The second Schwabacher Recital of the season, & the only one featuring only one vocalist, took place earlier this month (I am, as usual, perpetually behind on posting) at the First Unitarian Universalist Society, an unusual setting (I have only been there once before, years ago, for a Meredith Monk concert) but an attractive one. Pianist Tzu Kuang Tan accompanied baritone Gabriel Natal-Báez in Paths of the Heart, a thoughtful & poetic program taking as its theme journeys outward & inward.
The first set opened with six songs from Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, settings of lyrics by Robert Louis Stevenson; we heard The Vagabond, Let Beauty Awake, The Roadside Fire, Youth and Love, Whither Must I Wander?, & Bright Is the Ring of Words. The titles tip you off to the mood: you have a sense of youthful springtime wanderlust, carefree adventuring in the face of the looming drudgery of adulthood, with the mood darkening towards the end into uncertainty & even, in the bittersweet final song, the suggested loss of life & life.
The second set was four Schubert lieder: Prometheus, Geistes-Gruß (Ghost Greetings), Wandrers Nachtlied II (with texts by Goethe), & Der Atlas (text by Heine): a different sort of wandering, more heroic in scale, featuring demi-gods & legendary knights, but also, in the Wandrers Nachtlied, what might be an old, or simply very weary, searcher, calmly awaiting the peace of night to fall on his restless life. These journeys were more in psychological & philosophical realms. It was clear from the start, & became even clearer as the tone & mood deepened & the theme shifted, that we were in very good hands with these performers. Natal-Báez has a rich, smooth voice, which might be enough, but he also uses it with thoughtful care & great expressivity. Tan was a strongly lyrical accompanist. Fortunately the audience was attuned enough to hold applause until each set finished, as requested in the program, so they were able to conjure their vistas without interruptions.
The second half of the program brought us to Spain & the Hispanic world, initially through the French lens of Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée; we were given all three numbers in the cycle (Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire, with texts by Paul Morand inspired by Cervantes's classic novel). The three songs are very loosely related, to each other & to the source material, but the idealistic / crazy figure of the knight errant encapsulates many of the themes of the program: wandering, both physically & psychologically & spiritually; the estrangement that comes from always moving on, as well as the desire to connect that keeps leading one on; a sense of adventuring among the elusive & fragile beauty of the world.
The final set was in Spanish, & included the sense of traveling back nostalgically to one's own past (Natal-Báez is from Puerto Rico). beginning with two songs by Miguel Ortega to poems by Federico Garcia Lorca – Romance de la Luna, Luna & Preciosa y el aire – followed by individual songs by Luis Antonio Ramírez (Lucero del alba / Morning song, with text by Luis Lloréns Torres), Manuel Ponce (Estrellita / Little Star, with text by the composer), Astor Piazzolla (Los pájaros perdidos / The Lost Birds, with text by Mario Trejo), & Alfonso Esparza Oteo (¡Dime que sí! / Say yes!, with text by Alfonso Espiriu). The two Lorca songs, beautifully fraught encounters of children with death & sex, hide their sophistication under charming, almost folk-tale-type, language. The four final songs seemed more like the journey through life, taking up birds, stars, love lost & gained, familiar inhabitants of Lieder-land & none the worse for that, of course.
This was an outstanding recital: the music was chosen with care & intelligence & well presented(Natal-Báez wrote the thoughtful program notes, as well as the translations of the Spanish lyrics) & Tan & Natal-Báez both operated on a consistently high level of artistry. There was one encore, To Dream the Impossible Dream from Man of la Mancha, which neatly tied up several themes of the program: Don Quixote, of course, & questing through life; Tan & Natal-Báez let it soar like the Broadway anthem it is, sending us out into our own starry nights.
Taking their bows: Tan on the left, Natal-Báez on the right
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