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RECITAL REVIEW
April 18, 2006
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Bewildered by Bonney By Stephanie Friedman
It is difficult to know what to say about the soprano Barbara Bonney. On the basis of her performance of one Poulenc song in a recital many years ago, I had vowed to return to hear this passionate, intriguing artist with the crystalline voice. My disappointment with her latest offering at Herbst Theatre on Tuesday night, with the excellent pianist Malcolm Martineau, was hard to credit, let alone bear.
I am left wondering why she continues to give recitals. Yes, the voice has faults: a tendency to sing under pitch; to phonate incompletely, leaving certain syllables missing altogether (a possible result of injurious vocal nodes) and others without body; to push in all registers while at the same time skipping artfully but inexcusably over certain notes in the all-but-vanished middle of her register; the occasional complete lack of a soft dynamic; and an overreliance on pushing the voice. But faults can be overlooked in the sweep of a concentrated, full-hearted artistry, and here is where Bonney disappoints most of all. There is still beauty in the voice, but her sloppy disregard for the words, her strange pronunciations ("voes" for "vows," for example) and the production of her vowels — especially the open ones — through a clamped jaw, all undermine her obvious intelligence, expressiveness, and passion. She seems to have lost the commitment to performance, to communication with her audience, to her own artistry.
It may be futile to talk about the program itself when the interpreter, at least the vocal interpreter, was so often missing in action (Martineau, a singer's dream accompanist, did his marvelous best). But the program had the potential to be rewarding as well as interesting, and the few lovely moments in that program merit some mention. Mozart's youngest son, Franz Xaver, was represented by three quite varied, not unengaging lieder. But Schubert's "Was bedeutet die Bewegung" (What does this movement mean), with its depth of passion and stirring piano part, coming right after those slender songs, was no favor to them. The Schubert was part of a well-chosen group featuring heroines from poems by Goethe: Suleika, Mignon, and Gretchen from West-Östlicher Divan, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Faust, respectively. Besides Schubert, the composers were Mendelssohn, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and Wolf. Again, even the better and more famous selections among these — the Schubert, Liszt's "Kennst du das Land" (Mignon) and the Tchaikovsky "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" (Mignon again; the song is known in English as "None but the Lonely Heart") — were not as well-performed as they should have been, because of the frequency of vocal faults combined with lax interpretative drive. American songs by Aaron Copland, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and Samuel Barber, in the second half, fared little better, though the singer met well the challenges of the Griffes set, Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod (pseudonym of William Sharp), and they are worthy songs. Barber was represented by the Four Songs, Opus 13. In "A Nun Takes the Veil," to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the singer was passion-filled but somehow failed to connect with her words, so that the feelings of the young nun remained somewhere outside them. "The Secrets of the Old" (William Butler Yeats) was witty and lively, as befitted the song, and "Sure on This Shining Night," a moving, evocative setting of a text by James Agee, was equally fine, largely because the song is so well-crafted and is set so gratefully for the voice. "Nocturne" had one beautifully performed line, "None to watch us, none to warn." Here the words obviously got to the singer. But the final word of the song, "night," was squeezed out of a tight mouth, hampering the vowel unbearably and completely obliterating the earlier lovely impression. Mozart's Das Veilchen (The Violet), the first encore, had awful dry patches, present throughout the concert, and lacked body. The second, Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) — Goethe's heroine again — found the singer with better breath control and a firmer grounding in the song. The sudden softness at the phrase "sein hoher Gang" (his noble step) was perfectly realized by both performers.
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
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