Sidney Outlaw on the cover of his Lament album (from the Amazon.com Web page)
Last night in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Bowes Center, baritone Sidney Outlaw, accompanied at the piano by Warren Jones, concluded this year’s Schwabacher Recital Series, presented by the San Francisco Opera Center and the Merola Opera Program. The program had been scheduled for the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall; but, due to a power outage at the 50 Oak Street building, the venue had to be shifted to the Van Ness Avenue building. The program consisted entirely of the selections that Outlaw and Jones had recorded for their Lament album.
Taken as a whole, the program was an uneven one. The most satisfying selections were all performed after the intermission. The first of these was an excerpt from Dorothy Rudd Moore’s Frederick Douglass opera. This included her composing music for what is probably Douglass’ best known speech, “What to the slave, is the Fourth of July?”
Readers may recall that John Adams composed music for this speech in his score for the Girls of the Golden West opera, given its premiere during the Fall 2017 season of the San Francisco Opera. However, Moore’s opera was composed in 1985. The composer died earlier this year, and Outlaw recalled that he was fortunate enough to sing this selection for her before her death.
The setting of prose can be a risky business; and, when the prose is polemical, the composer runs the risk of letting the soapbox rhetoric get out of control. However, Douglass’ best speeches drew upon the strategy of the slow burn, and Moore’s music seemed to capture that foundation in a thoroughly convincing manner. Outlaw, in turn, took the foundation of Moore’s rhetoric and brought it to life with his delivery of Douglass’ text. This was definitely the high point of the evening.
Nevertheless, it was followed by a second journey of discovery. Outlaw performed four of the songs from Harry T. Burleigh’s Five Songs of Laurence Hope. Laurence Hope was the pen name of Violet Nicolson, whose poetry could not be published until she assumed a male pseudonym. Burleigh, in turn, is best known for his settings of spirituals; so Outlaw’s program provided a valuable window on his approach to art song. This turned out to be as engaging a journey of discovery as that provided by Moore’s opera. Outlaw then delivered two a cappella spiritual performances, followed by one accompanied by Jones and a second duo account taken as an encore. (With the exception of the encore, all of the spirituals are included on the Lament album.)
The richness of the second half of the program compensated for the shortcomings of the first. Ricky Ian Gordon’s Genius Child was a song cycle of poems by Langston Hughes. Sadly, Gordon’s understanding of poetry was weak unto an extreme (almost as if he had his head buried in a counterpoint textbook while the teacher was discussing American poetry). One could almost say that he treated each poem as a string of words that needed to be matched by a string of notes.
The three Opus 41 songs composed by Robert Owens showed far greater awareness of the texts. Indeed, he was bold enough to take on three sonnets written by the Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay. McKay was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and his ability to harness an archaic structure to depict the horrors of racism during the early twentieth century was nothing short of awesome. Sadly, Owens never seemed to have developed an ear for the proper mixture of phonemes and musical tones.
I also wanted to observe in passing that this was one of my few encounters with a venue that had no COVID precautions. This may well have been the result of the last-minute change. The only real difficulty came at the end of the evening, when the elevator taking audience members from the eleventh floor to street level was far more densely packed than I would have preferred. My guess is that I shall be avoiding the Osher Recital Hall until the COVID risk lowers.
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