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Reviews
RECITAL
Hodge-Podge
By Stephanie Friedman
Susan Graham
Malcolm Martineau
(4/12/05)
SYMPHONY
Well-Moderated Brilliance
By D. Kern Holoman
Kirov Orchestra
Valery Gergiev
(4/11/05)
RECITAL
Successful Pairing
By David Bratman
Stephen Isserlis
Stephen Hough
(4/15/05)
SYMPHONY
Serenity
By Kip Cranna
San Francisco Symphony
Michael Grebanier
Herbert Blomstedt
(4/17/05)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Substantive Fare
By Jules Langert
Composers Inc.
(4/12/05)
RECITAL
Trio Post-Modaern
By Adam Gilbert
Trio Mediaeval
(4/14/05)
RECITAL
A Rare Blend
By Stephanie Friedman
Matthias Goerne
Alexander Schmalcz
(4/11/05)
EARLY MUSIC
Memorable Work
By Rebekah Ahrendt
Il Giardino Armonico
(4/16/05)
MUSIC NEWS
'New & Unusual' at Santa Cruz
By Janos Gereben
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 4/12/05 Question of the Week
Robert Commanday, Senior Editor
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A recital can be a highly variable affair, and ingenious artists do look at it that way, creatively. Dawn Upshaw and Richard Goode have arrived at a most felicitous approach, a partnership more complementary even than the most celebrated singer-pianist pairings. It is a true duo-recital. Of course certain recital program types, say those devoted to the major violin-piano or cello-piano sonatas, call for musical equivalence. Upshaw and Goode go the extra step of presenting the pianist as soloist as well as partner. Just that simple a premise produces a dividend in program structure.
Able to focus on fixed sets or cycles, the vocal equivalent of large single works, Upshaw is freed from the piecing together of single songs into coherent sets and then having to produce chains of three to four-minute performances. Like as not these would be broken up by the applause that violates the continuity she would be striving for. For their current program, given in Davies Symphony Hall Sunday, the song cycles were Schumann's second Liederkreis, Op. 39; Debussy's triptych, F’tes galantes, Set 2; and Mussorgsky's From the Nursery. Then, for his part alone, Goode had the great late Haydn Sonata No. 46, in C, H. XVI:50, and Debussy's Ondine (Preludes, Book 2), and L'Île joyeuse.
The inspired programming elicited that level of performance. On their face, Schumann's dozen songs (to Eichendorff's poetry) would seem a succession of songs of love, some mournful and some enraptured, but individual romantic effusions associated with the flush of the composer's new marriage. Upshaw feels them as more of a unity, the expression of one poet, the ardors and the terrors occurring as mood swings, with uncertainty shadowing even the rapture. Her singing comes from within, from her depths. The more "simple" Schumann's song line seems, somehow, the more telling it becomes. In "Intermezzo," the "heart sings a song that rises in the air and rushes toward you." Its flow from her does just that, Goode answering with one of the sublime Schumann postludes that gently completes the curve. "Waldesgespräch" ("Forest Conversation") is the odd song out, the poet's frightening encounter with a Lorelei, a metaphor for emotional entrapment. Charging above the propulsive piano part, Upshaw ignited the drama.
The fifth song reaches the first climax of the cycle, the ecstatic "Mondnacht" ("Moonlit Night"). The effusive piano phrases that Goode cast with such grace, and then the pulsing undercurrent, seemed to feed the transport that she loosed. "Schöne Fremde" ("Beautiful, Strange Land") sustained this rush, again with the surging curved phrases she simply rides on. Much of these songs are tinged with sorrow. The strange, dramatic image of an ancient castle "Auf einer Burg," serves as a frame for one final startling image of immediate grief at the close . The cycle was traced out poetically, as much by the pianist as by the singer. It closed in rapture, "She is yours, she is yours!" ("Frühlingsnacht," "Spring Night") No. We are hers.
Upshaw returned directly for the F’tes galantes. Her soprano has never been smoother or more fluid, more finely graduated in its shading as it proceeds from its pure radiance into the surprisingly rich, low register. Debussy calls on all her art for the arch, mercurial "Les Ingénus," with its swift, biting boulevard wit, the parody of an 18th century dance accompanying the stunning character sketch. "Le Faune" pictorializes Verlaine's image of a plaster faun predicting unhappiness for the couple approaching across his lawn. Upshaw brought that faun alive, Goode evoking the sense of the strange fantasy dance in the background. The gem of the triptych, "Colloque sentimental" ("Sentimental Dialogue") was haunting as Upshaw, captured the Pelleas et Mélisande sense of a slow, floating drama. It conveys the sad conversation of a ghostly pair, vainly trying to remember a love past recall. Goode limned this suspended moment, finding a particular delicacy with which Debussy's changing harmonies slip past over a still bass, like clouds moving over a grey landscape.
Goode's solo Ondine and L'Île joyeuse were magical. The delicacy and fineness of his touch are wondrous. Ondine, casting a sense of mythic dancers, is one of the Preludes that most deserves being called a musical mirage. In that Prelude and more so in L'Île joyeuse, Goode doesn't so much play as paint the sound. He will at one time stage and sustain several levels of dynamic, from piano to triple pianissimo for effects of color and shading that contradict the percussive nature of the instrument. Inspired by Watteau's painting L'Embarquement pour Cythère, L'Île joyeuse would presumably evoke the sense of excitement and color and the image of the pilgrims embarking for this paradise. In this performance from the fantasia-like improvisatory beginning, the sense of impressionism was set aside. It seemed like the dawn of the modern usage of the piano. The constantly running figure, the exact control of the slow, slow growth of dynamic to the dazzling wash of the ending, all was brilliant.
Goode had opened the program with a crisp performance of Haydn's Sonata No. 46 in C, H.XVI:50. The opening Allegro is built on just a pair of notes, staccato, answered by another pair. From that he spins a whole marvel of intricate devising. Goode started working in miniature and then opened the musical workings, tracing the course masterfully through some of Haydn's artful harmonic dodging. The Adagio, an elegant, lyrical piece, was phrased exquisitely, and the finale brought in a recurring "wrong" harmony joke and the timing set up musical humor with great precision.
Upshaw returned to join Goode in five songs from Mussorgsky's The Nursery in which, as she announced beforehand, she had the challenge and fun of taking on different parts and voices: the boy child (being naughty, being frightened by a beetle); the nanny, now reproving, now reassuring; the little girl singing a fanciful lullaby to her doll; the girl singing her "Evening Prayer" with a rapid patter blessing of relatives, and needing prompting for the forgotten conclusion. It's a charmer. The piano part is colorful, pictorial and temperamentally "in character" with the singer and her roles. Upshaw got into these parts, changing voice (character) within single songs, each a kind of tiny skit, and the piano, by Goode was right up there in character. A delight.
The first of two encores was one of the jewels among the Schubert Lieder, Im Frühling ("In Spring"). As she put it, it is about spring, love, and losing love. Soft, bittersweet, the poem evokes all the nature signs of spring as metaphor for the fleeting love. Upshaw sang it with a gentle ease that was affecting. Goode touched off the supporting notes that lightly suggest dancing, sparkles, always at the critical points easing off exquisitely to punctuate, space and shape the song. Finally, Upshaw sang John Dowland's lute song "Weep no more, Sad Fountains." Then it was over, about as satisfying as an intimate evening of music can be, a duo recital, no, two recitals — and a half.
(Robert P. Commanday, senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
©2005 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved
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