SFP: Bryce-Davis’ San Francisco Recital Debut

Mezzo Raehann Bryce-Davis (photograph by Sam Eltosam, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night mezzo Raehann Bryce-Davis made her San Francisco recital debut in the second of the four programs presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) in this season’s Art of Song series. She is no stranger to San Francisco, having been a 2015 Merola alumna. Her accompanist at the piano was Jeanne-Minette Cilliers. The program was one of many that had to be rescheduled due to the COVID pandemic. However, during those hard times, Bryce-Davis and Cilliers presented a Merola Opera Virtual Recital Series performance.

The title of last night’s program was In Honor of Women. Almost all of the selections were composed during the current or preceding century. However, there was one nineteenth-century selection in which the woman being honored was the amateur poet Mathilde Wesendonck. Five of her texts were set by Richard Wagner as a collection entitled Wesendonck Lieder.

This is Wagner at his most intimate, and two of the songs were identified as “studies” for his work on the opera Tristan und Isolde. I have been fortunate enough to listen to performances of the collection on several occasions, and I was delighted with last night’s opportunity for another encounter. As one might guess, there is an intense undercurrent of passion in Wagner’s settings; and both Bryce-Davis and Cilliers could not have done a better job in their expression of those passions.

I was just as delighted with my latest encounters with three significant women from the twentieth century. The program began with Amy Beach’s Opus 44 setting of three poems by Robert Browning. It has been a long time since I last encountered what used to be a familiar couplet: “God’s in his heaven,/All’s right with the world.” It must have been familiar to Beach, too; but she knew just how to give it the right twist. The second half of the program presented songs by Margaret Bonds (“Birth”) and Florence Price (“The Crescent Moon”), both of which were “first encounters” for me but definitely welcome.

The issue of race surfaced in Melissa Dunphy’s “Come, My Tan-Faced Children.” Far more politicized, however, were the three selections of settings by Maria Thompson Corley: “I Am Not an Angry Black Women,” “The Beauty in My Blackness,” and “Black Riders’ Freedom Song.” The program closed out with three of the songs in Fi Mi Love Have Lion Heart, settings of Jamaican folk songs by Peter Ashbourne. The encore selection was Jacqueline Hairston’s arrangement of “Don’t Feel No Ways Tired.”

Taken as a whole, this was a throughly engaging evening of discoveries interleaved with the familiar. Bryce-Davis’ vocal skills are solid, and she couples them with just their right personality traits to engage her audience. There is an intimacy in solo vocal music that sets the genre apart from instrumental performances. Last night, however, that intimacy was evident not only in Bryce-Davis’ delivery but also in the chemistry she shared with Cilliers. Like Oliver Twist, I would have liked to approach them at the end of the evening and ask for more!