Photo by Vittorio Greco
It would be glib to say that Golda Schultz saved the best for last in her recital hosted by Philadelphia Chamber Music Society on March 17. A majority of the audience – which was far too small for an artist of this caliber at a top ticket price of $30 – no doubt came to hear the South African soprano essay Vier Letzte Lieder, which came at the end of the evening. Yet by placing it at the end of the night, Schultz made the canny choice to expose the listener to a panoply of intriguing composers and material that might otherwise go unnoticed by those preferring bread-and-butter recital offerings.
Organized under the title Dark Matter(s) and performed with her frequent collaborator, pianist Jonathan Ware, Schultz frequently returned to the theme of life’s ephemeral nature in her musical selections.
On this evening, the subject took on an added poignancy. News broke earlier in the day that Rainelle Krause, a fast-rising American soprano who recently made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Queen of the Night, had died suddenly at the age of 37. With the Perelman Theater’s auditorium lights still fully illuminated at the start of the concert, Schultz requested a moment of silence for her late colleague.
The respectful quietude of the moment led directly into the evening’s first section: George Crumb’s Apparition, a 1979 setting of Walt Whitman poems that frequently take the end of life as their subject. The suite began with Ware strumming the strings of the piano; as it progressed, he alternated between plucking, hammering and picking out jarringly arpeggiated phrases on the keys.
Amid this purposeful cacophony, however, Schultz delivered delicately spun legato phrases that seemed to capture the beauty of life amid the personification of its inevitable demise. Undoubtedly the most poignant section, in light of the precursor, was “Come Lovely and Soothing Death,” capped by an eerily haunting D flat.
The concert included several exciting discoveries: the work of Rita Strohl (1865-1941), a French composer new to me, warrants greater study. Schultz also highlighted the exquisite miniatures of Clara Wieck Schumann, capping a set of three Lieder with an ethereal rendition of “Ihr bildnis.”
Other unfamiliar repertoire was less memorable. Despite the Philadelphia Orchestra’s full-throated endorsement of Florence Price in recent years, a series of art songs were as undistinguished as the symphonies now frequently heard a few doors down are often vibrant and characterful. The Ophelia-Lieder of Brahms did not give the impression that it would subsume its Straussian counterpart in popularity or distinction.
But onto Strauss proper. Schultz brought a sense of poetry and seamless progression to the Four Last Songs, moving from the hopeful bloom of “Frühling” to the spectral, fading light of “Im Abendrot.” Her voice possessed both the weight and shimmer needed for this musical, and she drew out the composer’s seemingly endless phrases with limitless breath control, mirroring Ware’s luscious piano legato. While a single instrument might not be able to mimic the power of a full orchestra in such an expressive piece, Ware still found moments to shine – especially in the transpositions of the “Beim Schlafengehen” violin solo and the concluding horn passage in “Frühling.”
It was impossible not to remember the dedication to Krause as Schultz reached the final couplet of “Im Abendrot”: Wie sind wir wandermüde – Ist dies etwa der Tod? But it was equally impossible not to marvel at the skillful structure of the entire evening, which acknowledged death as a potent subject without wallowing in lachrymosity. And when Schultz returned for a single, lovely encore – Bernstein and Sondheim’s “Somewhere,” its passages knit together by her rich middle voice – she left her audience with the message that life still has meaning amid the sorrow.
Golda Schultz and Jonathan Ware will repeat this program at Shriver Hall in Baltimore on Sunday, March 22.
