Last night in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater, the San Francisco Opera Center and the Merola Opera Program presented the third of the four concerts in this year’s Schwabacher Recital Series, named after James Schwabacher, a co-founder of Merola. The program featured three vocalists, each of whom gave a solo performance on either side of the intermission. In “order of appearance” during the first half of the program, the vocalists were soprano Anne-Marie MacIntosh, bass Stefan Egerstrom, and soprano Elisa Sunshine. They were accompanied by Andrew King, playing a Fazoli piano courtesy of Piedmont Piano.
It would be fair to observe that none of the six offerings was particularly familiar to those that favor vocal recitals. I have to say that, in such an adventurous context, I was most pleased that Egerstrom used his first set to present a selection of seven songs by Jean Sibelius, taken from several collections that he composed over the course of his life. I should confess that I have yet to follow the diversity of vowels (and occasional consonants) in printed Finnish text, since just about every expectation of phoneme sounds in English is thwarted. [updated 4/28, 1:40 p.m.: I just found out that the texts were in Swedish, rather than Finnish, which probably underscores my inability to follow the text sheets!] That said, Egerstrom harnessed those unfamiliar sonorities to capture the intensity of the semantics that could be gleaned from the English translations. This was not my first encounter with Sibelius songs; but the gaps between those opportunities have been too long for my personal preferences, making Egerstrom’s efforts particularly welcome to my own personal tastes.
Any challenges with the Finnish language were compensated at the beginning of the second half of the program. Egerstrom shifted over to English with a performance of Cyril Scott’s arrangement of the folk song “Lord Randall.” This narrative of a young man poisoned to death by his lover has been with me pretty much for as long as I have been interested in folk songs. (I even had a favorite recording of this ballad sung by, of all people, Harry Belafonte, whose rhetorical delivery was more impressive than one might have guessed.) After five relatively polite verses, the young man erupts with anger in the final verse; and Egerstrom captured just the right phrasing to deliver those words with the greatest impact.
MacIntosh began the evening with Franz Liszt’s setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Die Loreley.” This, too, is a dark text based on a dark legend. Liszt’s repertoire of vocal music is relatively limited compared to his music for solo piano. (What isn’t so limited?) Nevertheless, the composer was definitely sensitive to the verbal nuances of the poet; and MacIntosh made it a point to give each of them the attention they deserved. In the second half of the program, she switched her attention of to a collection of four songs by Claude Debussy that he called “Chansons de jeunesse” (songs of youth). This contrasted Liszt’s darker rhetoric with a lighter touch, convincing the attentive listener that this is music that deserves to be heard much more often.
Sunshine’s venture into the unfamiliar concluded the program with the songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff. All of Rachmaninoff’s 83 songs were composed before he left Russia in 1917. Thus, when one listens today, one can appreciate the retrospective impression of Russia before the Revolution. I first encountered this repertoire at a student recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. This was many years ago, and Sunshine’s performance reminded me of how much I missed this aspect of Rachmaninoff’s efforts as a composer.
Less satisfying was her decision to conclude the first half of the program with Libby Larsen’s Try Me, Good King. This song cycle is a chronicle of the first five wives of the English King Henry VIII, each of whom is represented by her own words. Sadly, if Try Me, Good King is representative of how Larsen sets text to music, then she would do well to focus her pursuits on other genres. None of the songs show any sensitivity to syntax, semantics, rhetoric, or narrative. The cycle is one of those projects that looks good on paper but offers little to the attentive listener.
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