Da Ping Luo

Ricky Ian Gordon’s setting of Emily Dickinson’s “We should not mind so small a flower” tells of a single blossom we might barely notice in a garden fading out of season. The recital—conceived by soprano Erin Morley and pianist Gerald Martin Moore—is a far cry from simple. Built on themes of nature—flowers, trees and birds especially—it’s an audacious, ingenious mix of material, brilliantly conceived and superbly performed.

The lovely Gordon song group, which was first presented in Washington last spring, was a New York premiere and set the tone both musically and textually. At once traditionally lyrical and distinctly contemporary, the settings of different authors speak to the range of imagery that flowers can convey—Dickinson’s sweet-sadness followed by satirical bite from Dorothy Parker, and highly effective, poignant settings of less well-known writers including Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, and Telmo Dos Santos. The piano parts for this cycle are notably complex, as were many others throughout the concert, with Moore proving himself as much a virtuoso as Morley.

“Virtuoso,” though, may be a charged word here. There’s no doubt Morley is known for her skill in coloratura and astonishing ease at the very top of the range—Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” with dazzling ornaments has been a longtime signature piece. In fact, she made her Met debut in 2008, but her voice and technique are amazingly untouched by time, her accuracy so pinpoint, her tone so true that I sometimes think her performances should be a source for transcriptions.

Yet there’s more there. Listening to her, I remembered a story I once read about the great German soprano, Rita Streich. When she was introduced to someone as a virtuoso coloratura and Mozart-and-Strauss specialist, she pointedly said she also considered herself equally a recitalist and Lieder singer.  And she was right—wonderful as Streich is in Mozart’s stratospheric concert arias and as Zerbinetta, some of her loveliest work is in simple songs.

This is true for Morley too, and happily the recital gave her opportunities to show both sides in full bloom. Saint-Saens’s “La libellule” (“The Dragonfly”) is a mini festival of roulades, trills, and acuti: every trick in the coloratura playbook. Julius Benedict’s “La Capinera,” remembered by record collectors through a treasurable Victor 78 by Amelita Galli-Curci, offers an arching melody that is also fiendishly difficult. To these and others, Morley brought flawless technique and lovely, rounded tone.

But much of the recital was more lyrical—simpler in some ways, but also calling on other vocal and interpretive resources. Rachmaninov’s familiar but always welcome “Lilacs” and Robert Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum”—these are pieces for more introspection, and which lie more centrally in the middle register. Both are qualities that Morley has cultivated very successfully, as her recent assumptions of Pamina and Gilda at the Met demonstrate—just as this recital also did.

I will particularly treasure the memory of three pieces. Saint-Saen’s “Le rossignol et la rose” is an enchanting vocalise to which Morley brought exquisite silvery arcs of sound. (In fact, it was also a Rita Streich specialty.) Her encore of Ivor Novello’s sentimental “We’ll gather lilacs in the spring” was exquisitely simple. But for me, the biggest surprise was Zemlinsky’s “Voglein Schwermut,” a song I didn’t know, which mixes melodic grace with a strong dose of that disquieting, neurotic energy so characteristic of Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Morley followed this with Berg’s “Die Nachtigall”—and surely I’m not the only person in the audience who wondered—might she be looking at Lulu?