Nicholas Phan’s “Sanctuary” Recital for SFP

Tenor Nicholas Phan accompanied at the piano by Jake Heggie (from the SFP Front Row Web page)

Yesterday San Francisco Performances (SFP) released the third of its Sanctuary Series concerts for streaming through its Front Row Web page. Readers may recall that this was originally announced as a series of audio offerings, but this particular recital was documented as a video. This recital was prepared by tenor Nicholas Phan and entitled simply Time. The program book for this concert elaborated with the following text:

Songs which touch on the subject of time—how it can be fleeting, feel suspended, how finite our time is, etc. Also a meditation on this moment of paused performances.

In other words the broad perspective of the nature of time has homed in on the extent to which shelter-in-place has impacted our very perspective of time itself and how we experience it.

Phan’s selections covered a broad scope of music history with “Time Stands Still” by John Dowland in the distant past and a far more recent pairing of songs by Jake Heggie. Heggie also served as Phan’s accompanist. Phan introduced most of the songs with brief but apposite descriptions, but Heggie provided the introduction for his own music. For those that follow Phan’s recording career, three of the songs he presented can be found on his Clairières album, devoted entirely to songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, which was released by Avie Records at the beginning of this year.

I wanted to call out the Clairières selections because Phan is one of the few contemporary advocates for the Boulanger sisters that I have encountered. Listening to his recording was enlightening for any number of reasons, but watching the ways in which he brought expressive awareness of both text and music to the spontaneity of performance deepened my appreciation of these two composers, particularly with the benefit of a program book (PDF download) that provided both the French texts and useful translations into English. With such resources one could appreciate not only Phan’s shaping of the musical phrases but also the phonemic impact of the words themselves.

The same can be said of his approach to the English texts of three poems by Thomas Hardy, two set by Benjamin Britten and one by Gerald Finzi. Heggie’s selections, on the other hand, were drawn from the American poets Vachel Lindsay and Emily Dickinson. The latter was particularly interesting, since Dickinson had very clear thoughts about phrasing and breath, which she indicated by imposing long dashes into the text. Heggie clearly appreciated what she was doing and developed a setting that honored her phrasing without allowing it to overwhelm the musical setting. The Lindsay text was somewhat more straightforward, offering a slightly better fit to Heggie’s thematic contours.

Ultimately, however, the overall impact of the program was sustained by providing the lighter selections as “bookends” for the entire program. That meant Charles Ives’ “mini-cycle” of two songs, Memories, and the beginning and “Some Other Time” from Leonard Bernstein’s score for the musical On the Town at the end. The two songs in Memories are entitled “Very Pleasant” and “Rather Sad;” and both set texts by Ives himself. Thus, there is good reason to believe that both of them are tongue-in-cheek, each in its own way. The first is a spot-on account of audience members at a formal concert paying attention to everything but the performance. The second is, in all probability, deliberately sappy; and I have encountered at least one vocalist happy to deploy portamento to make the sap even thicker. Phan was less inclined to such exaggeration, but one could still chuckle at his delivery.

I probably go against much of the flow in declaring that Bernstein’s music for On the Town, particularly where the songs are concerned, should be counted among his finest efforts. (In other words I value On the Town far more than West Side Story.) One of my strongest reasons is that Betty Comden and Adolph Green came up with lyrics that covered a wide swath of highly varying emotions, none of which were anything less that spot-on sincere. Much as I have always respected Stephen Sondheim’s ways with words, I do not think he was comfortable with West Side Story’s intimations of opera; and he only found his “sweet spot” when he took responsibility for both the music and the lyrics of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. All this is my saying that Phan could not have picked a better selection than “Some Other time” when it came to “signing off” his recital.