I hear American singing

Since an early appearance as Schaunard in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway La bohème, barihunk Daniel Okulitch has been steadily building a substantial career. Along with noteworthy performances as Don Giovanni in New York and Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro in Los Angeles, much of his career has been centered on contemporary work. He has leading roles in such high profile premieres as Howard Shore’s The Fly (in Paris and L.A.), Peter Ash’s The Golden Ticket (St. Louis), and Pasatieri’s Frau Margot under his belt and is now singing Abdul in Menotti’s The Last Savage in Santa Fe which Anthony Tommasini admired not only for his “warm singing” but for his “fit physique.”

It is natural then that his first solo CD would focus on contemporary american art song. I’m a bit puzzled by the title, Daniel Okulitch: The New American Art Song (GPR Records), as if this marks a departure in a new direction. Although the four composers featured here (all of whom accompany their own songs) are of younger generation of song writers, the music is from a tradition handed down from Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem. Ricky Ian Gordon, Jake Heggie, and Lowell Liebermann have been well-documented elsewhere and only Glen Roven (who as artistic director of GPR Records is presumably the mastermind of this collection) is new to me.

This issue doesn’t make this release any less welcome. Gordon’s Quiet Lives are eight songs which richly demonstrate his mastery of the genre. In each setting he lovingly sets the poem to a natural vocal line which occasionally rises to a romantic gesture over a subtle piano accompaniment. Even the text-less vocalize in Stanley Kunitz’s “Three Floors” seems to rise naturally out of the poem.

Heggie’s Of Gods and Cats are two songs to texts of Gavin Geoffrey Dillard. Heggie’s playful accompaniments underline the mood of the text. The “Bonus Track” Robert Browning’s “Grow Old Along With Me!” is simply but richly romantic. The three songs by Liebermann, Night Songs, have sleep as their subject and the settings are suitably nocturnal and effective.

Taking up the lion’s share of this disk, Glen Roven’s Songs from the Underground is a collection of fourteen songs to poems by an eclectic mix of poets ranging from Yeats, Shelley, and Milton, to Whitman, Dylan Thomas, and Spike Milligan. Given the varied nature of these songs the settings are suitably diverse. Although I like a number of these songs, I find the most successful are the lighter selections: “Teeth” (Milligan), “The Leader” (McGough), and “Knightsbridge Ballade” (Green). The Whitman selection (“What am I After All”) is effective but I don’t understand the distinctly unsentimental Auden setting (“Song”.)

To this program Okulitch lends a warm bass-baritone that reminds me of Bryn Terfel. He doesn’t have quite as wide a color palette as his more famous colleague, nor does he indulge in some of his excesses (happily avoiding crooning.) What he accomplishes is to effectively communicate these songs in an understated way. I sometimes wish he’d go a little further interpretively, but in general I enjoyed luxuriating in the richness of his timbre and unaffected way with the texts. The latter may occasionally cause his diction to be a little indistinct, but I also feel that this is hampered by a somewhat muddy recorded sound.

One last plea. The liner note are rather skimpy and don’t include texts. The texts are promised on GPRrecords.com, but if they are there, I couldn’t find them.

All in all an enjoyable disk. I look forward to seeing and hearing more of Okulitch.