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RECITAL REVIEW
Luster Only Briefly Dulled March 24, 2002
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By Kip Cranna
It had promised to be one of the oddball music events in the Bay Area this season: soprano Jessye Norman, the grandest of opera's grandes dames, would devote an entire Lieder-Abend to Schubert's bleak, moving song cycle Winterreise — a heartbroken young man's personal tale of his journey toward despair and death. This work of gloomy male introspection was to be heard by an intimate audience of three thousand at Davies Symphony Hall on Sunday evening. Miss Norman had made waves last September with a much-ballyhooed staged performance of the cycle at the Théàtre du Chātelet in Paris, with settings by the famed slow-motion experimentalist Robert Wilson and costumes by none other than Yves Saint Laurent. San Francisco's event, presented by the Symphony, was to be in a bare-bones recital format, however, sans décor or staging.
Still it was a shock to be handed a printed insert at the door indicating that Miss Norman had opted to change her entire program, dumping Schubert completely in favor of Beethoven, Strauss, Ravel and Wolf. No explanation was given, nor were any program notes provided, only song texts. Last-minute changes are not foreign to this formidable diva, whose legendary hauteur backstage is belied by her warmth in front of the public. (At a Carnegie Hall concert not long ago, a startled audience expecting Ravel and Schoenberg on the first half of the program instead got feminist poetry readings from the Judith Weir commission to be performed after intermission.)
But the San Francisco audience had come to attend a love-fest and seemed not to care in the least about the "bait-and-switch" tactics. Beethoven's Gellert Lieder, a set of six devotional songs on poems by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, began the program. Norman bathed the audience in her famously-lush sound, almost overwhelming these miniature prayers with the extravagant richness of her delivery. The most somber of the songs, "Vom Tode" (On Death), was sung with darkly ominous portent. "Busslied" (Song of Penance), the longest of the group, began touchingly, with affecting humility, but the pitch sagged noticeably in the softer passages. In the contrapuntal concluding verse Norman drove home an extroverted emphasis a little out of scale with the song's penitential quality.
Her lavish vocal gifts were more suited to the expansive music of Richard Strauss, offered in a sampler of six songs from six different sets. "Heimliche Aufforderung" (Secret Invitation) was engagingly exuberant and outgoing, with the top notes full of luster marred only by a slight tendency for the tone to spread. The creamy richness and velvety warmth of her sound can still be heard, but the riveting gleam of penetrating full tone for which Norman has been so renowned was not always in evidence, and a certain frayed quality crept in for brief moments. "Mit deinen blauen Augen" (With Your Blue Eyes) was soulful and heartfelt, and the concluding Strauss piece, "Befreit" (Freed), a bittersweet song of parting, evoked great emotive intensity from the singer, undermined only slightly by uncertain pitch. For one who has not always bought into the over-reaching staginess of this artist's interpretations, the singing here seemed genuinely heartfelt and emotionally telling. Despite her predilection for grandiose posing, Norman is still capable of amazingly drawn-out vocal phrasing and impressively expressive crescendos. Ravel's contribution to the program came in the form of Shéhérazade, a set of three orchestral songs (dating from 1903) for mezzo-soprano on the exotic poetry of Tristan Klingsor. The first of these, "Asie" (Asia), is part perfumed reverie, part fanciful travelogue, which Norman interpreted with markedly arch mannerisms, luxuriating in its sounds and elaborately tasting the words, though many of them remained nonetheless unintelligible. Norman's excellent accompanist Mark Markham painted wondrously stylistic swaths of muted and understated color. His playing in "La Flūte Enchantée" was even more delicate and atmospheric. In "L'Indifférent," a slyly suggestive portrait of sexual ambivalence, Norman sang as if truly engaged in its sensuality. By the time the selections from Hugo Wolf's Italian Songbook rolled around, Norman seemed at last in nearly top form, with a reliable stream of that all-engulfing sonority at her disposal. "Wir haben Beide Lange Zeit geschwiegen" (We Have Both Been Long Silent) was magical, if just a hair under pitch. Norman became a larger-than-life coquette in "I Have a Lover Living in Penna." The adoring crowd coaxed her into three encores, including Strauss' "Zueignung," broadly sung as she turned in wide circles to encompass the terrace seats in the embrace of her sound. Schumann's "Widmung" followed, and then the inevitable "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands." The evening wasn't Winterreise by a long shot, but it was a sometimes heartening, if sometimes disappointing glimpse of a great performer in less than peak condition. (Clifford (Kip) Cranna is Musical Administrator of the San Francisco Opera, Program Advisor for the Carmel Bach Festival, and a frequent lecturer on Musical Appreciation.) ©2002 Kip Cranna, all rights reserved |
