San Francisco Classical Voice

Soprano Anna Carol Dudley's presence in the Bay Area music scene dates from 1957, when the singer first arrived in Berkeley as a young woman recently graduated from the Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music. She auditioned for the music director of the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, and was immediately hired as a singer for church services and events. Excelling in both the baroque and contemporary repertory, she soon started appearing with local ensembles and orchestras, and her acclaim extended well beyond the Bay Area. With a musical career now reaching into its fifth decade, Dudley has become even better known as a singing coach and music educator, holding teaching positions at the San Francisco State University, and at the popular workshops of the San Francisco Early Music Society.

Last Sunday afternoon, Anna Carol Dudley presented a recital at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley ("where it all began," as the soprano observes in the program notes). As part of the Church's events celebrating its 125th Anniversary, her program offered pieces by Purcell, Telemann, Haydn, Debussy, Copland, Seeger, and Berkeley composer Donald Aird.

Dudley's voice is a dark-hued soprano, with occasional sparkles of brilliance shining through making an arresting effect. A well-schooled singer, her middle range is poised and elegant. Now, in her late sixties, her instrument displays obvious limitations, particularly in the upper range and in the more trying passages requiring agility and stamina. Yet, to the small and warmly appreciative crowd in attendance (mostly friends and acquaintances of the artists, one suspects), these flaws were insignificant. A phrase or tone might have emerged with less confidence on occasion, but the audience seemed simply too delighted in sharing an afternoon of music with the performers to care about such details.

Accompanied by Larry Marietta on the harpsichord, the soprano opened the program with Henry Purcell's "We Sing to Him," delivered with a surprising sense of theatricality. Perhaps not yet fully warmed up, her tone fluttered a bit, disrupting the song's pacing. "An Evening Hymn," the next selection, also seemed overly dramatic, lacking the sense of calm repose indicated by the text and the gently lilting dotted rhythms.

The theatrical quality, however, was much better suited to the selections for two sopranos which followed, Purcell's hauntingly moving "Elegy on the Death of Queen Mary" and "Not all my torments," with Judith Nelson as the second singer. Purcell's Elegy contains moving, sweeping melismatic laments juxtaposed against dramatic, sepulchral descents into chest tones. This the well-matched vocal pair delivered with memorable urgency and intent. "Not all my torments" found Anna Carol Dudley much more comfortably centered, as she delivered the monodic opening with a grand, declamatory feeling.

Flutist Nancy Knop then joined Dudley and Marietta for a pleasant reading of G.P. Telemann's Cantata No. 68, "Lauter Wonne, lauter Freude," with its peculiar chromaticism and the graphic repeated interjections. But perhaps surprisingly, Anna Carol Dudley found her temperament most comfortably matched with the set of three Haydn songs that closed the first half. The "Sailor Song" had a lighthearted, fun buoyancy, crowned by an impressive top note on the phrase "war and death can him displease." "Sympathy," the second selection, was delivered with a truthfulness that redeemed these songs from the trite insignificance with which they are usually offered. In the last Haydn selection "Abschiedslied," a song of farewell, the performers' intention and sincerity of the narrative were communicated with vivid clarity.

Claude Debussy's short cycle Fetes galantes followed the intermission, and demonstrated that Dudley is still a credible interpreter of French repertory. The rapturous sensuality of poems was beautifully depicted, particularly as Marietta craftily captured on the piano the wonderful sonic landscape details, like the translucent quality of "Clair de lune" or the delicate nightingale calls in "En sourdine."

Most memorable of the closing set of American songs was Aird's "Dolor," set to Theodore Roethke's poem, on a depressing theme of alienation in a clerical, institutionalized microcosm. Though liquid and atonal, and constructed with a fluid angularity, "Dolor" had a strong sense of shape. Seeger's "Whenas in silks my Julia goes" capped the recital with a playful, charming colloquial mood.

(Ching Chang is a regular contributor to the SF Bay Times and The SF Gate.)

©1999 Ching Chang, all rights reserved