Last night in Herbst Theatre, mezzo Jamie Barton was featured in the second of the four The Art of Song Series programs being presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) this season, accompanied at the piano by Kathleen Kelly. As SFP President Melanie Smith observed in introducing the program, this was the final SFP offering of the calendar year. However, she also reminded the audience that many more programs would be offered in the remainder of the season beginning in January.
San Francisco has been good to Barton. She “caught her first big break” (as they like to say) on the opening night of the San Francisco Opera in September 2014. Daveda Karana, scheduled to sing the role of Adalgisa in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, was unable to perform. Barton stepped in to replace her for the full run of the opera; and the rest, as they say, is history. That history included her SFP debut in the Young Masters Series in December of 2015. She was back in the War Memorial Opera House this past June to sing the role of the witch Ježibaba in Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka; and while she was “in town,” she also provided a surprise encore for the final season concert given by the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony.
As Barton explained to the audience, she had prepared her program to provide “equal opportunity” (my phrase, not hers) for women composers. Thus, in the first half of the program, Joseph Haydn’s single-movement secular cantata “Arianna a Naxos” (Hoboken XXVIb/2) was preceded by songs composed by Amy Beach, Elinor Remick Warren, and both of the Boulanger sisters, Nadia, best known for her impact in teaching composers of the twentieth century ranging from Aaron Copland at one end to Philip Glass at the other, and Nadia’s younger sister Lili, who died early at the age of 24. The second half then balanced a song cycle by Libby Larsen with songs by Maurice Ravel, Henri Duparc, and Richard Strauss.
The most engaging selection in this diverse program probably came from Larsen’s Love After 1950 cycle. Each of the five songs drew upon a different female poet: Rita Dove, Julie Kane, Kathryn Daniels, Liz Lochead, and Muriel Rukeyser (in “order of appearance”). Musically, each had its own characteristic style: blues, torch song, honky-tonk, tango, and an homage to Isadora Duncan. There was also considerable rhetorical diversity across the collection. Nevertheless, Larsen seems to have selected these particular poems for the shared infrastructure of irony; and Barton clearly knew how to shape a unique ironic platform for each of the songs. The result was thoroughly entertaining on the surface, but Barton never neglected any of the dark undercurrents.
One might almost call Love After 1950 a “response” to the “call” of Haydn’s cantata. By the time Haydn composed this piece in 1789, he had already written 92 symphonies; and his reputation had advanced from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Great Britain. However, while Haydn had been prodigiously imaginative in both his symphonies and his string quartets, “Arianna a Naxos” emerged as an artifact that was traditionally formal: two arias, each preceded by an extended recitative. One barely encounters any of the advances in dramatic vocal music that had been initiated by Haydn’s colleague, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Given Haydn’s talents, it should be no surprise that the solo vocal line for this cantata was accompanied by a generous share of virtuoso keyboard performance. Thus, this was a performance in which Barton and Kelly contributed as equals. While Kelly was playing a modern Hamburg Steinway Model D, her touch definitely evoked the phrasing and sonorities of Haydn’s time. For her part, Barton knew how to deliver the full scope of the sorrow of abandonment in the (anonymous) text. However, this brings us back to the “call-and-response hypothesis.” If the “call” comes from Ariadne’s grief, then the poets set by Larsen “respond” with a single message, “Get over it!”
The four songs that began the program made for an engaging journey of discovery. In my own listening experience Beach was the most familiar; but I had not encountered her Opus 44 Browning Songs, of which Barton’s selection, “Ah, Love But a Day,” was the second of three. The Warren, on the other hand, was entirely unfamiliar; and my knowledge of the Boulanger sisters was more by reputation, rather than by any compositions.
As a result, the beginning of Barton’s program was a matter of getting to know the text and then getting to know how the music informed that process of knowing the text. Barton could not have done better in facilitating that process. Her text delivery was consistently crystal clear, as was her awareness of the rhetorical connotations of the music. Nothing would please me more than to encounter any of these four songs in future recital programs.
At the other end of the program, Barton knew how to present the selections by Ravel, Duparc, and Strauss as if they were old friends, which they probably were to those in the audience that regularly attend vocal recitals. However, those old friends had to yield to the new century in Barton’s encore selection. She sang “In the beginning …,” the first of the two poems by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard set by Jake Heggie in Of Gods and Cats, composed in 2000. “In the beginning …” is the “cat poem” of the pair; and Barton knew exactly how to play every feline gesture to the hilt. The playful sense of wit in both words and music provided the perfect complement to the more sardonic texts that Larsen had set.
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