Another Evening of a Memorable Encore

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee (from the SFP event page for this performance)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances followed up on three consecutive piano recitals in its Summer Music Sessions 2021 programming with a vocal recital by tenor Lawrence Brownlee, accompanied at the piano by John Churchwell. As had been the case on Monday evening, this turned out to be an evening in which the most compelling performance came with the encore. In a program entitled Songs of my Youth, Brownlee surveyed selections of songs with Italian, German, and French texts, as well as a set of spirituals, to review his development as a vocalist.

However, just when the audience thought the journey had concluded, Brownlee discussed an early encounter with George Frideric Handel’s HWV 56 Messiah oratorio and the opportunities for embellishment in the opening selections for tenor, “Comfort ye my people” and “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted.” He then delivered a jaw-dropping account of this music, allowing each embellishment to unfold gracefully among the notes that Handel had already committed to paper. This was then followed by the plain-spoken delivery of the African American spiritual “All Night, All Day,” reminding the listener that the sublime can be presented in many different packages.

Fortunately, the programming that preceded these encores was far more satisfying than what I had encountered on Monday. Regardless of genre, Brownlee consistently found a “comfort zone” for his vocal qualities in each of the selections he performed. He began with his early encounter with the collection 24 Italian Songs and Arias, a single volume of extracts from the three-volume collection Arie antiche (ancient arias) compiled by Alessandro Parisotti. Compiled in the late nineteenth century, “ancient” to Parisotti meant seventeenth-century; and Brownlee consistently honored the rhetorical styles of that period. He then shifted gears to the more familiar texts of German (Franz Schubert and Richard Strauss) and French (Gabriel Fauré, Francis Poulenc, and “honorary member” Franz Liszt) art song, providing equally engaging interpretations. Finally, his spiritual set drew upon arrangements by Harry Burleigh and Hall Johnson, both consistently authoritative sources.

This was Brownlee’s second SFP appearance. He had previously made his San Francisco recital debut as part of the SFP 2017–2018 Vocal Series. Before that he made his debut with the San Francisco Opera in Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, a 2016 production that was streamed this past April. He has established convincing comfort zones in both opera and art song, and his breadth in the latter category is engagingly impressive. Hopefully, his schedule will allow him to make frequent returns to our city.