After my three days at Gabriel Kahane's Pivot Festival for San Francisco Performances, I was back at Herbst Theater for the fourth night in a row, this time for SFP's presentation of the San Francisco recital debut of mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, accompanied by pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers.
The recital's general theme was In Honor of Women, & the first half had a woman composer setting a male poet (Amy Beach / Robert Browning) & then a male composer setting a female poet (Wagner / Mathilde Wesendonck). Beach's trio of Browning poems was commissioned by the Browning Society of Boston. They are brief but wonderfully varied; from the very first one, The Year's at the Spring, it was immediately apparent that Bryce-Davis uses words very expressively. She was looking very glam in an ivory sheath covered with light-catching strings of beads, some of which hung loose from the arms. The effect was warm, rich, & striking, sort of like her voice made visible. She had Cilliers speak an introduction to the Wesendonck Lieder, as she was one of those who had been urging the piece on Bryce-Davis. The performance was commanding & intimate. The piano accompaniment was poetic but I felt at times perhaps a bit underpowered, but then the mezzo's voice is an attention-grabber. As the man behind me said more than once, "She's got some pipes on her."
After the intermission, Bryce-Davis came out in a new but still glam look, a sparkly black sheath with broad white stripes running diagonally down the front. Cilliers also had a new outfit, which fit around her like a gilded lily. Both were designed by Bryce-Davis's fiancé, whose name I unfortunately did not catch. [UPDATE: His name is Allen Virgo, & thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the information; click here for her blog entry with a link to her review of the recital.]
The second half was all twentieth-century material, most of it contemporary, though it started with two earlier pieces, Birth, a setting by Margaret Bonds of words by her friend Langston Hughes, & Florence Price's The Crescent Moon, a setting of words by Louise C. Wallace. The on-going rediscovery of Price's work is one of the more exciting concert-hall developments of the past few years. These songs were followed by Melissa Dunphy's Come, My Tan-Faced Children, which revises a section of Whitman's Pioneers, O Pioneers! as a song of Black empowerment. This was written for Bryce-Davis, as was the next series, three songs by Maria Thompson Corley: Black Riders' Freedom Song (written as a tribute in particular to the Black cowboys of the American West), The Beauty in My Blackness, & I Am Not an Angry Black Woman. The latter in particular was a whole dramatic monologue, allowing Bryce-Davis to display, once again, her considerable dramatic skills, covering moods from speculative to wistful to defiant.
By now it was clear how gorgeous & big Bryce-Davis's voice is, but also how emotionally open & engaged her whole personality is. I had seen her in the Met Opera livecast last fall of Anthony Davis's X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X, & I am eager to experience her live in opera. The recital closed with three elegant & lively settings of Jamaican folk songs made by Peter Ashbourne, in tribute to the mezzo's Jamaican mother. As she & Cilliers both said, you can't sing in honor of women & not acknowledge your mothers.
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