Schwabacher Recital Series #3: Invitations

The third & final recital of this season's Schwabacher series took place last Tuesday, & it was all mostly marvelous (except for the venue, the Conservatory of Music's Barbro Osher Hall, which I will complain about below). The featured players were bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, currently slaying across the street as Orest in Richard Strauss's Elektra, & pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson (who is also Artistic Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, co-presenters with the Merola program of this recital series). Ketelsen  & Matheson were joined by several participants in this year's Merola program. Before the music started, Matheson gave us the key to the eclectic program: invitations, a theme malleable & capacious enough to provide a program of surprises & satisfactions. Surtitles were used for the songs as well as the opera excerpts, & I wish every recital did this.

The first piece was Là ci darem la mano, from Don Giovanni; as the recital took place on Bloomsday, this was a lovely but perhaps inadvertent homage to the day, as that duet is one of the musical notes ripping through Leopold Bloom's day in Dublin. Ketelsen was joined by soprano Shannon Crowley & they were accompanied by pianist Deven Shah. (stage director Claire Choquette supplied minimalist but effective movements for the dramatic pieces). Ketelsen as Giovanni (& later as Scarpia) is sexy & seductive; the commanding but nuanced authority of his voice is familiar but what struck me, seeing him at relatively close range, is how good an actor he is: convincing, insightful, nothing overdone; he could hold the stage even without his distinguished singing. Crowley was charmingly conflicted as Zerlina, & the next two numbers, L'invito by Rossini & Stornello by Verdi, for which she was accompanied by Matheson, confirmed her strength in the pert/perky/winsome repertoire; I'm sure there are sassy servant girls & clever peasant sweethearts in her future.

The next set had Matheson accompanying tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson in three Duparc songs: L'invitation au voyage, Chanson Triste, & Phidylé. He took these dreamy songs from a convincing ardent angle, which worked very well; there was a lot of youthful yearning there in songs that don't always sound as youthful as they should. There were lots of passionate, big voices on this program. After the Duparc, Ketelsen & Shah returned to the stage for Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, a loose cycle of three songs: Chanson Romanesque, Chanson épique, & Chanson à boire. In the latter Ketelsen gave clear but subtle, insofar as a drunk can be subtle, indications of the singer's inebriation; it was another demonstration of his skill in inhabiting the persona of a song, something also revealed by the switches in mood among these three very different pieces. Shah is a strong accompanist.

Two sets, both accompanied by Matheson, closed out the first half: a trio of Italian songs (Sognai by Schira, Il poveretto by Verdi, & Nebbie by Respighi) sung by tenor Chester Seungyup Han & a trio of Korean songs (San A / O Mountain by Dong Soo Shin, Ma Joong / Welcome by Hak Joon Yoon), & Mot I Jeo / Unable to forget by Hye-Young Cho) sung by baritone Paul Jang: powerhouse passions to send us into intermission. Han's rendition of Il poveretto was for me the highlight of his set, a song about an old soldier begging for any small coin so he could buy some sort of meal that turned out to be surprisingly touching. It made me think of beggars I had passed that day, particularly one lying on the sidewalk moaning that he couldn't even buy a cup of coffee. The three Italian songs were not ones I had heard before, but the Korean songs seemed a greater rarity & were a real treat; recitals so seldom step off the German-French-Italian-OK-maybe-some-English song path. Musically they sounded to my ears like American folk songs. The song to the mountain was particularly moving. Both Han & Jang really let it rip in their sets.

The entire second half was an excerpt from Tosca, with Ketelsen as Scarpia, soprano Charlotte Kelso as Tosca, Chester Seungyup Han as Cavaradossi, Paul Jang as Sciarrone, & Ryan Bryce Johnson as Spoletta, with Carrie-Ann Matheson as a fluid & evocative accompanist. Matheson started off by giving us a plot summary of what was happening. I'm not sure this crowd needed such a summary, but Matheson knows her audience better than I do.

(left to right: soprano Charlotte Kelso, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson)

Even without a full orchestra, & even in excerpt, Tosca is a musically & dramatically powerful opera. It's one I have mixed feelings about, though: the only interesting (& even, in a weird way, sympathetic) character, as far as I'm concerned, is Scarpia, the reactionary head of the secret police: not the choice the opera or my heart would really want a listener to make. Cavaradossi is passionate & romantic & mostly a cipher. As for Floria Tosca, let's look at her behavior just in this Act 2 excerpt: Cavaradossi is the one tied up & tortured, with blood running down his face, but she insists she's the one who is being tortured & she is just too sensitive to take it. That's why, against Cavaradossi's wishes, she betrays his compatriot (& also, by association, him). Her lover can keep quiet under torture but she, under the mere thought of torture, breaks his confidence & betrays his trust. Then, during her big aria, she insists that she has never harmed a single person – really? I just heard you sell out Angelotti – & she doesn't deserve any of this anyway because she has brought flowers & jewels to adorn the church. (Do I need Latin Catholic trigger warnings?) Yet, despite her efforts to bribe the Creator with His own creations, bad things have happened to her (of course to her; forget Angelotti & even Cavaradossi). There are just too many bitch, please! moments with her.

That aside: the opera is, as I said, musically & dramatically effective, & the excerpt was gripping. Ketelsen is a superb Scarpia. Again, he doesn't overdo it, but he makes very clear the sadism, the sexual tingle, underlying the police chief's machinations. He doesn't indulge in snarling & bellowing (genuinely powerful people don't need to bellow); he even amuses himself with his sadism. Kelso was compelling & even touching (at least, as touching as I will find this character) as Tosca. with lovely rich tones for Vissi d'arte. Han really belted out his Vittoria! Vitorria! triumphantly, which is pretty much Cavaradossi's business in this act. The smaller parts were well taken; Jang portrayed amusing confusion on Sciarrone's part at the start again / stop again orders of the seemingly capricious Scarpia (the torturer, being in the other room torturing, of course doesn't hear the conversation with Tosca). It was quite a show, received very enthusiastically by the full house. Ketelsen & Matheson followed it with an encore, Cole Porter's very funny Tale of an Oyster, made even more hilarious by Ketelsen's commanding tones & authoritative stage presence. He also nicely delineated the oyster's different emotions at each stage of its journey, from Oyster Bay to high-society meal to being upchucked back into the Bay, sadder but wiser for his social-climbing adventure.

(left to right: tenor Chester Seungyup Han, pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, soprano Charlotte Kelso, tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson, & baritone Paul Jang)

Now I will complain about the venue. I have been to the Conservatory's Barbro Osher Hall several times. First something good: once you're up there, in a glass-encased room on the 11th floor of the Conservatory's new building, there are attractive views down Van Ness Avenue & across the street to Davies Hall & the Opera House, & it's very pretty at night, with all the lights of the city sparkling below you. When you see the room from the street, it glows like a jewel.

But: the room (it's not really a "hall") is described as "intimate", but I'd describe it as "small", which is not the same thing. The chairs, the cheap plastic kind that can be stacked up easily & moved out of the way, are not very comfortable. But the real problem is getting to & from the room. I've been to several concerts there & only once were people allowed up to wait when they arrived. Every other time, we have to collect in the lower lobby of the building, where there are not nearly enough seats, so concert-goers, who are often elderly, cranky people (& I include myself in that) have to stand, often for long periods, before we can get upstairs, where we have to stand waiting again. There is usually some sort of rough line that forms, with the policing that that involves (on Tuesday there was a man keenly invested in letting everyone know he was first in line; I had arrived at least 10 minutes before he did, but didn't bother disputing precedence with him, as I had taken one of the few seats available & preferred that to standing the whole time). And that line he was so intent on? It's just to get on the elevator! The audience has to be led up, one carload at a time, to the 11th floor. Once there, as I said, a line has to form again before we can get into the actual room (which, again, I'm not going to call a hall). There is lots of anxiety & fraying tempers, as seats are not reserved & so where you are when the doors open affects where you sit during the concert. And I am far from the only person who cares a lot about where he or she sits.

And then, after the concert, you have to do the same thing in reverse: line up by the elevators to be taken down one carload at a time. And if you need to use the restrooms before descending, because of course you do, you have to get through the crowd jammed up by the elevators, most of whom stand there staring like angry lumps even after you explain that you're not trying to cut ahead of them, you're trying to get past them to the restrooms. I don't really understand why a recital like this, which could have drawn a larger crowd, wasn't in a larger venue. Even if the size of the room weren't a problem, the logistics definitely are. Not sure what the Conservatory was thinking when they came up with this arrangement. But when I see the Osher Recital Hall as a venue, I definitely think twice about attending.

Schwabacher Recital Series #2: Paths of the Heart

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

Schwabacher Recital Series #1: Italienisches Liederbuch

Yesterday at the Taube Atrium Theater, the Merola Opera Program & the San Francisco Opera Center presented the first of this season's three Schwabacher Recitals; this one, curated by Nicholas Phan, featured pianist Ji Youn Lee, soprano Mary Hoskins, & baritone Olivier Zerouali. The program had not been announced in advance, so the first pleasure was finding out that we would be hearing Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch, a collection of 46 mostly brief lieder to words by Paul Heyse "based on anonymous Italian poetry", which I've heard on recordings but which I've rarely (maybe never? unless it was decades ago, in another time & place?) encountered live. The second pleasure was how successful, how thoughtful, charming & moving, & inspiriting, the concert was.

I'm guessing that the "curating" part of Phan's role was not only in picking the repertory but also in directing the performers; the songs are not explicitly about an on-going story, but instead about many stories flitting in & out of possibility, & the two singers listened to each other attentively, with subtlety & care, to the apt, often dramatic or witty, accompaniment of Lee's playing. Her Steinway was to the center left (audience left) of the stage; to its right were two black chairs on either side of a small round café-like table with a black tablecloth, topped with two glasses of water (Zerouali drank more of his than Hoskins did of hers) & a few candles. Lee wore a stylish black ensemble; Zerouali wore a black tuxedo with an open-necked shirt, & Hoskins wore a velvety forest-green gown (one of her songs mentions wearing green, a possible inspiration). The large back wall featured a series of close-ups of paintings, some famous (Botticelli, Munch) & some not so much, a different art work for each song, printed in soft blacks & greys against a purple background, the art work reflecting & commenting on the content of the songs & the lovely shade of purple evoking the musical period in which Wolf worked; the effect was subtle & evocative. The words of the songs were displayed in large clear white type against the dark background of the art works.

I think I have only once before been to a recital which used surtitles, which have now become obligatory in opera houses. I am all in favor of using them in recitals, though I understand there are various difficulties, including cost, that prevent surtitles from becoming standard for recitals. It's worth the trouble, from an audience member's point of view, if only for sparing us the constant rustling & riffling & folding of programs with the words in them. (I'm always amazed by the number of habitual recital-goers who seem unable to figure out how the songs are arranged on the word-sheets, leading to endless flipping & scanning & searching, generally during the music). I was also grateful that in his brief opening remarks, Phan politely but clearly asked us not to applaud until the very end. I don't consider it the end of what passes for civilization if applause arrives at the "wrong" moment, but it is obtrusive, often feels merely de rigueur, & would be especially disruptive when the songs are all relatively brief (our 46 were covered in roughly an hour & 15 minutes).

The soprano is sometimes flirtatious, sometimes annoyed at her straying lover; the baritone is seductive, sometimes puzzled; both are sometimes angry, sometimes sweet. The later songs sometimes reference Paradise, in presence or in absence, a singular marker in Catholic Italy. Unlike lieder that expose the intimate feelings of a single heart, these songs are usually addressed outwards, to another (perhaps this is part of their extroverted "Italian" nature, in the eyes of an Austrian like Wolf), though there is not a clear dramatic arc or storyline in this cycle, but rather a variety of moods & situations; potent little dramas are implied, then slip away. The interplay between Hoskins & Zerouali reflected the on-going variety of the songs; nothing was overdone, nothing detracted from whichever was singing at the time, but both were at all times really present & responsive to the other. Both singers have appealing voices, Zerouali vigorous & forceful, Hoskins with a powerful but pure tone. Their attention to the words & their meanings was heightened by the audience's ability to follow along easily with the surtitles.

I do find the Taube Atrium Theater an odd space, with some acoustic peculiarities. There were only a couple of brief moments when the singers seemed to let the big size of their voices escape the reality of the room a bit. These were very tiny flaws in a collection of jewels. All concert-goers know the peculiarities of the interactions between the day they're having & the performance: does one lift or bring down the other, pull one somewhere else or seem like more of the same: each performance will be different for each audience member. So I'll just say I was having a fairly strange & not all that good day, & this concert was a welcome & delightful respite.