United States Various: Daniel McGrew (tenor), Sophia Zhou (piano). Young Concert Artists, Merkin Hall, New York, 8.12.2022. (RP)
Brahms – ‘Sagt mir, o schönste Schäf’rin mein’; ‘Es steht ein’ Lind’; ‘Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein’; ‘In stiller Nacht’; ‘Die Sonne scheint nicht mehr’ (from Deutsche Volkslieder WoO 33)
Nina Shekhar – ‘Pieces of You’ (World Premiere)
Debussy – Trois Mélodies sur des poèmes de Paul Verlaine
Christopher Berg – ‘Autobiographia Literaria’; ‘St. Paul and All That’; ‘Song (is it dirty?)’; ‘Steps’ (from Songs on Poems of Frank O’Hara)
Britten – The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Op.35
Harold Arlen – ‘Buds Won’t Bud’; ‘It’s a New World’
Tenor Daniel McGrew can sing a music. Any music, it appears. It is as simple to think about him in a nightclub or on a Broadway stage as singing an artwork music in recital. The winner of the 2021 Young Concert Artists International auditions touched these bases and extra in his excellent New York recital debut at Merkin Hall.
The live performance opened with 5 alternatives from Brahms’s assortment of Deutsche Volkslieder. Songs akin to ‘Sagt mir, o schönste Schäf’rin mein’ or ‘Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein’ afforded McGrew the chance to show his narrative abilities in Brahms’s lyrical settings of bittersweet exchanges between lovers. McGrew’s sense of line, his capability to create a temper and the sheer great thing about his voice made ‘In stiller Nacht’ magical.
’Pieces of You’, an astounding new work by Nina Shekhar, YCA’s 2021-2023 Composer-in-Residence, adopted. More a dramatic scena for voice and piano than a music, ‘Pieces of You’ was a collaboration between composer and singer by which Shekhar set phrases, or in her phrases ‘redeemed’ them, written by the adolescent McGrew.
The fragments of textual content are little greater than stream-of-consciousness rantings which seem to chart the arc of an actual or imagined relationship. Shekhar, nonetheless, reworked them right into a descent into neurotic obsession. The piano amplifies the emotional influence by including one other dimension to the psychological anguish by rhythm and sound.
McGrew’s visage was that of a determined man combatting the interior demons that beset him. He was at his most unnerving when repeating the identical phrases over and over, as if unable to dislodge them from his thoughts. There had been passages within the work that demanded lyricism and great thing about tone, nevertheless it was McGrew’s capability to channel the interior desperation that Shekhar present in his phrases that made ‘Pieces of You’ an awesome expertise.
With Debussy’s Trois Mélodies sur des poèmes de Paul Verlaine, McGrew transported the viewers right into a world the place sensuality reigned. These are songs by which the sounds of phrases are as essential in expressing a sense or temper as are their meanings. McGrew’s sensibilities on this regard had been equaled by Zhou’s capability to seize Debussy’s depictions of environment and place in her taking part in.
The first half of the recital ended with 4 of Christopher Berg’s settings of poems by Frank O’Hara. Berg is a grasp of mixing narration with a tuneful melody to seize the dry humor in O’Hara’s phrases. These are enjoyable but refined songs which can be typically tinged with melancholy, none extra so than ‘Steps’, by which McGrew conjured up glamour and the mundane with equal elements sincerity and panache.
Britten composed The Holy Sonnets of John Donne after performing in a live performance with Yehudi Menuhin for displaced individuals at Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi focus camp, simply months after World War II led to Europe. In his settings of Donne’s somber and pious spiritual texts, Britten was undoubtedly reacting to the expertise of witnessing the aftermath of Nazi atrocities firsthand.
McGrew’s acute consciousness of textural particulars was evident in every of the songs. There had been situations of pure magnificence, akin to McGrew’s plaintive singing in ‘Oh might those sighes and teares return againe’. He is a singer, nonetheless, who could make melody when there’s none, akin to in ‘Since she whom I lov’d hath pay’d her final debt’. The closing sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’ ended with a defiant, impassioned cry sung at full voice.
McGrew turned to lighter however no much less refined fare to finish the recital, with two songs by Harold Arlen who’s finest often called the composer of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. The tenor was a annoyed lover belting out a torch music in ‘Buds Won’t Bud’, while lavishing all the great thing about tone and pleasure that he may muster in ‘It’s a New World’.
Zhou was a superlative accomplice to McGrew in his foray into musical kinds as numerous as one can think about. Shekhar’s ‘Pieces of You’ was all of the extra impactful for the virtuosity with which she executed the calls for the composer positioned upon the pianist. In Debussy’s ‘Le son du cor s’afflige vers les bois’, she captured the languid temper of an autumnal forest. With her fashionable taking part in within the Berg and Arlen songs, Zhou proved that she was each bit the showman as McGrew.
In a recital that was markable for its juxtaposition of musical kinds, McGrew once more made an entire U-turn together with his solely encore, ‘Danksagung an den Bach’ from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. It was an expression of all that had come earlier than, nevertheless it additionally harkened again to the final line of Berg’s ‘Autobiographia Literaria’. McGrew reveled at being on the middle of all this magnificence.
Rick Perdian