Bass-baritone Dashon Burton (photograph by Tatiana Daubek, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)
Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched the first “physical” presentation of its Sanctuary Series of recitals. The recitalist was bass-baritone Dashon Burton, currently SFP Vocal Artist-in-Residence. He and his accompanist, pianist Robert Mollicone, had prepared an extensive survey of composers that were American, either by birth or through immigration, structured in two sections, each with its own title. Those titles were American Stories: The Shoulders of Giants and Black Like Me: Songs of the Diaspora. That second section had its own division into sections: The Maker (referring to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor), Langston and The Masters (referring to Langston Hughes), and The Modern (referring to living composers).
Sadly, Burton is currently recovering from a non-COVID related illness; and he prepared a significantly foreshortened program, so as not to disappoint his audience. Only one of the Black Like Me composers was included on that program: The final selection was the Three Dream Portraits composed by Margaret Bonds. Each of the songs evokes a character genre, whose personality unfolds through what amounts to a brief musical gesture, drawing upon penetrating passages by Hughes. Bonds composed these songs in 1959, a time when the efforts of the Civil Rights Movements were just beginning to register some impact on the general American population. Burton’s delivery captured the expressiveness of Bonds’ capacity for rhetorical brevity.
The Bonds songs were preceded by the four songs in Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 113 cycle, Mirages. Fauré took his title from a larger collection of poems by Renée de Brimont. As was the case with the Bonds selection, these amounted to a series of studies of the impact of brevity. Since the songs were not identified on the program sheet, Burton introduced them, allowing the attentive listener to associate the visual impressions of the titles with the brevity of Fauré’s capacity for expression.
The first two selections on the program drew upon the German repertoire. These were lengthier offerings, both exploring more extensive sacred texts. The first of these was Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 82 cantata Ich habe genug (I have enough), originally scored for bass voice and a reduced instrumental ensemble of oboe and strings. As with the Fauré selection, Burton provided a summary of the content of the text, which he sang in the original German. As Ludwig Finscher observes in his booklet notes for the omnibus Bach 2000 collection, “the proximity to analogous passages of the St Matthew Passion is manifest.” Thus, while BWV 82 may have been unfamiliar to most of the audience, there was a generous sampling of familiar thematic material throughout the individual movements of the cantata.
Bach was followed by the last collection of songs composed by Johannes Brahms, his Opus 121 Vier ernste Gesänge (four serious songs). The texts are all taken from the Bible, using Martin Luther’s German translations. The first three of these songs dwell on death, while the conclusion turns to the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, which concludes with the passage about faith, hope, and love. Burton’s command of German brought clarity to both the Bach and Brahms selections, but Brahms provided him with more opportunities to explore a rich diversity of dispositions.
The good news was that Burton’s expressiveness rose above the shortcomings of his piano accompaniment. The Bach selection was, of course, an arrangement, which turned out to be as thick in texture as the accompaniment that Brahms had composed. Sadly, Mollicone overplayed both of these accompaniments, often banging away to such a degree that the reverberations of the piano threatened to overwhelm Burton’s delivery. Fortunately, Burton himself was not phased by this keyboard onslaught; but the contrast in dispositions of the two performers was more than a little disquieting.
In fairness, however, it may have been that Mollicone was not prepared for the extensive capacity for reverberation in the St. Mark’s sanctuary. To be fair, I was not prepared for it either. Readers that have followed this site for some time probably known that I am more used to encountering early music performances with much more modest resources in that space. Mind you, I was not disturbed by such reverberations back in January of 2015, when pianist Angela Hewitt accompanied mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter for an SFP recital in that same sanctuary. On the other hand that duo performed to a “full house,” filled with bodies to absorb most of those reverberations. Nevertheless, I would say that Mollicone never found the right balance with Burton for the Bach and Brahms selections.
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