Cohen’s Schwabacher Recital Program

Last night in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, the Schwabacher Recital Series presented the third of its four programs. This series is jointly enabled by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Center and the Merola Opera Program; and last night’s vocalist, countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, is a Merola alumnus and an SFO Adler Fellow. Cohen was accompanied at the piano by Carrie-Ann Matheson, the SFO Center’s Artistic Director.

The countertenor is associated primarily with the pre-classical repertoire. Cohen accounted for that period with two airs from George Frideric Handel’s HWV 53 oratorio Saul taken, respectively from the first and last acts and sung by the vocalist portraying David. One could also associate a countertenor with Roger Quilter’s Three Shakespeare Songs, which opened the program; but it is unlikely that he had that particular vocal quality in mind.

The fact is that Cohen seems to have planned his program around music that interested him, rather than dwelling only on the countertenor repertoire. Thus, the audience could enjoy the German poets providing texts for the four songs that he extracted from Clara Schumann’s Opus 13 collection and the three French poets whose works were set as songs by Henri Duparc. He even wrapped up the program with two popular songs, both with a decidedly male perspective: Errol Garner’s “Misty” (with lyrics by Johnny Burke) and Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

He also reflected on his past experience as a synagogue cantor, a job he seems to have begun shortly after his bar mitzvah. Rather than drawing upon some of the chants of the service, he offered settings of liturgical texts by Max Janowski (“Avinu Malkeinu”) and Maurice Ravel (“Kaddish”). Ravel was, of course, not Jewish; but he seems to have had an interest in Hebrew folk traditions.

Taken as a whole, the program was an engaging tour of a diverse vocal repertoire. This inevitably culminated in an encore selection. Given that most of Cohen’s work these days involves considerable touring (primarily on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean), I suppose he can be forgiven for selecting “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which definitely went down very well with his admiring audience.