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RECITAL REVIEW
May 25, 2006
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Lessons in Beguilement By Stephanie Friedman
Years ago, when modern ears were introduced to the countertenor voice, it was at first strange to hear a grown man emitting a sound like a powerful boy soprano, pure and unvibrated. But this sound used to be quite common in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Italian castrati were the favorites of the public and reigned supreme with their dazzling vocal pyrotechnics and formidable power, combining the sweetness and agility of the unchanged voice with the strength and power of the man's physique.
The countertenor who sang at Herbst Theatre on Thursday, Andreas Scholl, did not sound like a boy soprano; nor was his sound uniformly pure and unvibrated unless he intended it to be, as he did in the first piece on his program, an a cappella love song by Oswald von Wolkenstein, from the late 14th or early 15th century. That song, fervent as it was, did not prepare us for the richness of timbre of the fully vibrated voice that sang the next song, Giulio Caccini's Amarilli, mia bella (Amaryllis, my lovely one), or for any of the songs that followed.
Scholl, along with his intuitive, technically superb pianist, J. J. Penna, did not bother to dazzle us with rapid-fire roulades and cascading coloratura, as many singers with the facility to accomplish this do even today; though the rare times that he used these devices — a silvery vocal "laugh" on the Italian word "rise" (was laughing), or in the opening section of Purcell's Sweeter Than Roses — showed they were well within his capacity. Nor did he often use the power he exhibited impressively in a lengthy swell from near-silence to fortissimo on the word "senti" (listen). Rather, he used these devices quite deliberately, and with absolute control, as means to an end, and that end was to illustrate the text, to mine the emotional content of the words so as to touch our hearts with his beautiful singing.
In other words, this rather unprepossessing figure, who smiled boyishly and loped on and off the stage, was a consummate artist, one to take to our hearts. No one but such an artist could have performed Purcell's Music for a While as a lesson in "beguilement," so that every repeat of the word "drop" (and there were many) fell as balm on our "cares" and "pains." The tempo was as slow as I've heard it, both relentless and consoling as it made its steady progress through the unfolding song. I'm not sure I continued to breathe during this performance. When repeated as an encore, the song was even more enthralling. Scholl had a way of taking over the tempo of a song, jumping in a fraction of a second early in a particular phrase, or pulling back ever so slightly so that he lagged a little behind the piano, and sometimes playing with the vocal rhythms as written. But these were not faults, because they were so obviously intended. They were what a jazz singer will do when completely comfortable with the line and direction of the song, a sort of mild Baroque version of scatting. And Caccini, that early master of singing, and Purcell, who delighted in freely expressing the words, would, I feel, have applauded. One example only, from Amarilli: Scholl drove the words "Prendi questo mio strale" (Take this arrow of mine), through "Aprimi il petto" (Open my breast) — and I feel sure he must have jumped the beat on the initial word of that phrase — then relenting at "e vedrai scritto in core" (and you will see written in my heart). He sang these phrases the way they were meant to be sung, as words enhanced by music, letting his grasp of the meaning of the words, and the emotions they indicated, direct the speed and volume at which he sang them. Penna, an improviser to his core, followed every phrase faultlessly.
After the gorgeous lavishness of Baroque emotional excess (I love it), encountering the Classical balance, grace, and dignity of three English songs by Haydn, set to poems of his friend Anne Hunter, was like coming upon a green glade and was a welcome respite. Particularly gratifying was The Wanderer, a soulful song with a long, beautiful piano introduction and, between the two stanzas, a piano interlude of similar length and appeal. These songs, and two by Mozart that followed, provided a gentle fulcrum between the early songs of the first half and the two Handel cantatas that made up the entire second half. These were a Handel-lover's delight, and it will be no surprise to learn that Scholl is a superb Handelian — again, not just for the coloratura parts, which he handled easily and without show, but especially for two of the slow arias, one from each cantata. From Vedendo Amor (Since Love Saw) there was the heart-stopping, and time-stopping, Camminando lei pian piano (She trod softly, softly), whose melody Handel used more than a decade later for the aria Va tacito e nascosto ([the hunter] steals silently and secretly) in his opera Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar). The other exquisite aria was Pastorella, coi bei lumi (Shepherdess, with your beautiful eyes) from Nel dolce tempo (In the Sweet Time). Both were superbly paced and seemed, wonderfully, to last forever. Each cantata tells a story about love. One ends with the lovers happily united: "The more I love you because you are honest, the more you are dear to me." The other ends with the words, "My song is of love, but more of rage," denoting the more painful aspect of being struck by Cupid's arrow. These lovely, rarely heard cantatas were quite enough by themselves to finish a deeply satisfying program. It was, however, a fitting end to a superbly performed concert to have our cares and pains once more beguiled by Music for a While, which, of course, was what the entire concert had been about.
(Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Friedman is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
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Andreas Scholl