#verdiprati's live music adventures

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I never realized what an adorkable energy Ann Hallenberg has until she signed an autograph for me and she wrote the g in Hallenberg as a treble clef. 

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With apologies for the inexpert framing, here’s a curtain call photo from Carolyn Sampson’s recital with Joseph Middleton on Sunday, May 14, 2017, at Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center in New York. Photo by me.

Their performance together was vibrant and sparkling. 

Before this recital, I knew Carolyn Sampson primarily from her baroque work—I had heard her in Handel’s Theodora in Göttingen (and rated her the best thing about the concert) and in the English Concert tour of Orlando at Carnegie Hall last year. I had listened once or twice to her "Fleurs” album, which has the same repertoire as Sunday’s recital, and liked it well enough, but hearing her sing art song in live performance was a whole 'nother experience. I really like what she does; she’s got a great command of the texts combined with a lively, outgoing energy. She spoke to the audience for a couple minutes midway through the first half of the program, explaining how Joseph Middleton had proposed the floral theme and they had worked through tons of repertoire together before selecting the songs for their album and recital program. She was funny and disarming. 

Her connection with the audience was warm, although it didn’t manifest in the kind of awed stillness that I usually associate with a good performer-audience rapport; in fact, the Alice Tully audience on Sunday was oddly noisy, with about half the audience clapping between songs (instead of holding applause until the end of each song grouping as requested in the program). There were at least four (!) separate instances of cell phones ringing during the show, two of which came after the singer made a joke about a ringing phone at the end of her remarks to the audience. (It went off just as she and Joseph Middleton were about to start the next section; she waited for the ringtone to be silenced and quipped “I didn’t bring that one,” as in, I didn’t come prepared to sing that tune.) Since Lincoln Center had promoted the flower-themed recital as a Mothers’ Day treat, I can only guess that this noisiness was a symptom of a holiday audience that might not be accustomed to classical recital etiquette. I didn’t get the sense that the audience was distracted or unappreciative; on the contrary, the bursts of applause between songs seemed like spontaneous reactions to the upbeat feel of many of the songs, and occasionally when a song ended on a more hushed note, the audience would stay blessedly silent in the pause before the next song.

Having seen Joseph Middleton in recital at least four times with Sarah Connolly and now once with Carolyn Sampson, I’m growing in appreciation of his skill as an accompanist. He brings out all kinds of effects on the piano and singers seem to love working with him. 

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Sarah Connolly at curtain call after singing Das Lied von der Erde in Chicago, March 31, 2017. Photo by me. Don’t tell the camera-hating CSO. 

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Nadine Sierra (Ilia) and Alice Coote (Idamante) with members of the chorus at curtain for Idomeneo at the Metropolitan Opera, March 25, 2017. Photo by me, shot from row O, orchestra left, just to the right of one of the HD cameras.

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I have had a GRAND time traveling to see at least one opera, concert, or recital every weekend in March. The heavy weekend travel schedule combined with working full time on weekdays has made me an even slower blogger than usual but I would like to share a few more bits and pieces from my live music adventures.

One of the most fun things that happened along the way was also totally unexpected for me. After Sarah Connolly’s recital at the Park Avenue Armory on March 17, Kim (of @operarox fame, second from right in the photo above) & friends invited me & my friends to go along to a sort of late night opera open mic night—but without any mic because we’re talking about opera singers, duh—at a restaurant in New York. There was a piano at the restaurant and an accompanist who would play whatever music was put in front of him. Young singers took turns singing works from their repertoire. My non-singing friends and I sat at a table and had drinks and nachos and took it all in. What a blast!

(Also I think Kim looks cooler than cool in this photo.)

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“und leben aktuell”: notes on a lesbian Frauenliebe rewrite

Continuing, in no particular order, my delayed notes on recent concertgoing experiences . . .

On Sunday, March 19, I had the pleasure of attending an innovative dual recital called “Schumann Ghost House” that was presented in a private home by our local artist-led startup opera company, Victory Hall Opera. 

In the first half, tenor Will Ferguson sang Schumann’s Dichterliebe while a trio of mostly-silent actors portrayed a teenaged Will and his parents, playing out a day in the life of a family wherein the son came out as gay and the father didn’t take it well. In the end, the son (young Will) turned to music, specifically the music of Schumann, as a source of solace and sense of identity. This was, I think, my first experience of a staged recital and I liked it a lot; however, I have more to say about the second half of the program, mostly by virtue of the fact that I am much more familiar with Frauenliebe than with Dichterliebe. 

In the second half, mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson accompanied herself on the piano while singing a new variation on Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben. As she explained, she loved the music for this cycle and had known it her whole life, but some of the lyrics by Adelbert von Chamisso [PDF] are problematic for a modern woman (”Laß mich in Andacht, Laß mich in Demut, Laß mich verneigen dem Herren mein”—basically, “let me bow down to my husband”), and moreover, as a lesbian woman, she found the Frauenliebe depiction of nineteenth-century heterosexual courtship and marriage especially inapplicable to her own life. So, she took several poems by the contemporary lesbian poet Emily Moore and—with the blessings of the poet, who is a personal friend of Brenda’s—fitted them to the music of the Frauenliebe cycle. This new mashup was advertised under the title “und leben aktuell,” which I like for the ambiguity of the German word “aktuell” meaning both “of today, of the present time” and “real, factual.” 

I’ve listened to Frauenliebe und -leben many times now. In 2015, I heard it performed in recital by Susan Graham, Renée Fleming, Sarah Connolly, and Dorothea Röschmann all in one year, which was a pretty interesting opportunity for compare-and-contrast. And I came to Brenda Patterson’s recital having just, within the previous eight days, heard the cycle performed twice—and exquisitely—in live recital by Sarah Connolly, so I had the mold of Frauenliebe with the original Chamisso texts very strongly impressed on my mind as I listened to the Moore/Patterson rewrite. 

On the whole I liked “und leben aktuell” a lot and I thought it was a great experiment in adaptation, definitely worthy of being repeated for another audience at some future recital or festival. As the project was so personal to Brenda Patterson, I do not know whether the adapted Emily Moore lyrics would be available for licensing, but I'd love to see other singers—especially other lesbian singers—take the refitted cycle for a spin. 

As you would expect, there were many differences between the Chamisso texts and the Moore replacements. In some cases I thought the differences were an even trade, making the songs different but neither better nor worse. I felt this way about the first three songs in the cycle where Patterson and Moore chose poems evoking the tentativeness-blossoming-into-exhilaration of young love. 

In other cases I felt that something was either added or lost by the substitution of Moore’s texts. 

The fourth and fifth songs were probably my favorite examples of adding something satisfying to the Frauenliebe model. The fourth song, “Du Ring an meinem Finger,” was refitted with Moore’s “Coney Island Epithalamium,” in which a couple rides the Wonder Wheel, a large Ferris wheel, while holding hands and “squeezing the band / You gave me as our car rose to full height.” The slow rhythms of Schumann’s setting were pleasingly apt for suggesting the slow up and down swooping of a Ferris wheel car. In the fifth song, Chamisso’s “Helft mir, ihr Schwestern” was substituted with Moore’s “Auld Lang Syne,” in which a toast is raised to the happy couple’s former lovers and crushes (e.g. “To the jeune fille who broke my heart in France, / the tramp who warmed your lap and licked your ear,” etc.). I thought this was a brilliant re-imagining of “Helft mir, ihr Schwestern,” in which the speaker calls upon her circle of female friends to help her prepare for her wedding; she mentions her mixed feelings of excitement and pre-wedding jitters, joy and sadness to be leaving the company of her “sisters” for marriage. “Auld Lang Syne” makes a beautiful point about how the people in our past have—through better and worse—gotten us to where we are today, and it deftly shifts the homosocial "Schwestern" of Chamisso's poem to a motley lesbian "sisterhood."

In other places I felt that the new texts did not correlate with the emotional tones of the music, and that felt like a loss to me. For one example, in the sixth song of Schumann’s cycle, “Süsser Freund, du blickest,” there is a moment of acute emotional stress on the word Wiege, meaning “cradle.” The speaker has taken a couple verses to work herself up to delivering the most momentous news of her life: this is the song in which she tells her husband that she is pregnant. The message only becomes clear and unambiguous when she says in tender awe, barely able to get the words out, that soon there will be a cradle at her bedside. There is no correlate climactic moment in the warm and fuzzy excerpt of Moore’s “Twenty Weeks” substituted for “Süsser Freund.” Similarly, I felt that something was missing from the last song in the cycle. Schumann’s setting for Chamisso’s poem “Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan” starts like a hammer blow on “Nun” (”Now,” signaling a sudden shift in the speaker’s relationship with her beloved) and can be sung to convey great anger and pain. The fragment of Moore’s “To M.C., To Read in the Rockies” chosen for “und leben aktuell,” however, evokes the speaker’s absence from the addressee in vague and indirect terms; the tone is wistful, never angry. As a song heard in isolation it may be fine, but in the setting of a rewritten Frauenliebe, I missed the sharp outburst at the end of the cycle.

Then again—as an astute friend pointed out—perhaps I should view this rewrite as a subversion of the dead lesbians trope.

That would be another welcome subversion on top of the one that made me laugh as soon as I opened the program: the baby-bouncing song “An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust” is substituted by a poem titled “I Don’t Want to Hold Your Baby.” Well played, Victory Hall. 

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Notes on Sarah Connolly’s recital at Spivey Hall

I am in the middle of a music marathon month, traveling every weekend in March to hear live music. Between the travel, travel preparations, travel recovery (read: laundry), general domestic upkeep, and working full time on the weekdays, I have not had much time to sit and write down my reflections on the music I’ve heard. I managed to write some personal notes on Dead Man Walking only because I sacrificed half a night of sleep, writing between midnight and 3:00 a.m. after getting back from Washington.

Anyway, here is my first attempt to catch up and write down some thoughts on my music adventures before they fade completely.

I am so glad I went to Sarah Connolly’s recital with Joseph Middleton at Spivey Hall in Morrow, Georgia on March 11 of this year. (I put a curtain call pic here and another on Twitter if you want to go find it—I won’t link to my real-name Twitter account from Tumblr.) Sarah is always magnificent in recital but I personally would rate this as my favorite recital—by any artists—that I’ve ever yet attended. 

I think it was my favorite partly because of the frame of mind I was in. Before the recital, my husband and I went to a pre-concert talk on Copland’s Emily Dickinson songs by Clayton State music professor Kurt-Alexander Zeller. It was the perfect pre-concert talk for an art song recital: nothing terribly abstruse nor musicologically groundbreaking, but very informative for a general audience and attentive to the relationship between words and music. Prof. Zeller spoke about Copland’s biography and Dickinson’s, then nicely explicated a couple of the songs. I particularly remember him illustrating on the piano how, in “Nature, the gentlest mother,” the piano part represents the sounds and activities of the natural world while the voice acts more like the restraining maternal hand. 

Even though the talk focused on the Emily Dickinson songs, I think it really primed my brain for picking up on the relationship between music and poetry throughout the different repertoire choices of the whole recital. I could almost picture little flashes of light inside my head, like the glowing spots on a brain scan, as I had tiny little “aha” moments one after another.

It was also probably my favorite ever recital for emotional impact and connection with the singer. Sarah Connolly is always wonderful at engaging with her audience: “She WILL look you in the eye,” I told some friends ahead of Sarah’s recital at Park Avenue Armory. But since the Spivey Hall recital was (regrettably, due to Clayton State’s spring break and a competing choral event) rather sparsely attended, and since I was sitting in the center of Row E on a raked floor with an empty seat in front of me, I got even more eye contact than usual from Sarah. I actually had trouble keeping my eyes on her during the long piano coda for "Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan" because she was looking right at me for the first part of it and silently telegraphing pain so intensely that it was hard to be on the receiving end of it. After a couple of quick glances away, though, I locked my eyes on hers and mentally opened myself up as an empathetic receiver of the emotion for several seconds (that felt very long) until she shifted her gaze. I felt the sadness so much that when the piano music ended and it came time to applaud, I had trouble bringing my face back from what I am sure must have been a very grim look, even though Sarah herself had broken the “Frauenliebe” character and was smiling for her bows.

Now THAT is something you don't get from listening to an album or even a live radio broadcast. I feel so lucky to have the means to attend great recitals from time to time. 

A few other memories that stand out from the Spivey Hall recital:

I think my response to Frauenliebe und -leben was uniquely shaped this time by the fact that I have had my wedding since the last time I heard Frauenliebe in recital. As Sarah sang "Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, Freundlich mich schmücken" I could not help but think of how, for the dancing at my wedding reception, I changed out of my long-trained wedding gown and into a more danceable dress that had been given to me by a good friend. Even though I didn’t have a gaggle of Schwestern beautifying me for my wedding, I had that freundlich gift, and I loved it. 

In the Dickinson songs, I especially remember my brain lighting up for “The Chariot.” I had heard Sarah Connolly sing the same selection of Dickinson songs at Alice Tully Hall two years ago, and “The Chariot” was a revelation to me then, but I still got an exciting new take on it this time around. 

For whatever reason, different aspects of the music came to my attention this time. I noticed the slow-ambling clip-clop rhythm in the piano part as played by Joseph Middleton, and that made me suddenly get a new view of the poem as a nineteenth-century courting ritual. The clip-clop reminded me of certain passages in a historic personal diary that I worked on a few years ago. The diary recorded (among many other episodes) the story of the writer’s courtship with his future wife in a small southern U.S. city in the 1880s. He had hardly any money and was struggling to establish a law career; his beloved, the “belle of the town,” was the daughter of a wealthy man who was less than enthusiastic about his daughter’s romance with the impecunious upstart lawyer. To evade the glowering patriarch’s scrutiny, the diarist used to hire an inexpensive horse-drawn cart for the afternoon and pick up his “belle” for long drives. It was on one such drive that he made a momentous confession of his love to her and she accepted it in return, effectively changing the course of their lives towards marriage. It was a scene of such great importance in the diary that he referred back to it decades later. Well, for some reason, even though I had studied Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death” (a.k.a. “The Chariot”) in some depth in college, it had never occurred to me to imagine the poem’s situation as a courtship scene, but suddenly while listening to Copland’s musical setting of Dickinson’s drive with death, it linked up in my mind with this diarist’s courting drives, giving me a new understanding of the poem. 

Copland’s setting of “The Chariot” ends with a very long-held note for the singer. I wrote about this note in my Alice Tully recital impressions, but it wasn’t until I heard it at Spivey Hall, where Sarah Connolly sustained it for an impossible-seeming two or three seconds beyond the silencing of the piano, that I suddenly clued in to the way the final syllable in eternity is held for a seeming eternity. Duh. It seems like a really basic and obvious point about the construction of the song, but I had previously noticed the general mood of the note in Sarah’s singing of it, not its relationship to the text. One can always learn something new!

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So busy with live music adventures, no time to update the Tumblr. Last night: Dido and Aeneas with the Mark Morris Dance Group (with Stephanie Blythe, Sherezade Panthaki, and Yulia van Doren among those singing from the pit). Tonight: Sarah Connolly in recital at Park Avenue Armory (YAAAAYYYY!!!). Sunday: a lesbian re-write of Frauenliebe und -leben. I hope to find time to report back . . .

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Sandrine Piau (right) and Susan Manoff at curtain call for their recital in Washington, DC on Tuesday, February 21. Photo by yours truly.