San Francisco Classical Voice

Einfeld, part of the Merola Program's class of 2003 and now an Adler fellow, is an exciting discovery. She's impressively accurate in her sense of pitch and rhythm, and makes any text very clear throughout her range. She has an ability to focus the audience's attention on the words she's singing, whatever their content might be, without dominating the proceedings. Einfeld also controls a wide range of vibrato, dynamics, attacks and vocal colors, and seems able to choose any point on these spectra at will. She was certainly the right singer for the Kolb work's complex poetry, with so many ways of inhabiting the text at her disposal.

It wouldn't be a Left Coast program without a premiere by a local composer, and the spotlight this night fell to Sean Varah. His Four Neruda Songs, for voice and guitar, deserves a life in the repertory. He chose to set four poems that, like so much of Neruda's writing, explore love, connecting it to other feelings and to a world of experiences. Varah fashioned a sort of subtle, dissonant, melancholy musical language around the texts, which fit them beautifully. Some brief opening hints of Spanish music quickly moved into more original territory, and Varah found a fitting pace and shape for each text. The only shortcoming in his expressive vocal writing was a tendency to push the voice high into its range very early in a couple of the pieces, leading me to fear that there would be nowhere else to go.

Altogether, Varah created a setting varied enough to accommodate the lengthy texts without any feeling they had overstayed their welcome. Einfeld's performance again was a model of varied style at the service of great expressiveness, and her diction was remarkably clear. Goldberg made an excellent accompanist, setting a strong mood in each song, assuming the lead role when called for.

The evening opened with Ned Rorem's rarely heard Romeo and Juliet, a 1975 work for guitar and flute. This is a set of nine brief movements, each of them inspired by a fragment of the play's text, usually just a few words. Given the subject, Rorem's approach was subtle and surprising, more static and impressionistic than dramatic. Sidestepping the broadest passions of the play, he has crafted a work that seems more to evoke the wide range of psychological states that the play touches upon. Typically, Rorem's language was coherent, with a fluent sense of line and careful control of the work's harmonic tension. While this doesn't rank with his finest work, it's worth hearing, especially in such a thoughtful reading. Goldberg and Pelinka gave a soulful performance that skillfully balanced the work's twin inclinations toward flowing tunefulness and harmonic ambiguity.

The program's other flute and guitar piece, Roberto Sierra's Cronica del Descubrimiento (Chronicles of Discovery), is a three-movement work meant to evoke the earliest encounters of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Spanish Conquistadores. Although only the second movement is titled “Noche,” I found the entire work to have an enigmatic and nocturnal feeling, with subtly beautiful explorations of the instruments' tone colors and dark, haunting harmonies. Even the concluding “Batalla” (battle), meant to evoke the violence of the period, had the same kind of introspective quality beneath its energetic surface. Goldberg and Pelinka deserve a hand for choosing repertoire that avoids the choice of surface prettiness that seems to overcome many composers who write for flute and guitar, and instead opting for some deeper material.

The program ended on a lively note with four of Manuel de Falla's great Canciones Populares Españolas, transcribed from the original for voice and piano. Each of these pieces, adapted from folk and flamenco sources in Falla's unique Spanish impressionist style, is a delight. Goldberg and Einfeld dug into each one with plenty of enthusiasm, and found also the sweet mood of the lullaby, “Nana.” Falla's artful absorption of his folk sources into an impeccably crafted concert piece was honored with an energetic performance, one that made a fitting ending to an unusual and very satisfying program.