The New York Times-20080126-Two Young Singers Seize a Chance to Fill a Stage All Alone- -Review-

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Two Young Singers Seize a Chance to Fill a Stage All Alone; [Review]

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This week the Marilyn Horne Foundation and the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall joined forces to present The Song Continues, this year's installment of Ms. Horne's annual series of master classes and concerts meant to encourage young singers toward recital singing as an art worth cultivating, even as they prepare for bigger-ticket operatic careers.

The master classes this year were by Ms. Horne, the pianist Graham Johnson and the soprano Dawn Upshaw. The first of the concerts, at Weill Recital Hall on Wednesday afternoon, was a split bill with alternating sets by Amanda Majeski, a soprano studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and Dimitri Pittas, a tenor who has been singing at the Met since 2004.

Ms. Majeski opened the program with a Poulenc group that quickly established strengths likely to be of greater use in other repertory, and certainly in other halls. Her performances of Air Champetre, C and Violon were forceful and assertive, delivered in a full-powered tone that was sometimes overwhelming in the intimacy and bright acoustics at Weill.

Ms. Majeski needs to think more carefully about matching her voice to the space and about the spirit of the music at hand. Poulenc's songs are ravishing; a surfeit of power crushes them. Only in the last song of her Poulenc group, Fleurs, did she sing with the suppleness this music demands.

Her approach was much better suited to five dramatic romances by Joseph Marx. These songs want the kind of dark-hued, assertive voice that Ms. Majeski has, not to mention the evocatively rippling pianism that Danielle Orlando supplied.

Mr. Pittas began with a Respighi group that let him quickly demonstrate his command of the Italian style and the rich, open tenor sound that gives the style its resonance. His accounts of Pioggia and Nevicata were particularly lovely for their directness and use of primary shades. Mr. Pittas phrases with a natural artfulness; nothing in his interpretive approach sounds self-conscious or labored.

He closed the program with the premiere of Scott Wheeler's Heaven and Earth: Four Songs on Texts of William Blake. Mr. Wheeler's vocal writing is mildly angular and regularly spreads single-syllable words across three or four notes. But at its best his writing responds nimbly to Blake's quirky, evocative poetry. And Mr. Pittas and his pianist, Carrie-Ann Matheson, made these settings into miniature dramas.