Freddie Collier

Several years ago I sent a review to parterre that, in passing, mentioned a performance that had starred Kate Lindsay when actually it had been Kate Aldrich. The two mezzos have a similar vocal range, very different musical focus, and are both delightful to encounter in any cast. Luckily our intrepid La Cieca, James Jorden, caught me in the act and altered the copy. Whew! Close one! (We need editors, every one of us.)

Last Monday I thoroughly enjoyed the Met’s premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, especially delighting in the opera’s many concertati. Few modern composers, in my humble opinion, are willing to permit more than one singer to sing at any time, thereby depriving themselves of a great dramatic tool and us of sensuous vocal pleasure. Heggie is fearless and I applaud him. And among the welter of masculine sound (excellent, across the board), not the least, in quartets, trios, even a duet, was the sole female voice in the Pequod’s crew, that of Janai Brugger as the cabin boy, Pip, whose smooth cherry-colored tones gave leavening and exquisite high complement to the evening’s delight. That, I said to myself, is a voice I’d love to hear again, whatever the rep.

But I’m a foggy old fogey. A great part of the delight of being an opera-lover is figuring out how to pronounce all those wacky names in all those wacky tongues (opera has been an international art since the day it stuck a toe outside Italy). And though neither lady is new to me, remembering which is which is more of a struggle than it used to be. So when I saw that J’Nai Bridges was giving a recital at Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin hall on Wednesday evening, I confused the names and went for it. A happy confusion!

The “recital” was more of a season finale for the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State (from the speeches, I thought the name they announced was not Cali but Kelly). Bridges had been spending a week or two coaching students at Montclair, which included singing duets or ensembles with them, and she provided a concert hall full of audience by performing a program with their assistance, letting her name be the draw.

She also showed the youngsters how these things are done. For one thing, when her pianist fell ill two days before the concert, she recalled having heard a young prize-winning Juilliard student from Chicago named Joshua Mhoon, and in two days he learned how to play de Falla and several American composers with a sure hand and an elegant rhythmic command—and how to accompany a diva flawlessly.

For another, Bridges came out in a gown the like of which one has seldom seen even on the recital stage. The mood was Gustav Klimt (pity she sang no Mahler or Korngold), gold metallic stripes and sparkles, outlining her voluptuous form with just a hint of off-the-shoulder. I won’t believe the equality of the sexes has been fully achieved until men can wear such ornamental items in formal circumstances like the recital stage. Just opening a couple of buttons doesn’t do it; I want color! I want sparkle! But for now, Miss Bridges has cornered the market. We couldn’t take our eyes off her. I did wonder how she had managed to grow an extra foot of black hair (piled regally high) since playing the cabin boy with short bangs on Monday, and that was what led me to check the program and realize I had confused two different ladies.

But then she began to sing, and, my ears said, “Who cares? Just relax and let this voice wash over you.”

Bridges produces a bountiful sound, great strong floods of it whenever she has to. Merkin, an excellent hall for solo voices, is rather too small for her—she can fill the Met or any other hall designed for singing—but at this event, she often drew herself in and perceptibly, easily, held back her opulent vocal gifts.

De Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas, which makes use of folk rhythms from different regions of Spain and has earned its popularity in the repertory by offering the singer so many different styles in which to show off, vast cries of heartbreak’s anguish, tight, jagged sarcasms, rejoicing in young love. Bridges gave us all of that, both the operatic grandeur and the near-recitative of tossed insults, and Mhoon’s sharp guitar-like attacks might have been studied in a Roma cave outside Granada.

Dario Acosta

There followed a set of Spirituals arranged into a cantata by John Carter. Bridges let it rip in “Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells” with a gleaming sound on the impulsive, repeated “ring,” then a weary yearning flooding the voice in “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Shild,” and an finally explosion of triumph for “Ride on, King Jesus.”

There followed settings by three composers of poems by Harlem’s own Langston Hughes: Carlos Simon’s “Prayer,” Margaret Bonds’ “Minstrel Man,” in which Bridges injected emotional variety to repeated, almost ordinary lyrics, and the melodrama of Florence Price’s “Hold Fast to Dreams.”

Several of Bridges’s students at the school interrupted the program (as used often to happen at musicales in an earlier age), and I enjoyed Shawn Okpebholo’s “Steal Away,” sung by Clinton Garrison, with a light, pleasingly grained baritone. Other singers joined Bridges for the farewell trio from Cosí fan tutte (where Bridges suavely scaled her opulent sound down to balance — but never drown — the other singers) and the “Barcarolle” from Hoffmann. Here her voice beautifully blended with the soprano of Clara Luz Hernández-Iranzo, but the piece, though prettily sung, seemed unnecessarily rushed; it should be performed slowly, with languor, the voices delighting in their sound, their sexiness, the mood of a gondola swaying slowly to the pier.

To conclude, with a dozen youngsters for chorus, Bridges gave us a full-throttle “Habañera,” her excellent French on flirtatious display. I’d be tickled to hear her in a full performance of the opera—she has the sound and the intensity for it. The encore was “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Rodgers’s melody stands up well in operetta company.