Tenor Ilker Arcayürek Returns to SFP

 Tenor Ilker Arcayürek (photograph by Janina Laszlo, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Turkish-born Austrian tenor Ilker Arcayürek returned to give his second recital for San Francisco Performances (SFP). He made his debut through the Discovery Series, which had been planned to present “artists who already have their feet firmly planted along the trail of auspicious music careers.” SFP presented three of these recitals between December of 2018 and May of 2019. (Arcayürek was preceded by the Telegraph Quartet, which is based here in San Francisco, and followed by Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi.)

Arcayürek’s debut recital consisted entirely of Franz Schubert’s D. 911 song cycle Winterreise (winter journey). He was accompanied by British pianist Simon Lepper, who was also making his San Francisco debut. Last night he returned with Arcayürek for another all-Schubert program. This time, however, Arcayürek provided his own title for the program: The Path of Life. The program was structured as five “chapters,” given the titles “Love,” “Longing,” “The Quest for Inner Peace,” “Resignation,” and “Redemption.” The intermission was placed between the second and third of these chapters. Most of the selections were relatively short; but the final chapter was devoted entirely to the lengthier D. 933 “Des Fischers Liebesglück” (the fisherman’s happiness in love).

Taken as a whole, this was a thoroughly engaging journey. Arcayürek brought clarity to each of his selections, and his delivery consistently led the attentive listener down the underlying semantics of each of the texts. The interplay between vocalist and accompanist could not have been better, and the dynamic range fit into the Herbst acoustics like a well-crafted glove. There was only a single encore, concluding the evening with one more Schubert song, his D. 827 “Nacht und Träume” (night and dreams).

Most important was that the expressiveness of both vocalist and accompanist conveyed a clear sense of a journey based on how the selections were organized. This was decidedly not a one-thing-after-another affair. The presentation of that a journey made it well worth taking, and even the encore was conceived as a coda to that journey. I left Herbst wondering what Arcayürek’s next project would be!