San Francisco Classical Voice

March 7, 1999

Mel Ulrich

The baritone Mel Ulrich produced a rich array of vocal music for the 17th Schwacher Debut Recital last Sunday at the Old First Church. An 1998 Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera, Ulrich brings to his performance of art songs operatic experience, assured voice production, a full dynamic range with finely controlled pianissimos on top, and legato phrasing, along with a distinct narrative ability.

The ambitious program began with six of the thirteen songs of Henri Duparc that survived the composer's destruction of most of his music. At age thirty-seven, Duparc gave up composition but lived on until his eighty-fifth year. Ulrich sang with a lovely warm sound and adequate French diction, yet seemed detached from the sentiments of the poetry. The well known Chanson Triste lacked the sense of the lover's loss, hopelessness, and despair that culminates in the words "Mon Amour," as Phidlylé was missing its sensual languor.

In Debussy's Trois Ballades de Villon, bold settings of challenging lyrics by the medieval vagabond thief François Villon, Ulrich used his strong histrionic ability to projected the range of emotions from religious love to bawdy love with appropriate irony and strong mood contrasts.

His full baritone timbre enhanced the group of six of Schubert songs to Goethe's texts. Ulrich sang these with ease and fine energy, bringing out the humor and seduction in Der Fischer, anguish and yearning in two settings of Wanderers Nachtlied. Erlkönig, magnificently played by Bryndon Hassman, Ulrich's accompanist for recital's first half, was rapid and exciting. Ulrich projected a particularly eerie vocal color for the characterizations of the Erlking and his daughters.

Dover Beach by Samuel Barber, an early piece, lyric and quiet, to a famous text by Matthew Arnold, proved highly suited to Ulrich's voice and temperament. The sound of the accompanying string quartet of Dara Saffer, Candice Guiralo, Eleanor Angel, and Noriko Kishi resembled soft surf gliding over pebbles on the beach. The performance was outstanding.

Craig Bohmler's Songs to Her, in its world premiere, was witty, playful, and deftly performed. The gifted, young American composer accompanied these as well as Ulrich's last group, folk song settings by John Jacob Niles. Niles' arrangements were done with gusto and humor, but a certain fuzziness in Ulrich's otherwise clear diction made comprehension difficult. A heart-felt rendition of Schubert's Du bist die Ruh, and the Drinking Song from Ravel's Don Quichotte a Dulcinée were his encores.

James Schwabacher, who created and endowed this recital series, commented to the audience in his intermission remarks that he had been asked if the song recital was dead. Looking at the capacity audience with a smile, Schwabacher responded, "No!"

(Margot Blum Schevill is a mezzo-soprano and a former Merolina, now a writer, who sang in the Bay Area and elsewhere during the 1950s and 1960s. She sang with the Providence, R.I. New Music Ensemble for fifteen years.)

©1999 Margot Blum Schevill, all rights reserved