Disappointing Vocal Recital at C4NM

Banner for yesterday’s concert showing Joseph Collins Wicht and Jesse Barrett (from the C4NM event page)

Yesterday evening the Center for New Music (C4NM) hosted composer Joseph Collins Wicht, who presented selections from his Trinity song cycle. As suggested by the title, the collection is divided into three sections: “The Prodigal Soul,” “The Epicene Heart,” and “The Rapacious Body.” On the basis of the excerpts that were performed, I doubt that I can even begin to plumb the denotations or connotations of these titles. Suffice it to say that each song in the cycle sets the text by a unique poet.

Three vocalists participated in the performance, tenors Jesse Barrett and Samuel Brondfield and bass Terrence McLaughlin. Wicht accompanied them all at the piano. A total of eight songs from the cycle were presented, along with three “works-in-progress” for which Wicht accompanied his own singing. Sadly, the online program material provided by C4NM included the list of the songs themselves but not the texts of the poems.

The good news was that all three of the vocalists delivered a solid command of diction. Brondfield was weaker in several aspects of vocal quality than his two colleagues. Most outstanding was Barrett, when he delivered the satirical selection, “Cafe,” based on a poem by Joan Gelfand. This was a mercilessly satiric attack on “city life;” and Barrett’s command of body language reinforced the clarity of his diction over the course of roasting the urban life style.

Taken as a whole, however, Wicht’s selections were uneven in commanding listener attention. Sometimes the piano accompaniment would reinforce attention to the song; but too much of the performance sounded too routine, both in the inventiveness of the music and its execution. If Trinity was intended to allow Wicht to display his personal joy in the diversity of poetry in the English language, then that train never really left the station.

The program was further marred because Wicht seemed more interested in talking about his work than in playing it. Sadly, the C4NM technical crew has not yet found a way to provide a microphone for anything that is spoken between the performances of the music. Thus, most of what Wicht uttered came across as distant mumbling (and I have to believe that he was not aware of his incoherence).

Over the course of the summer, I put in a good deal of time tracking the progress of how different organizations were approaching live-streaming. The most impressive learning curve can be found in the efforts of Old First Concerts (O1C), which took a great leap forward when they were finally able to stream from their “home base,” the Old First Presbyterian Church. C4NM, of course, has its own space; and, to date, it has presented far fewer live-streamed offerings than O1C. Nevertheless, they still need to do some work on how each performance must, out of necessity, be provided with its own unique configuration of gear for capturing all of the audio (not just the music) and an informative account of the video. Hopefully, things will improve in time for next month’s performance by the Friction String Quartet, particularly since the players frequently provide valuable verbal background to supplement their performances.