San Francisco Classical Voice

It is rare to encounter a singer who excels in both opera and recital. Wendy Hillhouse is a rare bird indeed, on the evidence of her recital Friday night for Old First Concerts. Her imaginative programming, her beautiful, opulent voice, her extraordinary sensitivity to musical and verbal nuance, and her expressive use of face and body made a winning combination.

The program's centerpiece was Elinor Armer's set of seven songs, A Season of Grief, to poems by Tennyson and Witter Bynner. Chosen upon the death of Armer's mother, the poems are arranged in a powerful progression from loss through healing to acceptance. They were beautifully portrayed in the music as well as in Hillhouse's singing and the able piano accompaniment of Josephine Gandolfi. Armer's subtle musical language is well suited to the voice, enhanced by details like the trembling of a poplar tree echoed in a fluttering piano figure, a phrase like "Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears" leaping out. One short poem makes its rueful point without accompaniment.

The concert began with Haydn's solo cantata, Arianna a Naxos. In this scena, Haydn reveals dramatic gifts equal to Mozart's. Haydn's audience probably already knew the story of Ariadne and Theseus from Greek mythology (and probably also knew Italian), but Hillhouse wisely told the story to this audience before she began: how Theseus (Teseo) came from Greece to Crete as war reparations, to be sacrificed to the monster Minotaur who lived in a labyrinth, how Ariadne (Arianna), daughter of King Minos of Crete, fell in love with him and helped him to vanquish the Minotaur; how she sailed away with him bound for Greece; how they stopped briefly on the uninhabited island of Naxos, and how she woke the next morning to discover that he had sailed off without her.

Many composers before and after Haydn have sympathized with poor Arianna. In the series of recitatives and arias of Haydn's cantata, Arianna, discovered on the island, awakes, searches for Teseo, and gradually realizes that he has abandoned her. Hillhouse brought all her operatic skills to bear: superb timing, a speaking face and gestures, and variety of color and dynamics, from the climactic calling of Teseo's name to the lifeless tone in which Arianna fully realizes her abandonment. I thought that singer and pianist began too slowly, and that the first aria, Dove sei, lacked urgency because of its slow tempo. But most of the scena moved brilliantly to its climax and the ending despair. And I am impressed by a singer who can get really upset without going off pitch.

Hillhouse's masterful use of varieties of color in her voice was evident also in a group of songs by Henry Cowell--unpublished songs which she herself transcribed from manuscripts in the Library of Congress. She entered into the spirit of The Pasture (Robert Frost) with a light "you-come-too" sort of sound, then switched to a full sensuous sound for The First Jasmines (Tagore) and Song in the Songless (Meredith).

The next song, Rest (Catherine Riegger), made effective use of a persistent pedal point in the piano, and Cowell's trademark tone clusters (even to the full-arm press at the end) matched by some unusual vocal effects on the words "shore" and "rest"--a kind of slow oscillation over a wide interval. Composer and performers caught the restlessness and the yearning for rest in the poem. The last song, Music, when soft voices die (Shelley), returned to a gently romantic mood.

More by Cowell--a piano solo, Ritournelle, and a second set of songs to texts by Padraic Collum--less remarkable as music, though lifted by Gandolfi's fluent pianism and Hillhouse's gift for bringing out the syntax and sound--in short, the meaning--of language.

Three songs showed Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to be an excellent lieder composer. Her Mainacht is a worthy companion to the Brahms setting of the same text. Again, this time in German, Hillhouse combined beautiful sound with subtle attention to words, without falling back on operatic clichés.

The concert closed with five settings by John Duke of Lewis Carroll's Alice poems. Hillhouse delivered these in hilarious Gilbert and Sullivan/music hall style, dancing with the lobsters, smiling a crocodile smile, making "soup" delicious, glowering as the violent Duchess, and relishing every ridiculous word in Jabberwocky. Her encore was a Cowell setting of a fragment from Keats--interesting to me because Charles Seeger set the same text, and Keats inspired both composers to extravagantly romantic writing. She sang it rapturously.

There you have it: Wendy Hillhouse is everything a singer should be. The hall should have been packed, but it was a dark and stormy night. Those who came were happy they had braved the storm.

(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University [lecturer emerita] and director of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)

©2000 Anna Carol Dudley, all rights reserved