Benjamin Appl’s Long Night’s Journey into Day

Baritone Benjamin Appl (photograph by Lars Borges, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) concluded its 2022–23 season with its final Art of Song recital. The vocalist was baritone Benjamin Appl, currently in the middle of his North American Concert Tour and making his San Francisco recital debut. He was accompanied at the piano by James Baillieu, last seen here this past April when he appeared with violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen at the annual SFP Subscriber and Member Concert.

Appl assigned the title Nocturne to his program. The preview article for this recital described that program as “a nighttime journey with selections arranged according to facets of the night – romance, the moon, stars, nightmares, fancies, insomnia, dreams, the darkest hour, and finally, morning.” The scope of the music itself covered almost the full breadth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This made for an impressive structure, and spoken introductions by both Appl and Baillieu provided valuable assistance in negotiating that repertoire.

As might be guessed, Franz Schubert accounted for the largest number of selections on the program. However, only one of them, the D. 328 “Erlkönig” constituted war-horse familiarity. Indeed, the entire evening made for an engaging journey of new encounters in the vocal repertoire, the only other familiar selection providing the conclusion, Richard Strauss “Morgen,” the fourth song in his Opus 27 set, marking the beginning of a new day and the end of the  program’s nocturnal journey.

Unlike Tuesday evening’s program, this journey had an intermission. This provided a “gap,” which separated the two most intense episodes in the entire journey: “Nightmares” and “Phantasies.” These two episodes accounted for a surprising diversity of dispositions, with “Erlkönig” at one end of the spectrum and the black humor of William Bolcom’s “Song of Black Max” at the other. Presumably, the interval that separated these two extremes was as welcome to the performers as it was to the listeners!

The “Darkest Hours” episode was distinguished by two songs composed by Ilse Weber during her internment by the Nazis, first at Theresienstadt and then at the Auschwitz concentration camp. At that second venue she composed a lullaby for the children being held there. When those children were led to the gas chamber, Weber went with them, singing her lullaby to calm them. Appl’s account of that lullaby was decidedly the “darkest hour” before the dawn that would follow.

I must confess that I got lost struggling with the German title of Appl’s encore; but my “educated guess” is that he turned to one of the operettas of Oscar Straus, suggesting that the dawn that concluded his program led to a sunny day.