Photo by Jennifer Taylor
The recital is a dying art form, we are told. There are signs of this decline; several prominent venues have reduced their recital offerings, moved them to smaller venues, or dispensed with them entirely.
I think that there is just a lack of vocal superstars who can fill a house; Juan Diego Flórez showed how a real charismatic star can fill Carnegie Hall in his recital earlier this February. However, the talent is still out there. Singers like the wonderful Matthew Polenzani, Paul Appleby, Joyce DiDonato, Julia Bullock, and Jamie Barton show that there are currently leading artists who are committed to the recital format. There are others, I am sure, that I am leaving out.
Over the last few months, I have seen multiple recitals and been impressed by how they can give you a whole new perspective on a singer, revealing them in different repertoires and showing a more intimate aspect of their artistry.
One such singer is the Juilliard-trained baritone John Brancy, who can charm and engage in a wide range of music. His compact, velvety baritone may not be built for huge auditoriums like the Metropolitan Opera but is wonderful in intimate settings, including 54 Below, where he did a second holiday show, “A-Wassailing A-Wand’ring” this past December, singing everything from medieval carols to show tunes to contemporary pop.
On Wednesday, February 25, he alighted in Weill Recital Hall as the soloist in a chamber program given by musicians of the Orchestra of St. Lukes in a program of American composers, including such towering stalwarts as Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and the still with us Adam Guettel. This was part of the 250th anniversary celebration of our great American Dream, which currently is suffering from orange-tinted nightmares.
Barber and Bernstein were represented by very early works written in their early twenties – the vocal cantata “Dover Beach”, Op. 3 with string quartet was composed when Barber was but 21 years old, still a student at Curtis, with darkening clouds in Europe presaging another world war. His “String Quartet in B minor” (1935) also shows a mature, fully-formed compositional style with its central “Adagio for Strings” becoming a landmark in 20th century music (more familiar in its independent orchestrated version).
“Dover Beach”, set to the 1856 poem by Matthew Arnold, is a rumination looking over the sea where the beauty of nature turns into a spiritual crisis over the state of humanity, “where ignorant armies clash by night.” (I hear you, Matthew.) The soft-textured, dark timbre of Brancy’s baritone was like a fifth instrument alongside the two violins, viola and cello (Alex U Fortes, Emma Frucht, David Cerutti, and Daire FitzGerald), perfectly integrated and balanced with the instruments but still front and center. The original string quartet version of the “Adagio for Strings” sets the ruminative power of the melody in a starker, yet equally effective format. It is bookended by the more restless first and third sections – again anxious and agitated spirits is contrasted with brooding lyricism as in “Dover Beach”.
Bernstein was heard in his very early “Sonata for Clarinet and Piano,” which premiered in 1942, when Lennie was but 24 years old. It is his first published work and has stylistic elements of his teacher, Hindemith, as well as Stravinsky and jazz. It presages later works of the composer. This mildly dissonant classical composition veers off into exuberant jazzy riffs, showing the opposing musical worlds that Bernstein easily inhabited, but that would affect how the musical establishment perceived him as a composer.
Jon Manasse on clarinet played the Bernstein sonata with edgy exuberance and brash athleticism, enjoying the boppy digressions. He threw in a mid-concert encore with a zippy instrumental “I Got Rhythm” by another 20th-century American composer who bridged the pop and classical worlds: George Gershwin.
The evening finished with a mini-concert of Sondheim & Guettel musical theater, including “Color and Light” and “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park with George and the evergreen chestnut “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. Brancy’s diction is very clear and his delivery of English text is natural, not stilted or oratorical in the way of many opera singers (including English speakers). Sondheim’s vocal writing for Georges Seurat veers into tenor range frequently, as it was written for Mandy Patinkin, who wasn’t afraid to shift into a baritenor falsetto. In both the Guettel and the Sondheim, Brancy segued into a seamless full-bodied head tone on climaxes. This may be alien to the full-throated belting of operatic Verdi baritones (not French singers’ voix-mixte) but is frequently used by male pop singers. “Send in the Clowns”, written for the vocally-limited (in breath control and range) Glynis Johns, sat comfortably in his rich middle range. It plays a little differently with a male vocalist, with hints of bitterness and anger, though Brancy was mostly rueful.
The Guettel section consisted of two songs, “Awaiting You” from Myths and Hymns and “How Glory Goes” from Floyd Collins, both of which deal with loss. “Awaiting You” longs to see the absent lover as a spiritual savior awaited like a messiah. “How Glory Goes” is a rumination on the evanescent fragility of life with Floyd coming to terms with his imminent death. What I have noticed about Guettel, which is the reason none of his songs have crossed over into pop hit territory like “Send in the Clowns,” is the lack of melodic buttons and repetitions. The songs are full of ideas and elusive melodies that never full coalesce into cohesive forms. You hear snatches of musical ideas that move onto something else, not building on what comes before. Brancy brought a lot of physical engagement, even getting on his knees, as well as emotional engagement and spiritual angst to the music. His top register is well-integrated into his voice and reliable.
His final encore was “A Simple Song” from Bernstein’s Mass (1971), a song that seemed to be a musical and philosophical companion to the preceding Sondheim and Guettel. Bernstein’s Mass was one of the works that opened the currently crisis-ridden Kennedy Center at a time when 1960s optimism and idealism were degenerating into Vietnam War protest and Watergate era cynicism. It was nostalgic to go back to that troubled time while looking with dismay at the current state of our democracy.
