The New York Times-20080128-Music in Review
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Music in Review
Full Text (1438 words)'THE SONG CONTINUES'
Zankel Hall
The critic felt almost an intruder at The Song Continues on Friday night. The audience space at Zankel Hall was evidently packed with supporters, the stage with young singers and their accompanists. Seven singers and four pianists were celebrating a week of performances and master classes led by a coalition of the Marilyn Horne Foundation and the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.
With Ms. Horne and grateful alumni of her teaching program exchanging fond feelings for one another -- all in the form of friendly patter and brief interviews -- it was amazing how much music got sung. The foundation also commissions songs for its events, and the composers Paul Moravec, Tobias Picker, Libby Larsen and Lowell Liebermann were in the audience to hear their music.
All of the singing was good, some of it more than good. I was taken by Nicole Heaston's fineness in Debussy's Apparition, and her pointed, loose-limbed spiritual singing in Plenty Good Room. Evan Hughes, the one singer still in school, showed a promising bass-baritone and an energetic style. Voices like those of Guang Yang, a mezzo-soprano, and Meagan Miller, a soprano, sounded healthy and happy.
Rod Gilfrey's baritone was the voice of experience on Friday. Young Garrett Sorenson showed a nice tenor and did a few amiable comic turns.
Margo Garrett negotiated some very elaborate piano parts. Both Brian Zeger and Tamara Sanikidze were subtle accompanists. The pianist Warren Jones came on at the end with the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.
Ms. Blythe, who is in the midst of a career-making season, showed why so many are paying attention. The knockout items were the two Montsalvatge songs from Cinco Canciones Negras, but the evidence of her breadth of talent lay more in Les Berceaux by Faure. That a voice of such Wagnerian size and power could negotiate such exquisite melody with such delicacy speaks of a sensibility and vocal control well beyond the ordinary. BERNARD HOLLAND
AMERICAN SYMPHONY
Orchestra
Avery Fisher Hall
The concert presented by the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall on Friday night was called Russian Futurists, but the title wasn't altogether accurate. Of the five pieces programmed by the music director Leon Botstein, only one, Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry, could genuinely be described as reflecting the Futurist agenda. Its loud, monotonous clanking and grinding were intended as a paean to the utopian potential of mechanized industry and human ingenuity.
What Mr. Botstein's program actually illustrated was a brief period, from the 1917 revolution to the rise of Stalin in the 1930s, in which Russian composers could envision a future of bold innovations embraced by a tolerant society.
Some, like Mosolov, celebrated industrial progress. Gavriil Popov created music of dazzling vitality for Komsomol -- Patron of Electrification, a 1932 film that chronicled the Young Communist League's efforts to provide electricity throughout the Soviet Union.
Popov's Symphonic Suite No. 1, based on his film score, opened with the eerie wail of a theremin, played here by Elizabeth Brown, intertwined with passionate vocalise from a soprano (Marina Poplavskaya) and bass-baritone (Joshua Winograde). Succinct and vivid, this suite might easily be substituted for any number of well-worn Impressionist scores on conventional concert programs.
Shostakovich drew on jazz, cabaret and other popular idioms in his incidental music for The Bedbug, a 1929 satirical theater piece by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The score is filled with a sensuality and acid humor echoed only from a haunted distance in Shostakovich's later music.
At the opposite extreme was Arthur Lourie's Chant Funebre sur la Mort d'Un Poete, a stark, enigmatic ode to Alexander Blok based on a verse by Anna Akhmatova. The Concert Chorale of New York gave a luminous account, accompanied by clarinets, oboes and bassoons.
Mr. Botstein and his players were impressive in these works. But Vladimir Shcherbachov's Symphony No. 2 (Blokovskaya), a fascinating yet meandering setting of Blok's poetry in an idiom that echoes Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin, lacked sharpness and coherence. Michael Wade Lee, a tenor, sang with attractive tone and stamina in the final movement, a lurid Dantean fantasy, but his contributions were obscured by an orchestra at full roar. STEVE SMITH
AULOS ENSEMBLE
Washington Irving High School
The Peoples' Symphony Concerts do an important service, offering recitals and chamber concerts by well-known performers for as little as $9 a ticket (and even less by subscription). Lately new-music groups have found a place on the series prospectus, but concerts of early music played on period instruments are few and far between. They seem to be a tough sell: for the Saturday-evening performance by the Aulos Ensemble at Washington Irving High School, empty seats were plentiful.
Maybe the Peoples' Symphony audience suspected that the hall was a bit large and acoustically dry for a small period-instrument band like the Aulos. The setting did exact a toll. For the most part the group's performance was elegant and polished, but the sound that sailed into this unresonant high school auditorium was oddly tepid, given the energy these players seemed to be putting into it.
The program was framed with Rameau suites -- music from Les Fetes d'Hebe to start and Les Indes Galantes to close. In the fast movements the group's front line -- Linda Quan, the violinist; Christopher Krueger, the flutist; and Marc Schachman, the oboist -- enlivened the picturesque dances with thoughtful characterizations. And Myron Lutzke, the cellist, and Arthur Haas, the harpsichordist, provided elegant support as well as less frequent but consistently solid solo moments.
The ensemble was joined by Kendra Colton, a soprano, for a set of florid arias from Handel's Admeto, Acis and Galatea and L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, each built around bird calls illustrated in the violin or flute lines. Ms. Colton has an attractively dark sound, and sings with the fluidity and suppleness that these flighty pieces require. She also gave moving accounts of arias from two Bach cantatas, separated by the Aulos players' oddly sleepy rendering of the Affetuoso from his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. ALLAN KOZINN
The next Peoples' Symphony concert is by the Miro Quartet on Feb. 10 at Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 586-4680 or pscny.org.
'OFFENBACH CABARET'
'Jacques in the Big Apple'
French Institute Alliance Francaise
Offenbach Cabaret: Jacques in the Big Apple, presented by Opera Francais de New York and the French Institute Alliance Francaise, promised a satirical and saucy musical review. But glancing at the glum, perplexed faces of audience members in the institute's elegant Skyroom on Thursday, you might have thought they were investors watching their stocks plummet, not Champagne-sipping cabaret patrons.
Facing bankruptcy, Jacques Offenbach was invited to the United States to conduct two of his operettas at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. He also gave several concerts in New York. He was feted and fabulously paid, although he reportedly disappointed some Americans, who expected a flamboyant figure who would spontaneously dance the cancan. Offenbach, who thought Americans too materialistic, kept a diary of the visit, published as Orpheus in America.
The directors of Offenbach Cabaret, Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeuil, were inspired by Offenbach's impressions of New Yorkers to create a baffling (if imaginative) scenario centering on a shady promoter pretending to represent Offenbach. An aspiring soprano hopes to impress the composer, who is purportedly scouting talent in America. The story (written by Philip Littell) also involves the soprano's husband and a flamboyantly camp waiter.
As performed, there was lots of leaping around the room, interspersed with solo and ensemble arias from Offenbach operettas, including Orpheus in the Underworld and Pomme d'Api. Unfortunately any intended satire was lost in the confusion.
The evening began with a pianist (Benedicte Jourdois), described in a synopsis as a brilliant and troubled accompanist whose personal experimentation with quantum physics has pushed her over the edge into madness, playing glissandos and collapsing over the keyboard. The young cast -- with the tenor Karim Sulayman; the able baritone Marco Nistico; Sharleen Joynt, who sang with a bright soprano; and Mr. Littell -- was energetic, but couldn't quite make it work.
There were plenty of antics, and the shady promoter used spray paint to put graffiti on the glass wall of the Skyroom. But the various goings-on felt stilted and elicited scant laughter. Offenbach's spirit seemed far removed from this clumsy cabaret. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
[Illustration]PHOTOS: Marina Poplavskaya sang and Leon Botstein conducted in a program titled Russian Futurists at Avery Fisher Hall. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIETA CERVANTES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES); Evan Hughes, a bass-baritone, was accompanied by Tamara Sanikidze at Zankel Hall. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIEN JOURDES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)