San Francisco Classical Voice

In Sunday's Schwabacher Debut Recital at Old First Church, mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy and tenor Todd Geer presented a polished and varied program of duets and solos by Schumann, Liszt, Rossini, Zemlinsky, and Britten. Old First Church is an attractive and pleasant venue for these recitals, but for operatic singers the acoustics are too live for the bigger vocal moments. (Even so, in ths respect, Old First is still a vast improvement over the Vorpal Gallery, the Schwabacher Recitals' original venue.)

The emotional and musical center of the evening came just before intermission in Britten's Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac. Britten wrote this short cantata as a kind of epilog to Billy Budd, which shares the theme of the sacrifice of innocence. Premiered in 1952, the text is taken from the Chester miracle plays, a medieval liturgical rendering of the story from Genesis, Christianized to the point of Abraham's invoking the blessing of the Trinity on his son as he lays him on the sacrificial altar.

The Canticle is a staggering combination of simplicity, variety, and dramatic power. In the opening measures, in which God summons Abraham to his task, the alto and tenor voices combine in unisons and close intervals to conjure an otherworldly, unforgettable effect. Accompanied by racing scales in the piano, Isaac tries every wile to escape. When at last he submits, serenely beautiful arpeggios movingly express his resignation. The vocal writing moves seamlessly from recitative to arioso and, after God relents of his demand on Abraham, ends with a hymn of praise in canon.

The problem of how much action to perform in a recital situation was handled expertly here. As the voice of God spoke, McHardy and Geer faced away from the audience. They turned forward as they became Abraham and Isaac. Otherwise the acting was all in voice and demeanor. The singing was clear, focused, and well enunciated. The unisons were exquisite.

The program opened with four Schumann duets, beginning and ending with contrasting lovers' entreaties ("Let me in"), the first one Unterm Fenster ("Beneath The Window") successful, the second Liebhabers Ständchen ("Lover's Serenade") a wet and windy failure.

The second duet, In der Nacht from the Spanisches Liederspiel) is one of Schumann's sublime slow movements. As a moment of repose it would ideally appear later in a program. Though beautifully sung, the intensity, particularly from McHardy, was a bit too operatic in places to suggest the inner heartache of one lying awake at night. Geer sang here, as elsewhere, with an exquisite mezza voce. A rapturously sung Er und Sie ("He and She" )rounded out the set.

Liszt's Tre sonetti di Petrarca ("Three Sonnets of Petrarch"), big, operatic songs requiring a full tenor voice, showed off Geer's impressive range and dynamic control. To Petrarch's sonnets Liszt wrote bel canto arias in the style of Bellini, with the added advantage of a far richer piano accompaniment. Pianist Monica Vanderveen played them skillfully, though here, as in the rest of the recital, I would have liked a more assertive partnership.

McHardy opened the second part of the recital with six songs of Austrian composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. Encouraged in his youth by Brahms and Mahler, Zemlinsky wrote in a post-Wagnerian romantic idiom. But unlike his brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg, he never abandoned tonality. These six songs are somewhat reminiscent of Mahler and, in the sixth song, of Kurt Weill, though lacking the melodic gifts of either.

Set to German versions of poems by the Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, the songs eschew concrete naturalism in favor of vague suggestion and nuance. In these poems, strong imagery abounds--three sisters seeking death, a maiden whose eyes are bound in golden bandages--but within a murky haze of obscure meaning. McHardy did a game job of making the songs seem to say something, vividly projecting the German text in her rich mezzo.

As a palate cleanser, the recital ended with three light excerpts from Rossini's Sins of My Old Age: the tenor's pastoral lament "Le Sylvain," the "Song of Zora the Little Gypsy" (in which the gypsy girl complains that all society seems to want from her is her smile and her music) and, finally, an Offenbachian duet, "The Lovers of Seville." As an encore, the singers offered an effervescent "Old-Fashioned Wedding" from Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun.

(Baker Peeples is the Artistic Director of Lamplighters Music Theater, Conductor and Tenor.)

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