A finely crafted song can take listeners on an intimate journey in which music and words are married, like slaves to the same master: storytelling. And sometimes words and music take two seemingly different paths — like two developing subplots — to reach the same end.
The latter was the paradigm at play in the premiere of Mark Adamo’s bracing, but deeply lyrical, Aristotle, for Voice and String Quartet. That three-part song proved the highlight of baritone Thomas Hampson and the Jupiter String Quartet’s appearance at the Mondavi Center for the Arts on Wednesday evening.
Adamo’s music for Aristotle was married to Billy Collins’ vividly impressionistic poem of the same name. It’s easy to see why Adamo chose it for his musical inspiration. The 74-line poem nails the idea of how stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But make no mistake — the poem is far from a dry incantation of Aristotelian principles. Rather, it’s an intimate and vivid skein of images akin to the mise-en-scène of an experimental film, albeit one that hews to tried-and-true dramatic structure.
Two forces were at play. In the first, violinists Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, with violist (and sister) Liz Freivogel and cellist Daniel McDonough, performed string music that was, at times, brooding, yet always hypnotically powerful.
Adamo’s challenge in the song is taking Collins’ poetic imagery … and employing the right colors and textures to add an emotive spin.
And Adamo, who made his mark with the operas Little Women and Lysistrata, rose to the task of conveying Collins’ poetry.
This was accomplished with a lyrical musical clarity in Aristotle. Economy of musical line helped Hampson traverse the three-part work as it moves from beginnings (“a woman ironing on a bare stage”) to the middle (“the sticky part where the plot congeals”) and on to its third-act conclusion (“St. Clement with an anchor around his neck”).
Hampson’s dusky baritone did not overpower, nor did he ever overplay his hand in the song’s signature moments. If anything, he may have underplayed some of them.
Adept Partnering
The Jupiter Quartet proved a crucial partner in this storytelling equation — with tonal descents and subtle interludes between sections whose music was delivered with delicacy, though not a delicacy that made what they performed subservient to the vocal.
The work was a bracing affair that felt like the signature aria from an operatic work. It provokes the idea of whether such a song might be the seed of an opera — a self-reflexive one about storytelling, about beginnings, middles, and ends?
The concert, which began with a proper, but not captivating, performance of Schubert’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, saw the quartet, with Hampson, tackling six works by Hugo Wolf. Most of those songs were ones that Wolf married to the poetry of Eduard Mörike or Goethe.
Hampson gave Wolf’s still-contemporary-sounding music a sensual sheen.
In that pursuit, Hampson offered a bewitching turn on Wolf’s Im Fruhling. Here Hampson gave Wolf’s still-contemporary-sounding music a sensual sheen. He was not afraid to imbue the emotion needed to convey a young lover’s exultation or an inevitable lament.
The best outing by the Jupiter Quartet was a work not paired to voice — Webern’s Langsamer Satz, for String Quartet. Darkly sensual, this work reveals Webern wearing his heart on his sleeve before the atonal took hold. Here second violinist Meg Freivogel distinguished herself with a bold sound in music that asks her to set the tone of the middle section. Throughout the concert, the Jupiter musicians displayed a keen sense of when to be almost musically invisible (as in the Wolf leider) or when to be a force to reckon with (as in Adamo’s Aristotle.).
It’s not every day that a work for baritone and string quartet gets written or commissioned. And all commissions serve to ask the question: “to what end?”
With Aristotle, Adamo makes the argument that pairing a baritone with a string quartet is a musical forum that needs more exploration. And if that exploration happens by combining the seignorial quality of a singer like Hampson with the fresh-faced power of musicians like the Jupiter … well, then, all the better.