It was a rainy afternoon yesterday in NYC, but a good crowd still turned out at Alice Tully to hear the latest Wednesdays at One installment. This time the hour-long recital featured vocal works by five composers - Mozart, Debussy, Rossini, Ravel and Bolcom.
The program opened with mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, accompanied by Hea Youn Chung, performing Mozart's Alma grande e nobil core, K.578 (1789). This was the first of three "insertion" arias written for Louise Villeneuve, who played Dorabella in the original production of Così fan Tutte. According to Alfred Einstein:
"This was written for Cimarosa's Intermezzo I due baroni di Rocca Azzurra, and it breathes the indignation of a young lady at whom Mozart secretly pokes fun in the orchestra part - a ravishing piece."
More pointedly, Mozart biographer Hermann Abert notes:
"'Alma Grande' is a binary aria, powerful in expression, that makes only limited demands on the singer's range and vocal flexibility."
Next were "Pantomime" (text by Paul Verlaine) and "Apparition" (text by Stéphane Mallarmé) from Debussy's Quatre Chansons de Jeunesse (1882-1884) sung by soprano Jessine Johnson accompanied by Daniel Fung. These are early works by Debussy and were written for Marie Blanche Visnier, a singer with whom the young composer had become madly infatuated. The first song deals with characters from the commedia dell'arte while the second is a sentimental reminiscence of first love. Though the mood of the music in both is an accurate reflection of the symbolist poetry of the texts, it was not clear to me how deeply the composer himself was involved with this literary movement. Both songs were performed with a great deal of feeling by Johnson whom I thought the most talented of the five students appearing.
Following was Rossini's La regata veneziana from the wonderfully titled Péchés de vieillesse ("Sins of Old Age") sung by mezzo-soprano Marguerite Jones accompanied by HoJae Lee. These salon works, which provided a vivid description of a Venetian gondola race, were composed long after Rossini had retired from his opera career and were never intended for publication. The problem I had listening to these selections was that I heard them performed exquisitely only last month by Joyce DiDonato in her recital at Carnegie Hall. Di Donato had nailed the three songs so perfectly that Jones, though obviously a talented student, could only come in a distant second in her performance of the same pieces.
The next selection - Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (1932) - featured the only male singer to appear yesterday afternoon, baritone Joe Eletto accompanied by Dan K. Kurland. These three songs were the last works completed by Ravel. They had originally been commissioned by the Russian bass singer Fédor Chaliapine who was to play the Cervantes character in a 1933 film directed by G.W. Pabst. Unfortunately, Ravel was not able to complete the work on time and the music and songs actually used in the film were instead written by Jacques Ibert.
The program concluded with three of Bolcom's Cabaret Songs sung by mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms accompanied by Edward Kim. The one song "Black Max," a cabaret piece that strongly reminded me of Kurt Weill's music for The Threepenny Opera, turned out to be the highlight of the afternoon. The song's lyrics had been written by Arnold Weinstein, a writer whose affiliation with the New York School had introduced him to a number of prominent visual artists including Willem de Kooning. Bolcom later provided the following description of the work's inception:
"One day in the 1950s Arnold was visiting his friend Willem de Kooning’s studio. Bill’s brother had come to visit from Rotterdam, where they both had grown up...and they reminisced about the bohemian life in their home city in the 1930s.... The artists’ and prostitutes’ section of the city was the same quarter, with a lively street life. One of the most picaresque characters on the Rotterdam streets was 'Zwarte Max;' this is Black Max’s portrait 'as told by the de Kooning boys.'"
Bottoms not only sang well but in her slinky black dress also looked the very incarnation of a seductive chanteuse.
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