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RECITAL REVIEW
It Doesn't Get Any Better
April 18, 2001
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By Anna Carol Dudley
Dawn Upshaw and Richard Goode — it doesn't get any better than that. The dynamic duo came to Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall Wednesday night for a recital imaginatively designed and beautifully performed. Four groups of songs — by Haydn, Mahler, Bartok, and Ives — alternated with piano pieces by Beethoven and Debussy.
Upshaw invested each of five songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn with its own special quality. Her nightingale sang magically in "Ich ging mit Lust" ("I walked with joy") and was trumped by the donkey of "Lob des hohen Verstands" ("In praise of higher understanding"). She could color her voice to be seamlessly beautiful, as in the low ranges of "Ich ging," or speakingly comic, in the heehaws and braying "kennen" of "Lob." A child dies of hunger in "Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly life") and enjoys abundant food in "Das himmlische Leben" ("Heavenly life"), and Upshaw brought the contrast vividly to life.
Bartok's arrangements of Hungarian folk songs give the pianist a lot to do, and Goode played them with panache, tossing off the virtuosic bits but not wrenching the songs out of their basic simplicity. Upshaw sang them in Hungarian, wailing through bitter laments, figuratively stomping through a dance tune, and rollicking about on horseback. She sang a couple of the laments in a keening ornamental style that evoked Arabic songs she has done with the Kronos Quartet — a style that entirely suited the Hungarian songs.
Upshaw is a thoroughly American singer, with roots in folk and popular music. She is ideally suited to singing Ives, moving easily from nostalgic to cute to deeply expressive. She changed easily from spunky gesture and movement in a song like "Ann Street" to eloquent stillness in the gem that is "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," from corny opera house "Memories" to moving reminiscence. The concert began with a group of songs by Haydn, led off by Goode's sparkling pianism in "The Mermaid's Song" and his orchestral playing of "She never told her love." Upshaw was slow to find the right voice for this repertoire, inconsistent in her sound in the first song, awkward in phrasing in the second. Of two songs to texts by Anne Hunter, she fell short of creating a compelling atmosphere in "The Spirit's Song" (the words are not great literature, but the music is haunting), but "Fidelity" built up to a satisfying end.
Goode drew a lovely singing sound from the piano in a set of Six Bagatelles by Beethoven (Op. 126). Every note counted under his fingers, whether the touch was gossamer or weighty, and his mastery of dynamic contrast and suspenseful pauses contributed to the expressive power of his playing. Following the Beethoven group, Upshaw came into her glory vocally and expressively in the Mahler songs. The second half started with the Bartok songs, went on to Goode's crystalline performance of three pieces by Debussy, and ended with Ives. Encores were Schumann's "Er ist's," in celebration of spring — gorgeous in both vocal and piano sound — and Ives' Songs my mother taught me, a nice return to Upshaw's roots. The audience refrained from applauding every single piano bagatelle, but many persisted in clapping after every song within a group. I wish people would notice when their applause is not being acknowledged as the singer tries to maintain her connection to the next song. Still, this probably means a large and welcome new audience is being attracted to vocal recitals by these superb artists. (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.) ©2001 Anna Carol Dudley, all rights reserved |
