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RECITAL REVIEW
Uneasy Fit Between Singer and Songs
May 20, 2001
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By Stephanie Friedman
After a concert in which she unleashed her powerful mezzo-soprano voice in Bizet, Wagner, and Argento, Elizabeth Bishop, former Adler Fellow, reined in that power for the one piece on the program that fit her like a glove, a scaled-down, fetchingly perfect encore rendition of Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are." Donald Runnicles was her accompanying pianist in Sunday afternoon's Schwabacher Recital Series at Old First Church.
Neither such seductive fare as the Carmen-like "Adieu de l'hôtesse arabe" ("Farewell of the Arabian Hostess"), with its wily roulades, nor the grandiloquent settings of Wagner's Wesendonk Lieder, to their sometimes overblown poetry, found Bishop persuasive. It was Kern's beautiful song (lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, from the Broadway musical Very Warm for May) that found Bishop at her best. Communicated with a down-to-earth honesty that made full use of her rich voice and expressive personality, this was a tribute to both Bishop and Kern: The singer made the piece sound like the American art song that it is.
Bishop wore the other garments on the program uneasily. The Bizet songs are sung to implied interlocutors, whose presence must be evoked even though they don't speak. Suzon is addressed at length by a bombastic short-term lover in "Adieu à Suzon" ("Farewell to Suzon"). The Arabian hostess tries to detain the departing "bel étranger" ("fair stranger"). Nevertheless, Bishop seemed to be singing to herself alone. No unseen presence was felt. Her too-frequent hand gestures and wide-eyed facial expressions were for the benefit of no unseen viewer.
The perfect fit of the Kern song indicates that in time, and with skilled coaching, this young singer should be able to bring her body language into line with her interpretations, as well as cultivate her imagination. Her voice can evidently yield itself to appropriate material.
Wagner's Wesendonk songs, however, did not qualify as appropriate. They seemed badly mismatched to the singer, even though she has sung Wagnerian roles. The songs, whose poetry is often turgid and baffling, need to be managed like wayward horses and bent to an overall conception. Perhaps the most successful poem in the group is the visually rich, haunting "Im Treibhaus" ("In the Greenhouse"), which, along with the passionate "Träume" ("Dreams"), was a study for Tristan und Isolde. The "arme Pflänze" ("poor plants") addressed in the poem are the poet's fellow aliens in this other-worldly, oppressive hothouse. Although Bishop failed to limn the mute but palpably present plants, she drew down the song nicely to a final piano, providing a lovely moment.
To attempt to portray musically the mercurial, intermittently deranged Virginia Woolf, especially as revealed in diary fragments, is a worthy but formidable undertaking. Dominick Argento, in his daunting From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, has conceived a true song cycle, whose themes repeat and double back throughout the eight songs. Both the piano and the voice parts are complex and challenging. Normally reassuringly stable, triads and arpeggios in the voice are set against the hammering insistence of repeated, diminishing piano notes or a pompous, full-chorded march, and sound anything but reassuringly normal. Yet how strikingly they convey Woolf's anguished reaction to the "phony war" that preceded the actual Second World War in England ("War/June, 1940"). The familiar triadal figures keep dissolving or breaking off, as if presaging the destruction not only of England's comfortable prewar life but of her own life as well. Bishop rose above mere opulence many times in these songs, working assiduously to recreate the wild mood swings in "Anxiety/October, 1920" and the oscillation between humorous observations of the bishop's "polished shiny nose" or the "rapt bespectacled young priest" and the melodrama of the funeral service in "Hardy's Funeral/January, 1928."
The year 1935 in Rome, with the dictator Mussolini in the ascendancy, must have been a worrisome time, but Argento's delicate Chopinesque, 1930's-movie-music accompaniment in "Rome/May, 1935" sustained a light touch. And so did Bishop, with a little laugh on the first of three differently sung "no's" that conclude the song, indicating Woolf's refusal of a recommendation for the Companion of Honor. The sardonic self-knowledge with which Woolf herself might have uttered those repeated words was not in Bishop's interpretation, but the little laugh was welcome. In the final two songs, "Parents/December, 1940" and "Last Entry/March, 1941," Bishop began to feel her way into Woolf's erraticism and despair: "I will go down with my colours flying." Where Woolf attempts to get hold of her despondency by observing it and writing it down, even to the makings of the commonplace dinner of haddock and sausage meat, Bishop plumbed her own depths and let the author shine through. It was, finally, a creditably moving reading by both singer and pianist of this monumental 20th century song cycle. (Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country and abroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at U.C. Davis and Holy Names College.) ©2001 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved |
