Last night the Taube Atrium Theater hosted the first of the four vocal recitals to be presented in the 37th season of the Schwabacher Recital Series. Organized around a nocturnal theme, the program featured two alumni of the 2019 Merola Opera Program, both with low-register voices. These were mezzo Alice Chung and baritone Laureano Quant, accompanied at the piano by Nicholas Roehler. Readers may recall that Chung delivered a commanding performance of Azucena in the excerpt from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore presented this past July in the Schwabacher Summer Concert.
Last night’s program saw Chung and Quant alternating over the course of an impressively diverse repertoire, coming together for duo performances in a few of the selections. However, what made this evening particularly memorable was that Quant sang one of his own compositions, settings of two poems by the nineteenth-century Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, collected under the title “Sombras” (shades). (Quant is, himself, Columbian.) This was music that captured both the semantics and the rhetoric of Silva’s texts, and Quant’s delivery provided engaging insights into the work of a poet probably unknown to most of the audience. For her part, Chung responded to the “call” of Quant’s offering with her own approach to the music of a Columbian composer, Luis Carlos Figueroa. She sang a lullaby that he composed setting his own text, a brief but engagingly affectionate offering.
Things were somewhat shakier when it came to selections by the better-known composers. The first half of the program concluded with Hector Berlioz’ Opus 7 collection Les nuits d’été (summer nights) with Quant and Chung each taking three of the songs. Berlioz is best known for his orchestral compositions; but Opus 7 was originally written for soloist and piano accompaniment, completed in 1841. He subsequently prepared orchestral versions between 1843 and 1856, and these tend to receive more attention in concert programming. One consequence is that those familiar with the piece find themselves being reminded of the orchestrations when the accompaniment is played at the piano.
In this respect one may say that Roehler did his best to play with a deck of cards that had been stacked against him. By the same count, those listening to Berlioz are more likely to associate him with instrumental bombast than with sensitive intimacy, but no bombast is to be found in the texts of the poems by Théophile Gautier that Berlioz set. Nevertheless, there was a sense that neither Quant nor Chung knew quite how to evoke the intimacy expressed through Gautier’s texts. The result was a dutiful account by both the soloists and their accompanist that never quite made for a compelling listening experience.
The first vocal selection in the second half of the program consisted of four of the five songs that Gustav Mahler collected under the title Rückert-Lieder. In this case (with one exception) Mahler prepared both orchestral and piano versions; and the first performance of four of the songs was given in the orchestral setting with Mahler conducting. (The remaining song was only orchestrated after Mahler’s death by Max Puttmann.)
Last night the song that was omitted was “Um Mitternacht” (at midnight hour). This was a wise decision, since it is one of the finest examples of imaginatively stunning sonorities in Mahler’s approach to instrumentation. Each of the songs performed last night had its own unique approach to intimacy that was well served by the piano accompaniment. Here, again, Quant and Chung shared the set, dividing the selections equally in half, each providing his/her own perceptive approaches to not only the music but also the turns of phrase in Friedrich Rückert’s texts.
The program ended on a more provocative note with six of the songs that William Bolcom had collected under the title Cabaret Songs. These are all settings of poems by Arnold Weinstein, each of which expressive its own distinctive perspective on New York City life. Two of the poems were sung as duets, given just the right amount of minimal staging to keep the words fresh in the ears of the listener. Bolcom gave each of these songs a light touch, but both Chung and Quant knew how to tease out the sharper edges of the prevailing rhetoric.
The Mahler songs were preceded by a solo offering by Roehler. He played the opening prelude movement from Claude Debussy’s Suite bergamasque. This collection is best known for its “Clair de lune” movement, although Vladimir Horowitz like to perform the minuet movement as an encore selection. The prelude is the most challenging of the suite’s four movements, and it suggests that Debussy may have been seeking out his own musical approach to stream-of-consciousness. The underlying emotional dispositions turn on a dime from one phrase to the next, and the closest one ever comes to resolution is the aggressive cadence that concludes the entire movement.
Sadly, Roehler did not seem to recognize the underlying turbulence of this music. He plugged his way dutifully from one measure to the next, making it clear that he knew how to account for all of the marks on the score pages. However, there was no sense of the underlying erratic rhetoric, meaning that the performance amounted little more than a parade of notes with little sense of order other than that of the underlying duration.
The encore was an affectionate account of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow.” Clearly, all three of the performers enjoyed presenting this song. It also made for a soothing gesture to soften all those sharp edges that had just revealed themselves in the Cabaret Songs selections.
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