San Francisco Classical Voice

After decades of living in Germany and working with pianist Hartmut Höll, mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai's sensibility is predominantly German. This was evident in her opening group of songs by Richard Strauss, Brahms, and Othmar Schoeck on San Francisco Performances' Vocal Series in Herbst Hall last Tuesday. Entitled "Our European Songbook of the 20th Century," the program she and Höll presented offered songs by 16 composers from eight countries in five languages.

The first group of German songs introduced Shirai as a singer with a sumptuous, seamless sound, an expressive dramatic use of face and body, and a singularity of phrasing who pays attention to every nuance of words. Perhaps as an unavoidable corollary, she tended to focus on the particular at the expense of a purely vocal legato line.

Alban Berg and Anton Webern were represented by early songs still heavily influenced by their teacher Schoenberg. The strength of Shirai's low range made for a memorable opening of Berg's "Schlafen." The second Berg song, "Schlafen trägt man mich" ("Sleeping I am borne"), sounded like a song from Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens" (although Berg wrote it before Schoenberg published his cycle).

While the essential sounds of Shirai's Italian, French, and English were blunted by her accent, her fine attention to the structure and meaning of language left no doubt of her total involvement in what she was singing and her ability to communicate in many languages. (I can't vouch for her Finnish, in Seppo Nummi's setting of a translation from Li Tai-Po.) Her choice in songs by various non-German composers was idiosyncratic, not representative of the main stylistic thrust of their songwriting.

Luciano Berio was represented by one of his folklike settings, "Avendo gran disio" ("Having a Great Desire") from Quattro Canzoni Popolari (Four Popular Songs), Debussy by the dark World War I "No”l des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison" ("Christmas of the homeless children"), Poulenc by the World War II song "C," and Britten by a setting of Hölderlein's troubled poem "Hälfte des Lebens" ("In The Middle of Life").

And when as an encore Shirai sang Webern's compact, fleeting, distinctive "Gleich und gleich" ("Same/same") from his Opus 12, the difference between that and his earlier Opus 4 songs underlined the whole tone of this recital. Songs were chosen not to represent a variety of typical 20th century musical styles, but rather to reflect the particular sensibility of these two performers. In a program note, they made it clear that this was their personal overview of 20th century Europe. Such a concert should make us aware of the folly of easy generalization about the music of any particular century or even decade.

Songs in English included five poems from James Joyce's Chamber Music beautifully set for both voice and piano by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. Shirai's secure, expressive high range was exploited in "Lean out of the window," and her communication of the poetry was exemplary. A slight exception was the "Welladay" section of "Winds of May," which she took too seriously. It was interesting that her English was clearer here than in two Hindemith songs to poems by American Oscar Cox — no doubt a tribute to Joyce and Szymanowski.

The second half of the recital began with a nightmarish scena and operatic tour de force for Shirai with Ernst Krenek's "Ballade vom Fest" ("The Ballad of the Banquet"). She took us through every room of a castle, looking for a supposed banquet that constantly eluded her, finally wondering why she could never find it and even why she had wanted it. (This had a special resonance after a week in which our two presidential rivals kept trying to find their banquet in the surreal castle of Florida.)

Pianist Höll also had plenty to do in the Krenek, and he did it magnificently. The same can be said for his playing in three lovely songs by Hanns Eisler, and indeed for the whole concert. The structure of Eisler's songs is Schubertian — verse and ritornello, regularity of measure — and his "An eine Stadt (Heidelberg)" was dedicated to Schubert. Eisler's "Und endlich" ("And at last") was a beauty, beautifully sung.

The recital ended with a group of songs from 1993 by Wilhelm Killmayer — written with such exaggerated simplicity of means that the repetition of "nichts" ("nothing") in the last song echoed my suspicion that they really amounted to nothing. Then came that encore by Webern — all of a minute long but infused with such strong individual genius that it put the likes of Killmayer to shame.

(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University [lecturer emerita] and director of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)

©2000 Anna Carol Dudley, all rights reserved