San Francisco Classical Voice

Rorem's settings of Sylvia Plath's tortured Ariel poems, for example, require constantly changing colors and an attention not only to clarity of diction (in which Aikin was generally faultless) but to the nuances of each packed word. Aikin displayed a certain all-purpose agitation throughout the songs, but “all-purpose” doesn't always serve. For example, the words “vulturous boredom” in the line “A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree,” from “The Hanging Man,” must be particularized in order to arrest the attention. The juxtaposition of the two clashing images — the ravenous, clutching bird of prey and the utter paralysis of boredom — is noteworthy if not shocking. Rorem's setting is musically uncomplicated; the words are the challenge. To make them seem easy when they are not by gliding over them, as Aikin did, is to miss the opportunity to reap the abundant artistic rewards for singer and audience that might come from tearing into the words with lips curled and teeth bared. Aikin seemed reluctant to relinquish the appearance of control, and her interpretations therefore lack richness and true bite.

In a similar vein, the poet in “Poppies in July,” exhausted and terrified by the aggressive color of the brilliant, flaming poppies, finally asks for surcease in the form of the liquid from the flowers, seeping into her body, “But colorless. Colorless.” Aikin sang these closing words in a wispy, vibrated voice which lacked even the color of colorlessness and communicated nothing of the poet's weariness or desire for peace.

In “Words,” Aikin declaimed adequately, but simple declamation is not enough for poems in which the words are living things threatening at every moment to burst out of their musical skins. In “Poppies in October,” however, Aikin seemed to shrink even from correct or complete enunciation. “Skirts” came out “skuhts”; “love gift,” though Rorem barely gives time to enunciate the words, was rushed through, bereft of any hint of love; and “red heart” zipped by almost unintelligibly.

The final song of the set is “Lady Lazarus,” the longest and perhaps most bitter of the group. Rorem doesn't help his singer in setting, for example, the difficult words “peanut-crunching” at breakneck speed. But Aikin passed quickly over them as if they had been unremarkable as well as easy to enunciate. And once again her insistence on clear but uninflected diction misled her: “Do not think I underestimate your great concern” was bitten off with clarity but without motivation or attention to proper word rhythms. The famous lines “Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well” drip with self-hating irony, but Aikin caught none of it. Granted, these poems, and this one above all, are almost too intimate and wrenching to be set to music. But Rorem did set them, and the singer must do her best to winkle out the why and how of it.

Strauss's Mädchenblumen (Maiden-flowers), a charming group of flower-like images of women, is beautifully crafted, delicate and spirited in turn. If musical sensitivity and vocal purity were the standards by which to judge a consummate Strauss singer, Aikin would more than qualify. But she lacked the penetrating sinuousness that is a Straussian must. Rather, she pumped her words, breaking the continuity, and she even missed several opportunities for sheer opulence of sound. Examples: Her rendering of “Ohne Kraft” (without strength), a phrase that binds preposition to noun in a seamless musical drive, severed the vital connection; and what should have been a gorgeous outpouring on the suspended “ah” of “Lieb'umrankung” (love-entwining) was neglected in Aikin's performance, which was neither gorgeous nor sensitive to the harmonic change occuring beneath the suspension. Nevertheless, by means of her intelligence and musicality, she revealed the songs to be gems, especially the entrancing “Wasserrose” (Waterlily), with its beguilingly harmonized arpeggios, over which the voice “recites.”

The hand of a master is evident in Dominick Argento's Songs about Spring, settings of poems by e. e. cummings. The songs abound in lovely images of children playing in a “puddle-wonderful” world, flowers springing seemingly from nowhere, and the “goat-footed balloonMan” selling his moon-balloons. The songs fairly jump and glow with high-spirits and the wonder of Spring. The set is well-suited to a singer with Aikin's gifts — precision, agility, a gift for patter. Yet here too she slipped over words that needed more attention, like “puddle-wonderful”, where she sacrificed the first word to achieve the subseqent (more impressive?) high loud note of the second; and the word “old” in the line “...New and / Old things” which she cut short, eliminating any chance of contrast with “new.” The singer must do her utmost to point the listener to the words and what the composer has done with them. To do that, she must show some attitude towards what she's singing, as well as practicing fine diction.

“Amor” from Strauss's six songs to settings by Brentano was Aikin's first encore and it suited her beautifully. She sang it from memory, unlike some of the earlier songs, and she clearly owned it. Second came a repeat of the last “movement” of the Schubert, followed by Johann Strauss Jr.'s ”Frühlingsstimmen Walzer, its rapid words and a well-placed final stratospheric note delighting the enraptured audience.