and Dixon each sang solo selections for the collection, both again involving just enough staging to reinforce the romantic tone of the texts.

A little bit of staging also went a long way in the performance of Barber’s Opus 29 Hermit Songs cycle. When they were first performed in 1953 at the Library of Congress, soprano Leontyne Price sang the entire set, accompanied by Barber at the piano. Last night the songs were divided among the four vocalists in ways that made perfect sense. “St Ita’s Vision” is the one that most explicitly involves a female voice; and Wesley’s channeling of the words of Mary could not have been more effective. Similarly, the voice behind “The Monk and his Cat” is decidedly male; and Pursell portrayed the monk as more interesting in watching the cat at play than in copying his manuscripts. (As those familiar with this song know, the cat makes an appearance by walking across the piano keyboard.)

The first half of the program was devoted to sixteen of the songs from Hugo Wolf’s collection of 53 songs setting poems by Eduard Mörike. As suggested above, Wolf’s approach to composing songs differed significantly from that of Brahms. Wolf and Gustav Mahler were fellow classmates at the Vienna Conservatory (now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna). Both found their own ways to depart from Brahms’ conventions in writing art song. However, while Mahler favored orchestral settings, all of Wolf’s songs involve piano accompaniment.

Nevertheless, he shares with Mahler a preference for thick fabrics of polyphony. Indeed, many of his songs (including those performed last night) frequently require that the voice weave its own way through the many voices of polyphony already in the piano part. This is no easily matter, particularly when it involves the rich harmonies of the late nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, all four of the vocalists often showed difficulty fitting their lines into the textures coming from the piano. This may have been at least partly a matter of the adverse acoustic properties of the Atrium Theater. As has been frequently observed, this space has no natural acoustics and depends, for all practical purposes, on the Constellation® technology developed by Meyer Sound. Controlling that system requires a skilled technician; and, to the best of my knowledge, such a technician has always been present for any performance involving the San Francisco Opera. (Readers may recall that at the Earplay concert this past February, one of the contributing composers took over those controls, since the technology contributed to the score he had created.)

Last night’s technical support clearly served the music of Barber and Brahms satisfactorily, but it would appear that the technician had not been prepared for the complexity of Wolf’s polyphony. As in the other selections, the dramatic skills of all four vocalists definitely facilitated listener attention. However, Wolf’s obsession with intricate detail, even when it involves only a piano and a vocalist, is as critical to his aesthetic stance as is Mahler’s focus on the detailed activity of individual instruments in his symphonic writing. Thus, while Katz clearly had good intentions in preparing an account of Wolf’s skills in working with particularly intense German texts, those intentions were sadly undermined by the “technical details” of the circumstances.