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RECITAL REVIEW
A Voice for the Seventeenth Century January 20, 2002
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By Michelle Dulak
One of the down-sides of the Bay Area's vibrant musical life is that extraordinary artists can visit so quickly and quietly that only a few get to hear them. The magnificent early-music soprano Ellen Hargis was in town Sunday for a recital at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, but I found out about the concert only a few days earlier and more or less by accident. In the end, an audience of maybe sixty people witnessed the finest vocal recital I've heard in a long time.
Hargis does not have a very large voice, but in Grace's side chapel it didn't sound small, just perfectly in scale to the space and to the music. Her tone is vibrant, her intonation astonishingly pure. Her legato is very fine; even the wide-ranging and quirky lines in the Purcell set that opened the recital were seamless and apparently easy for her. She gets around coloratura about as well as any early-music singer I've heard apart from Emma Kirkby, but without that machine-gun regularity that makes Kirkby's coloratura seem a little inhuman; Hargis' pitches are as accurate, but they sound like a line rather than a series of bullets. And her ornamentation is intelligent and apparently natural — a virtue a lot rarer in early-music singers than it ought to be.
She commands a considerable range of colors. I wasn't sure how she would fare in Purcell's “Bess of Bedlam” (what I had heard of her singing on record suggested a personality just a little too well-balanced to play a madwoman), but on Sunday night she was terrific, veering from one mood to the next in demeanor as well as in tone, seemingly lucid at one instant, snapping into a completely different character the next. I've heard more histrionic Besses, but Hargis' was as convincingly mad as any, and more unnerving than most. She was just sane enough to be genuinely frightening.
That coloristic range served her well elsewhere, too — nowhere more than in the big recitative-like piece by Jacopo Peri, “Uccidimi, dolore,” where the scorned woman's abrupt pity and tenderness towards her tormentor brought an altogether new tone, gentle and luminous; all the vindictive hardness in her sound suddenly melted away. The wry wit of Purcell's “Cupid, the slyest rogue alive” came as easily to her as the more meditative moods of some of the other Purcell songs, or the light pathos of Handel's cantata “Ah che pur troppo è ver.” If there was a weakness in the recital, it was on the accompanimental side. Edward Murray (playing a fine copy of a mid-17th-c. harpsichord by John Phillips, lent by its owner for this performance) played incisively and well, and the instrument itself was lovely. But some of his accompaniments sounded a lot more like forty-year-old continuo realizations than like actual, improvised continuo playing. The accompaniment to Monteverdi's “Ohimè, ch'io cado” was incredibly fussy, as though the arranger was hell-bent on displaying his skill in three-part counterpoint in each ritornello. The bass-line almost disappeared under the layers of upper parts. (I darkly suspect the heavy hand of Raymond Leppard.) “Ah che pur troppo è ver” was yet worse; by the end of the performance I had come to the conclusion that this must be a keyboard reduction of a cantata with one or more treble instrumental parts, so distinctive and incessant were the tunes that someone (Murray? An arranger?) had put into the keyboard's right hand. But, no, this one is a continuo cantata. A reinforcing bass instrument would have done everyone concerned many favors.
The program was divided into old favorites (Purcell, Monteverdi, Handel) before intermission and rarities (Peri, Strozzi, Rossi, Mazzocchi) after, with Bernardo Storace's engagingly inept harpsichord Ciaccona thrown in to the middle of the second half for fun. The rare pieces spoke to Hargis' excellent taste. The big Strozzi piece, “L'amante segreto,” is a ground bass (the famous four-note descending scale) interrupted over and over again as the passionate lover is overcome by emotion. The Rossi, “A quel dardo,” with its repeated refrain “Taci lingua, amor lo sa” (Hush, tongue, for love knows this), was delightful, but the best of all was saved for last: Mazzocchi's “Sdegno, campion audace,” a fabulously virtuosic Ciaccona that left no doubt at all of Hargis' technical resources. Hargis introduced her sole encore: “You will all know the poem, and some of you will probably know the tune as well.” The poem was Robert Herrick's “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” and the marvelously spare setting was by William Lawes. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2002 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |