Denk’s Program for Piano and Strings at Davies

Pianist and conductor Jeremy Denk (courtesy of SFS)

Last night marked the first public concert given by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall since the closing of the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center on March 7, 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (On Thursday and Friday of last week, SFS and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen presented a free program reserved for Bay Area hospital and medical professionals, as well as representatives from community centers and cultural districts, who have been at the front lines supporting the people of the city in critical ways throughout the pandemic.) Pianist Jeremy Denk conducted from the piano keyboard, presenting a program of four compositions for piano and strings.

The program featured two concertos composed, respectively, by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1052 in D minor) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (K. 449 in E-flat major). Each concerto was preceded by a shorter composition, both being performed by SFS for the first time. The program began with William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence;” and the Bach and Mozart concertos were separated by Gerald Finzi’s “Eclogue.” Denk shared leadership of the ensemble with Assistant Concertmaster Wyatt Underhill.

For my own tastes the Mozart selection was probably the most satisfying offering. Most of his piano concertos supplement the virtuoso keyboard work with imaginative sonorous interplay between winds and strings, but the winds are entirely absent in K. 499. As a result, all interplay unfolds only between soloist and ensemble; and the prevailing rhetoric is consistently playful. As usual, the keyboard work was conceived to allow the composer to show off his skills; and Denk consistently rose to the challenges of all of those skills. However, there is just as much playfulness in the ensemble music; and, at the conclusion of the final Allegro ma non troppo movement, Mozart lets everyone go to town with a galloping gigue.

While it was not “Historically Informed” in the strictest sense of that phrase, there was much to enjoy in the Bach offering. String resources were far smaller than those for the Mozart concerto. Indeed, were it not for the social distancing of the performers, they probably all would have fit comfortably in the space of Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig with Bach leading from behind his keyboard. It would be fair to say that Denk and his SFS colleagues managed to capture the social spirit of that time while endowing the performance with a decidedly present-day rhetoric matched to the sonorities of a concert grand piano. True, Denk could get a bit enthusiastically heavy-handed with some of the more demanding passages; but, in all probability, Bach had his own ways of “playing the show-off” too.

The Still composition was an instrumentation of music originally written for solo piano. One would probably not guess those origins given the sensuous qualities of the sonorities and the intimate interplay between piano and strings. Denk himself endorsed that sensuality by calling the piece and “opium den” after the performance had concluded.

Finzi’s piece began as the slow movement for a piano concerto. The program note by James M. Keller described it as an “intimate work, reflecting his love of Bachian counterpoint.” I am not sure that I endorse that “Bach connection.” Indeed, I was left wondering just how fine the line is that separates intimacy from schmaltz. Fortunately, neither Denk nor his string section ventured too far across the border of self-indulgence.

Denk wrapped up the evening with an encore, turning to the work of jazz stride pianist Donald Lambert. Lambert had a particular interest in “jazzing up” favorite classical themes. Denk selected his treatment of the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. The offering was an utter hoot, given a straight-faced account by Denk that was sure to raise eyebrows across the Davies audience.

That audience provides a link to the one downside of the evening. When this site announced the launch of this two-month SFS concert series, it cited “reduced concert hall capacity” and “assigned seats that maximize physical distancing.” Sadly, this was not the case at Orchestra level. The good news was that everyone was wearing masks. Nevertheless, there seemed to be too many instances of perfect strangers sitting side-by-side, which did not seem consistent with “maximize physical distancing.” Fortunately, those in the side sections had a bit of flexibility to seek out more “distanced” locations; but those in the Center Orchestra section were pretty much stuck where they had been assigned.

Hopefully, this was just one of those inevitable bumps in the road that leads to a new way of doing things; but, from my own vantage point, it was not difficult to hear a lot of grumbling about the seating conditions.

Nicholas Phan’s “Sanctuary” Recital for SFP

Tenor Nicholas Phan accompanied at the piano by Jake Heggie (from the SFP Front Row Web page)

Yesterday San Francisco Performances (SFP) released the third of its Sanctuary Series concerts for streaming through its Front Row Web page. Readers may recall that this was originally announced as a series of audio offerings, but this particular recital was documented as a video. This recital was prepared by tenor Nicholas Phan and entitled simply Time. The program book for this concert elaborated with the following text:

Songs which touch on the subject of time—how it can be fleeting, feel suspended, how finite our time is, etc. Also a meditation on this moment of paused performances.

In other words the broad perspective of the nature of time has homed in on the extent to which shelter-in-place has impacted our very perspective of time itself and how we experience it.

Phan’s selections covered a broad scope of music history with “Time Stands Still” by John Dowland in the distant past and a far more recent pairing of songs by Jake Heggie. Heggie also served as Phan’s accompanist. Phan introduced most of the songs with brief but apposite descriptions, but Heggie provided the introduction for his own music. For those that follow Phan’s recording career, three of the songs he presented can be found on his Clairières album, devoted entirely to songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, which was released by Avie Records at the beginning of this year.

I wanted to call out the Clairières selections because Phan is one of the few contemporary advocates for the Boulanger sisters that I have encountered. Listening to his recording was enlightening for any number of reasons, but watching the ways in which he brought expressive awareness of both text and music to the spontaneity of performance deepened my appreciation of these two composers, particularly with the benefit of a program book (PDF download) that provided both the French texts and useful translations into English. With such resources one could appreciate not only Phan’s shaping of the musical phrases but also the phonemic impact of the words themselves.

The same can be said of his approach to the English texts of three poems by Thomas Hardy, two set by Benjamin Britten and one by Gerald Finzi. Heggie’s selections, on the other hand, were drawn from the American poets Vachel Lindsay and Emily Dickinson. The latter was particularly interesting, since Dickinson had very clear thoughts about phrasing and breath, which she indicated by imposing long dashes into the text. Heggie clearly appreciated what she was doing and developed a setting that honored her phrasing without allowing it to overwhelm the musical setting. The Lindsay text was somewhat more straightforward, offering a slightly better fit to Heggie’s thematic contours.

Ultimately, however, the overall impact of the program was sustained by providing the lighter selections as “bookends” for the entire program. That meant Charles Ives’ “mini-cycle” of two songs, Memories, and the beginning and “Some Other Time” from Leonard Bernstein’s score for the musical On the Town at the end. The two songs in Memories are entitled “Very Pleasant” and “Rather Sad;” and both set texts by Ives himself. Thus, there is good reason to believe that both of them are tongue-in-cheek, each in its own way. The first is a spot-on account of audience members at a formal concert paying attention to everything but the performance. The second is, in all probability, deliberately sappy; and I have encountered at least one vocalist happy to deploy portamento to make the sap even thicker. Phan was less inclined to such exaggeration, but one could still chuckle at his delivery.

I probably go against much of the flow in declaring that Bernstein’s music for On the Town, particularly where the songs are concerned, should be counted among his finest efforts. (In other words I value On the Town far more than West Side Story.) One of my strongest reasons is that Betty Comden and Adolph Green came up with lyrics that covered a wide swath of highly varying emotions, none of which were anything less that spot-on sincere. Much as I have always respected Stephen Sondheim’s ways with words, I do not think he was comfortable with West Side Story’s intimations of opera; and he only found his “sweet spot” when he took responsibility for both the music and the lyrics of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. All this is my saying that Phan could not have picked a better selection than “Some Other time” when it came to “signing off” his recital.

Noontime Concerts to Preview Midsummer Mozart

According to my records, the last time I wrote about the Midsummer Mozart Festival was in June of 2017, following a one-year hiatus after the death of Co-Founder George Cleve in August of 2015. At that time I announced that the Festival would consist of a single program, performed on July 24, 2017, held at Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the venue that had previously hosted preview concerts for the Festival presented in conjunction with Noontime Concerts. Last summer, on the other hand, concerts took place only in Santa Clara and Sonoma, both beyond the boundaries of my “beat,” which is almost entirely confined to the San Francisco city limits.

This year’s plans for “midsummer” have not yet been announced. However, Noontime Concerts will again host a pair of preview concerts, one at each of the two venues now being used. Curiously, the first of these two concerts will not present any of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Instead, the program will consist of chamber music for piano and strings by Johannes Brahms and Gerald Finzi with Festival Conductor Paul Schrage serving as pianist. The Brahms selection will be his Opus 60 piano quartet in C minor. Schrage will be joined by Robin Hansen on violin, Elizabeth Prior of viola, and Eric Gaenslen on cellos. All four of those musicians will then be joined by violinist Adrienne Sengpiehl and Mark Wallace on bass for a performance of Finzi’s Opus 10 “Eclogue.”

This performance will take place in the sanctuary of Old Saint Mary’s, beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 9. The cathedral is located at 660 California Street, on the northeast corner of Grant Street. There is no charge for admission, but this concert series relies heavily on donations to continue offering its weekly programs.

The second concert will be devoted entirely to Mozart’s music. It will consist of two serenades, both scored for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, K. 375 in E-flat major and K. 388 in C minor. Performers will be Laura Griffiths and Ruth Stuart (oboe), Mark Brandenburg and Ann Lavin (clarinet), Deborah Kramer and Patrick Johnson-Whitty (bassoon), and Glen Swartz and Katie Dennis (horn). This will be the May offering for the once-a-month free concerts held on Sunday afternoons at the San Francisco Mint, which is located at 88 Fifth Street. The performance will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 19.

Pershall Brings Diverse Repertoire to Schwabacher

Baritone David Pershall (courtesy of San Francisco Opera Communications Department)

Last night in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater, the Schwabacher Recital Series presented the second of the four concerts of its 2019 season. The recitalist was baritone David Pershall, an alumnus of the 2008 Merola Opera Program, who has gone on to establish himself in both the United States (including the San Francisco Opera) and Europe. His accompanist last night was pianist John Churchwell.

Readers probably know that I place high value on any program that turns out to be a journey of discovery. I would hazard the guess that many in last night’s audience had not previously encountered the name of Gerald Finzi, let alone the music he composed. Pershall devoted the second half of his program to Earth and Air and Rain, Finzi’s Opus 15, a collection of ten settings of poems by Thomas Hardy composed between 1928 and 1932. Over the course of his career, Finzi wrote six song cycles based on Hardy poems; and his Opus 15 was the second of them.

Reading Hardy on the printed page can be quite an adventure. His rhyme schemes tend to seek out new ways of thinking about symmetry; and, while his underlying metrical structures are straightforward, the text itself often inclines to being read as prose. The words themselves frequently suggest that the poem is about to relate a narrative, but then it emerges as multiple reflections on a single image or instant. (Cynics might accuse Hardy of having written long-winded haiku.) One way of approaching Hardy’s poems is to read them as “establishing the scene” for the imagined Wessex setting of his novels; but, as last night’s performance made clear, the texts have enough virtues to stand by themselves.

The title of the cycle is Finzi’s rather than Hardy’s. Perhaps Finzi was struck by the elemental nature of many (but not all) the poems he had selected for his Opus 15. To some extent the texts reflect on relations between human nature and the elements; but those reflections emerge as individual images in each of the songs, rather than beads strung on a common thread. Ultimately, each poem captures a moment; and the essence of that moment then emerges through Finzi’s writing.

Pershall seemed to be well aware of this relationship between music and words. His diction was always right on the money; but, since Hardy’s turns of phrases were not always straightforward, having a text sheet at hand was decidedly an asset. Pershall endowed each of the songs with its own unique sense of personality, but he seemed to appreciate that Finzi’s music had its own unique strategy for leading the reader on a discovery of meaning behind each of Hardy’s poems. This is not what one usually expects of a vocal recital, but Pershall’s performance left at least this listener with curiosity about Finzi’s other approaches to Hardy’s texts.

All of the composers selected for the first half of the program were decidedly more familiar. Nevertheless, when compared with his piano and orchestral music, the songs of Sergei Rachmaninoff deserve more attention than they usually get, at least in this country. Pershall selected two from his Opus 14 collection and one each from Opus 21 and Opus 26. Those who know Rachmaninoff only from his symphonic side are likely to be struck by the brevity of his songs. Indeed, like Finzi (who was roughly a contemporary), Rachmaninoff knew how to capture “the moment” in the structure and delivery of a single song. Pershall clearly understood the impact of Rachmaninoff’s brevity and endowed each of the four selections with its own unique rhetorical impact.

Rhetoric also figured significantly in his performance of Gustav Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (songs of a wayfarer). The chronology suggests that this cycle began in a version for voice and piano, which was then orchestrated. However, the first performance seems to have been of the orchestral version. This tends to be the way in which it is usually performed; but the piano version allows the listener to pay more attention to the words themselves, rather than the instrumental fireworks. The words are Mahler’s own, and many would probably dismiss them as being a bit much. Fortunately, Pershall knew how to avoid overplaying his hand, allowing the attentive listener to appreciate details of the relations between music and words that are often washed over by the thick orchestral contexts.

The only real weakness of the program came at the beginning with a performance of An die ferne Geliebte (to the distant beloved), Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 98, often credited as being the first song cycle. Unfortunately, Beethoven’s vocal writing rarely rises to the level he attains in other genres. Indeed, he is at his best in presenting the cycle not as isolated songs but as a continuous unfolding of the poetic texts linked by interstitial thematic material. Pershall’s account was not particularly convincing, but there was not much need for being convinced.

Overall, the recital was a richly endowed journey with any number of impressively weighty moments. One can appreciate that Pershall wanted to lighten things up a bit for his encore. Dispensing with any vestiges of formality, he launched into an impassioned account of “So in Love” from Kiss Me, Kate that could easily have brought a smile or two to Cole Porter’s face. Whether or not Pershall appreciated the many layers of parody that make Kiss Me, Kate such a delight (even after if emerged from the “Hollywood treatment”), Porter’s spirit was definitely alive and well last night; and many in the audience seemed delighted to appreciate its presence.

Music for Tomorrow’s Corpus Christi from Clare College

Where my personal work practices are concerned, the winding down of the 2016–2017 concert season marks a time when I can begin to devote more attention to recordings that have been sitting on my queue for some significant time past their respective release dates. This morning, however, I realized that one of those albums that had been waiting patiently could not have had better timing as a result of the delay. The album is the latest harmonia release of the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, led by its Director Graham Ross. The title of the recording is Pange lingua: Music for Corpus Christi; and, as a result of a recent decision made by Pope Francis, it turns out that the Feast of Corpus Christi will be celebrated tomorrow! (Do procrastinators have a patron saint?)

courtesy of PIAS

Since 2013, when the album Veni Emmanuel: Music for Advent was released, Ross has been planning a series of recordings, each of which involves a significant date and/or celebration in the liturgical calendar. Regular readers know that my own vantage point is a secular one, so the significance of occasion has not registered very deeply with me. Nevertheless, the project is an interesting one to the extent that Ross plans each album as a survey of a generously wide swath of music history.

As had been the case when Veni Emmanuel began this program, that swath begins with plainchant. The text is the Latin hymn written by Thomas Aquinas specifically for the Feast of Corpus Christi: “Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium” (tell, tongue, the mystery of the glorious Body). This is the chant that provided the cantus firmus for the Missa Pange lingua, which is generally taken to be the last Mass setting composed by Josquin des Prez. Indeed, the work was so late that it did not appear in Ottaviano Petrucci’s published collection of Josquin’s Mass settings, which appeared in 1514. Furthermore, while Josquin was a prolific composer of Mass settings (his Wikipedia page lists eighteen of them), only four of them were based on plainchant (Missa Pange lingua being the last of them).

The program for the album then continues with another Aquinas text. “Lauda Sion Salvatorem” (Sion, praise your Saviour) is a sequence also written for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Furthermore, both this sequence and the “Pange lingua” hymn were written (probably around 1264) at the request of Pope Urban IV for the same service. However, the musical setting was probably written about half a century later than Josquin’s Mass setting by Tomás Luis de Victoria.

Indeed, the texts of Aquinas provide the “spinal cord” for most of the selections on this album, extending all the way from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Villette, both of whom composed settings of “O Sacrum Convivium” (O sacred banquet), an antiphon that is attributed “with some probability” (as its Wikipedia page puts it) to Aquinas. The album then concludes with Gerald Finzi’s anthem “Lo, the full, final sacrifice,” whose text is based on two poems by the seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw, one of which is based on Aquinas’ “Lauda Sion Salvatorem” text. The scope of the entire album actually extends into the 21st-century with the world premiere of Ross’ own setting of the Corpus Christi hymn “Ave verum corpus” (hail, true body).

The result is an album that is decidedly impressive in its historical scope and in the scholarship behind the establishing of that scope. Nevertheless, I have one quibble with how this recording was produced. The recordings were made in two different cathedral settings in England, Norwich Cathedral in Norfolk and the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. While I have no problem with the underlying technical discipline, whether it involves the balance of the resources or the actual audio capture, I have to say that, as a serious listener with a strong interest in the pre-Baroque repertoire, I find the sonorities to be a bit too rich.

Ross clearly has a keen ear for the underlying harmonies; but, for just about every selection on this album, the virtues of the music reside in the voice leading. For better or worse, I have developed a preference for such music performed by radically reduced resources, often with little more (if any) than one-to-a-part singing. It is only by thinning out the overall texture that the attentive listener can effectively tune in to the individual parts, both as melodic lines and for the harmonies they form with the other parts. This is, admittedly, a highly personal opinion; but I am far from the only one to espouse it. It thus seems fair to alert like-minded readers to this weakness in the overall impression made by the album. Those who are not so minded are free to disregard this paragraph!

Finally, it is important to observe that the above hyperlink to this album is for the Audio CD page on Amazon.com. Those interested in the options for Streaming and MP3 download will discover the availability of a “Bonus Track.” This is a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 618 setting of the “Ave verum corpus” text with organist Michael Papadopoulos providing the accompaniment. This track may be accessed separately by those who prefer having a physical copy of this album.

Naxos Collects its Finzi Recordings into a Single “Anthology” Box Set

Naxos held its first recording sessions for a full album of the music of Gerald Finzi in September of 1995. Between than and April of 2008, a series of eight all-Finzi albums were released. At the beginning of this month, those eight recordings were released in a single package as a box set.

Born in 1901, Finzi is clearly a representative of English twentieth-century music. The Amazon.com page for the box set describes his music as “lyrical pastoralism.” This is a phrase one is likely to encounter in descriptions of Finzi’s senior by about a quarter of a century, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Go back about another quarter-century; and one arrives at the birth year (1857) of Edward Elgar. Both Elgar and Vaughan Williams ventured significantly beyond the pastoral, however. Yet, while Finzi composed actively through 1955 (the year before his death), he showed little sign of venturing very far beyond his comfort zone. On the other hand, by most standards he was not very prolific, leaving behind an opus count of only 40.

The Naxos anthology is not a “complete works” set. There is probably enough remaining material to fit on another CD, but it might not fill it. Rather, the resources were made on the basis of resources and genre. These may be enumerated as follows, with the original catalog numbers included for reference:

1. 8.553566: the Opus 31 clarinet concerto (Robert Plane soloist), Lawrence Ashmore’s arrangement of the Opus 23 bagatelles, original written for clarinet and piano and performed, instead, with string ensemble, and other works for string ensemble (the Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Howard Griffiths)
2. 8.555766: the Opus 40 cello concerto (Tim Hugh soloist) and two works for piano (Peter Donohoe) and strings (again Griffiths leading the Northern Sinfonia)
3. 8.555792: part-songs sung by the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, led by Christopher Robinson, some with organ accompaniment by Christopher Whitton
4. 8.557644: three song cycles sung by baritone Roderick Williams accompanied by pianist Iain Burnside
5. 8.557863: two cantatas for tenor (James Gilchrist), chorus and orchestra (the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by David Hill)
6. 8.557963: three more song cycles for baritone (Williams again), two accompanied by piano (Burnside) and one by string quartet (the Sacconi Quartet)
7. 8.570414: three song cycles for tenor (John Mark Ainsley, accompanied by Burnside)
8. 8.570417: orchestral music performed by Hill conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (and Gilchrist for the Opus 12 sonnet settings)

My own “first contact” came with Earth and Air and Rain, a two-CD Hyperion recording of five song cycles all based on poems by Thomas Hardy with pianist Clifford Benson accompanying tenor Martyn Hill and baritone Stephen Varcoe. (At the time I did not even know that Hardy was a poet as well as a novelist.) I took personal pleasure in encountering new interpretations of all five of these compositions in the Naxos anthology, and I suspect that my personal love of English literature led to a preferential bias on my part for the art song selections in general. His orchestra work frequently comes to the brink of syrupy, although there is sure to be argument over the side of the border on which it lands. However, the more intimate settings reminded me of my disappointment and not having heard any of this music in performance. Perhaps the current crop of male vocalists find Finzi’s music too old-fashioned; but then they probably feel the same way about the poets whose verses he chose to set. More’s the pity.

Clerestory Announces the First Concert in its Eleventh Season

The nine-man a cappella vocal ensemble Clerestory will begin its eleventh season next month. The title of the opening concert will be Ye Sacred Muses: Choral Music from the Chapel Royal. The Chapel Royal was not a building but rather an ecclesiastical organization of clergy, singers, and vestry officers in the service of the reigning sovereign. Both Scotland and England had distinct Chapels Royal, both of which date back to the eleventh century, although the earliest records in England were documented in 1312. Composers who served the English Chapel Royal included Henry Purcell, William Byrd, and Thomas Tallis; and the program will include lesser-known a cappella works by these three composers as well as others. The program will also include selections from The Triumphs of Oriana, a collection of 25 madrigals compiled by Thomas Morley and published in 1601, said to be a tribute to Queen Elizabeth I, supposedly the “Oriana” of the title. (This attribution has now come into question.) Every madrigal in the collection concludes with the same couplet:

Thus sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana:
long live fair Oriana

The program will also include excerpts from A Garland for the Queen, a similar compilation prepared for Queen Elizabeth II with contributions by composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi, and Michael Tippett.

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place at 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 10. The venue will be Grace Cathedral, located at 1100 California Street at the top of Nob Hill. General admission will be $25 with a $15 rate for students. Tickets may be purchased online in advance through an Eventbrite event page. This page also allows for donated contributions in addition to ticket acquisition.

Fitting the Voice to the Space

The last time I reviewed a performance in the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series (run under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center), I discussed the problem of a singer who had not been particularly successful in scaling her operatic voice down to the intimacy of a recital setting. In yesterday's concert in this same series at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, baritone Quinn Kelsey had no such problem with scale. There is no questioning the strength of his voice, wonderfully demonstrated this past fall both in the role of Marcello in the San Francisco Opera La Bohème and as the baritone solo in the San Francisco Symphony performance of Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony. Yesterday, however, he demonstrated that he was just as comfortable with smaller-scale settings, although he did not choose to diminish his interest in the dramatic in his selections for his program.
Three languages were represented by this program: English, German, and Russian. I do not know enough Russian to account for his diction in that language; but his English and German had the sort of splendid clarity that draws the ear to the words themselves, even when, as was the case with the selections by George Frideric Handel, the texts themselves left much to be desired (and probably had not occupied much of the composer's attention). Still, Handel could take texts that were, at best, "borderline ridiculous," such as John Gay's libretto for Acis and Galatea and Newburgh Hamilton's for Samson, and serve them up with a thoroughly sublime treatment. Kelsey clearly favored Handel's side of the story, using the energy of his settings to begin his recital with a dynamic opening.
From this point of departure he could turn to far better words in the hands of a composer with a keen sense of English poetry. The composer was Gerald Finzi, whom I know best from his settings of the poems of Thomas Hardy. Kelsey's selections, however, were from Let us Garlands Bring, whose texts are by William Shakespeare. I used to hear these from time to time back when XM Radio had their Vox channel, but I could not always follow the words on the recordings they broadcast. The combination of Kelsey's clarity and the texts in the program revealed the merits of Finzi's ear for setting Shakespeare, as well-tuned as that of any actor or director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Finzi also had a nice trick of rendering nonsense syllables ("hey ding a ding a ding") in double-time, rather than letting them weigh down the import of the text that they embellish.
Finzi's faithful setting of Shakespeare's well-crafted way with words was followed by Mahler's hyperemotional setting of his own texts for his four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. This is the young Mahler getting his act together (particularly since material from his cycle later emerged in two of the movements of his first symphony); and we are back in the domain of texts in dire need of rescuing by the music. Kelsey approached this as the mini-opera captured by the narrative that cuts across the four poems in the cycle. He also had no trouble letting us know that the protagonist of this opera is more than a little deranged at the very beginning of the first poem, after which the path is all down a precipitous slope. The standard opera repertoire rarely gives the baritone a chance for a mad scene, but the young Mahler did a good job of compensating for this lacuna! Kelsey had the dramatic sense to keep the overwrought texts from carrying him over the edge, but he was also not afraid to unleash some raw emotions to give those texts the impact they deserved.
In this performance particular credit must also be given to accompanist Peter Grunberg. This cycle fares much better in its orchestral setting, but Grunberg clearly had a keen ear for that setting. He knew how to bring out the most important details even when limited by his piano keyboard, and the result was a performance as effective as any orchestral performance I have heard.
The intermission was followed by a different kind of song cycle, the Songs and Dances of Death by Modest Mussorgsky. This is the first time I have heard these four songs in a recital, although I worked on some of them when accompanying a baritone friend of mine back in Los Angeles. There is a bit of a pun in the title, since Death appears as a character in each of these songs. Thus, they are not so much about Death as they are performed by him. The author of the texts, Arseny Arkadyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, was clearly very sympathetic to this Death-as-character; and Mussorgsky captured this sympathy in what are four decidedly different emotional settings. Once again this was an opportunity for Kelsey to exercise his dramatic training through opera, endowing each of the songs with the uplifting spirit behind the texts. It was the sort of performance that makes one wish this cycle was heard more often.
The encore, on the other hand, has been heard so much that it is always right on the brink of cliché. It was "Some Enchanted Evening," from Richard Rodgers' score for the musical South Pacific. People who know this show only from the film and subsequent revivals may not know that this song was originally written for Ezio Pinza, who, in his time, may well have been the quintessential Don Giovanni. It would be unfair to expect that Kelsey would be channeling Pinza in this encore; but he endowed this song with the straight reading of a respectful baritone with little care for its inferiority to the standard repertoire. This made for a good encore choice. However sympathetic a character Death may have been, this selection provided a touching way to relieve the hall of his presence.