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RECITAL REVIEW
January 15, 2006
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By Stephanie Friedman
A graduate of the San Francisco Opera Merola Program, mezzo-soprano Jill Grove has sung roles ranging from Verdi's Amneris, Ulrica,
Preziosilla, and Dame Quickly to the Omniscient Sea-Shell in Strauss's Aegyptische Helena, Auntie in Britten's Peter
Grimes and Anne Kronenberg in Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk. She boasts appearances with such leading conductors as
James Levine, Lorin Maazel, and Christoph von Dohnányi, to name only a few. She displays a formidable voice with an
extensive range and power, with ease and resonance in her lower register, and a gutsy dramatic intensity. All of this would seem to
predict a successful career in opera.
But if I've said it once I've said it dozens of times: The opera stage and the recital stage are not equivalent. The power and
intensity that fill a house holding two or three thousand bodies threatens the more modest dimensions of an intimate hall that
holds several hundred. Shaking the battlements is out; narrowed, careful focus on text and the projection of finer emotions is what
is wanted for the recital hall. The opera singer, used to limning in large strokes, must scale down size of both voice and concept
and master a whole new range of capabilities in order to give the recital repertoire its due. This Jill Grove failed to do in her
first-ever recital, given with John Churchwell, pianist, in the acoustically sensitive Martin Meyer Sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El,
as part of the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series.
The cantata Arianna a Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), by Franz Joseph Haydn (whose dates are 1732-1809, not, as indicated in the
program,1813-1901), drove the singer to an ill-advisedly high level of intensity that obviated any emotional variety. Ariadne has
been abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, after helping him learn how to defeat the Minotaur, the beast at the center of
the labyrinth set up by King Minos, and escape from the labyrinth unharmed. At first she awakes to find him gone and yearns for
him. Then, climbing a high rock, she sees him fleeing in a Greek ship and realizes he will not return for her. Meat enough for a
passionate female singer. But there are gradations of emotion, developed over several sections of recitative and aria, from
bewildered longing to anguish to despair, and these Grove was unable to communicate. She started and ended with anger, and produced
little else in between.
Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder fared equally badly. There was plenty of drama and intensity but little musical sensitivity, and
every high note was shouted. A sizable vibrato — good, perhaps, for projecting drama on an opera stage, but bad for
communicating the fine gradations of text and emotion in a recital hall — made her tone sound as overgrown as a thicket, and
in some cases knocked pitches right off their centers. It was not clear what the singer wanted to do with these songs, other than
use her big voice to lather them with sound. But no meaning, no color — in other words, no interpretations — could emerge
from this jungly confusion of vibrato and force. As for color, it was displayed in her costume's hues of umber, beige, and Chinese
red, not in her voice.
In Samuel Barber's Three Poems of James Joyce, Grove finally managed to find a center to her voice, and for the first time
in the recital I heard simple, warm tone and direct, unfussy communication, though the pronunciation of the crucial word “unquiet”
in “Sleep now, O sleep now,” made it sound like “kwaee-yet,” and marred the final moments of the song. But singing in English seems
congenial to her; it reins in the excesses of her delivery and seems to sharpen her perceptions. Her performances in contemporary
American opera are surely well worth hearing for those reasons.
The program closed with de Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (Seven Popular Spanish Songs). Though these
songs suited the singer well, her energetic vibrato once again marred pitches and line, and a scooping into initial notes —
present throughout the program — prevailed here as well. She doesn't dwell happily in the realm of slow, soft songs like the
heartbreaking “Asturiana,” and is therefore unconvincing in softer singing. But the final “Polo,” with its belting in low register,
was her forte (pardon the pun) and would have been a knockout had it not been that she had reached that level of intensity early in
the concert and stayed there.
For an encore, Grove sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” a personal reference to her feelings about her adopted city.
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
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Jill Grove
