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RECITAL REVIEW
Shirai's Song Panorama, Instructive, Pushed, Theatrical
November 14, 2000
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By Stephanie Friedman
Though not an interpretive triumph, Mitsuko Shirai's recital Tuesday
evening at Herbst Theater ranged thoughtfully through a menu of last
century's fare of European songs. Accompanying her was her longtime
musical companion and husband, Hartmut Höll. This program of largely little known songs, including several gems, was well-selected for Shirai's vocal and histrionic abilities.
The panorama of songs was breathtaking. At one end
were Brahms and Strauss; at the other end a living German composer,
Wilhelm Killmayer, well thought-of in Europe but scarcely recognized
here. In between came Berg and Webern, Debussy and Poulenc, Respighi and
Berio, Britten, Hindemith, and several infrequently heard composers. The
evening resembled an instructive lecture, though far from a boring one.
Starting with three lieder, one each by Strauss, Brahms, and the Swiss
composer Othmar Schoeck,. Shirai seemed to be discharging a stream of
nervous energy. She rushed through the songs, hardly taking the time to
differentiate among them. Her voice sounded shaky, overripe and lacking in
color, though the Strauss, "Gefunden" (Found), was charming and the
Schoeck, "Der römische Brunnen" (The Roman Fountain) was not without
interest.
By the second group, Alban Berg's "Vier Lieder, Opus 2", Shirai began to
find her voice, most notably at the extreme ends. The almost spoken low
notes of "Schlafen" (Sleep) were solid and authoritative, the high notes
bright and incisive, and the progressive half-steps sounded right in their
grooves. But the voice was sometimes focused, sometimes spread. Especially in mid-range Shirai, attempting drama, strained, pushed, and generally asked more of her tone than it could give.
The Berg group itself is a masterpiece, written in 1909-10 when he was twenty-five. Shirai brought fine coloration to "Warm die Lüfte" (Warm the Breezes); the penultimate line, beginning, "Der Eine stirbt, daneben der Andere lebt" (One dies, against which the other lives) was appropriately bloodless in tone. Not the least remarkable offering was the Finnish composer, Seppo Nummi's "Vuorella," to a text after the Chinese poet Li Tai-po, source of some of Mahler's poems in "Das Lied von der Erde". Next came one of Britten's six Hölderlin fragments, "Halfte des Lebens" (The Middle of Life), restless and seeking. An expert with atonal music, Shirai dispatched Webern's "Fünf Lieder, Opus 4" with aplomb. Höll was here, as he was throughout the concert, an excellent, musically perspicacious partner. Respighi set the Italian translation by R. Ascoli of a Shelley poem, called in English "Long Ago Times", dramatically. Though harmonically rich and beautiful, this sensuously Romantic setting seemed at first hearing a bit overwrought,. In contrast, Luciano Berio's "Avendo gran disio" (Having a Great Desire), to a poem by J. da Lentini, seemed just right: simple chords at first, giving way to a rippling piano accompaniment in the second stanza. The pithy, miniaturized musical style suited Ms. Shirai better than the lush Respighi, encouraging her to restrain her theatrical tendencies.
Ernst Krenek, in the nightmarish "Ballade vom Fest: (The Ballad of the Banquet), devised a scena for singer and piano. A couple gradually become trapped in a castle where somewhere, perhaps, there is a banquet that they have been invited to but cannot find: a sort of Ravel's La Valse, out of Kafka's The Castle and Schoenberg's Erwartung. The ripeness of Shirai's voice was well-employed here in a truly fantastical piece. A set of songs by Hanns Eisler, onetime Brecht collaborator, sounded hard-edged and unvocal, with the exception of the lovely, rather unfussy "Und endlich" (And at Last), to a text by Eisler after P. Altenberg, poet of the better-known "Altenberg Lieder" of Alban Berg. Poulenc's understated but profoundly moving "C", so-called in part because all the line endings rhyme with the French pronunciation of that letter. Also the poem refers to a place called Cé on the river Loire across whose bridges French refugees from the invading Nazis sought to escape in 1940. The poet (Louis Aragon, French resistance leader during the war) remembers scenes of centuries past along the river--"Le long lai des gloires faussées" (the long saga of false glories)--and contrasts them with the desolate scenes of the present: "overturned cars", "unprimed weapons", "ill-dried tears". (Anyone who has seen the post World War II film, Les jeux interdits (Forbidden Games) can never forget the scene of the fleeing French citizens being strafed by German bombers.) To say that Shirai's performance needed alternately more "French cantabile" and "French parlando"--in other words, more colors--is to tell only half the story: the performance lacked any connection to the pathos of the song. In Louis Beydts' "La colombe poignardée" (The Spitted Dove), Ms. Shirai relied too much on a dramatic rendition which here, as elsewhere when she resorted to it, made her sound as if she were riding heavily along the surface of the piano accompaniment rather than integrating the vocal line with it. The program ended with two rewarding groups of songs. "James Joyce Songs" by Karol Szymanowski were persuasive settings, graced by excellent declamation in English by Shirai. Finally, a haunting set of three "Lieder nach Gedichten von Peter Hartling" (“Songs of Poems by Peter Härtling”), by Killmayer, were stark, spare line-drawings, in which piano and voice parts hardly touched each other. They provided an austerely bracing conclusion to a sufficiency of song. (Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country and abroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at U.C. Davis and Holy Names College.) ©2000 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved |
