United States SongStudio 2023: Renée Fleming (host and inventive director), Hartmut Höll (piano), Golda Schultz (soprano), Jamie Barton (mezzo-soprano). Carnegie Hall, New York, 30.1-4.2.2023. (RP)
Performers:
Eirin Rognerud (soprano) / Malte Schäfer (piano)
Julie Roset (soprano) / Liza Armistead (piano)
Charlotte Wajnberg (soprano) / Aaron Wajnberg (piano)
Maire Therese Carmack (mezzo-soprano) / Pei-Hsuan Lin (piano)
Shannon Keegan (mezzo-soprano) / Yun-Ho Chen (piano)
Zhuohan Sun (tenor) / Yuriko Watanabe (piano)
Travon Walker (tenor) / Hikaru Kanki (piano)
Yuriy Hadzetskyy (baritone) / You Zhao (piano)
Joël Terrin (baritone) / Cole Knutson (piano)
Vinícius Costa (bass-baritone) / Hikaru Kanki (piano)
Renée Fleming has usually referred to SongStudio as a bootcamp for singers. Given the exceptionally prime quality of the ten pairs of rising singers and collaborative pianists who participated on this 12 months’s program, a extra apt time period could be ending faculty.
The younger artists got here from 12 international locations and most are multi-lingual. (One, based on Fleming, speaks seven languages.) What they share, aside from extraordinary musical skills, is a ardour for tune.
Most of the exhausting work is finished in non-public periods, however there are additionally public grasp lessons. Pianist Hartmut Höll and Fleming have been current as up to now; this 12 months, soprano Golda Schultz and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton have been readily available as nicely. For the contributors, it’s a likelihood to get beneficial publicity and suggestions from a few of world’s biggest exponents of tune. Auditors, nonetheless, are equally rewarded.
It could also be only a tune, as Schultz stated, however the aim is to inform a narrative. More importantly, it’s important to love doing it. A gorgeous voice is simply floor zero for a singer, Schultz defined, as it’s merely the car to precise how the phrases and music makes you’re feeling. The artist’s job is to make an viewers expertise these feelings too.
After listening to a tune carried out in its entirety, Schultz typically posed the query, ‘How can I help you?’. For soprano Charlotte Wajnberg, who was accompanied by her husband. Aaron Wajnberg, that meant delving into the Romani loss of life rituals that haunted Joseph Jongen’s ‘Chanson romaine’. It is a subject that Schultz, who’s a voracious reader, surprisingly knew fairly a bit about.
With Zhuohan Sun, Schultz discovered communication simpler by conversing with him in German. When she stated one thing that clicked, you can see the lightbulb activate in his head. His first run by way of Robert Schumann’s ‘Abends am Strand’ revealed zeal and a formidable instrument, however their work collectively yielded a efficiency that conveyed the tune’s tales of shipwreck and far-off lands extra vividly. When completed, Schultz congratulated him with ‘Thank you for teaching us how to sing’.
Zhuohan Sun supplied one other spotlight of the week singing Frank Bridge’s ‘Love went a-riding’. Yuriko Watanabe created a windstorm of sound that the tenor street with as a lot brio as did Love astride Pegasus hovering skyward of whom he sang.
This was a homecoming of types for Barton, as her first efficiency in New York City was in 2011 when she was a participant in Marilyn Horne’s The Song Continues, the predecessor to SongStudio. She reiterated what Schultz had stated earlier – performing a tune is all about telling a narrative – and added that singers paint with the voice, simply as an artist does with coloration on canvas.
For soprano Julie Roset, that meant not solely with phrases but additionally pure sound in Eva Dell’Acqua’s ‘Villanelle’. Her coloratura and vocalizes have been as charming as they have been expressive. Roset coached Rachmaninoff’s ‘Ne poj, krasavica, pri men’ with Fleming and sang it within the ultimate recital, however the lightness and great thing about her voice in ‘Villanelle’ was actually particular.
It is not possible to place Barton in a field, however she did present a particular affinity for her Fach in working with mezzo-sopranos Shannon Keegan and Maire Therese Carmack. In Herbert Howell’s ‘King David’, Keegan sang of the person’s profound despair heightened by the singing of a nightingale. Barton urged Keegan to equally alleviate the sorrow of others by changing into that fowl. ‘King David’, nonetheless, was one of many freeze-frame moments of your complete week.
Sumptuous hardly begins to explain Carmack’s dusky, lush voice. She sang Richard Strauss’s ‘Befreit’ and Jake Heggie’s ‘Animal Passion’ within the recital. The former throbbed with emotion and displayed her cavernous decrease vary, whereas the latter was pure enjoyable. Undine Smith Moore’s ‘Love Let the Wind Cry’, which she labored on with Barton, was an outpouring of exaltation which satisfied everybody that this singer was in love with love.
Fleming first heard Hartmut Höll carry out with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau when she was a pupil at The Juilliard School. They have carried out collectively in recitals in Europe, Australia, Asia and the United States, and recorded collectively as nicely. His holistic strategy to tune efficiency is revelatory, in addition to his means to convey emotion by way of his taking part in. Even extra spectacular, maybe, is his capability to precise his ideas so eloquently in phrases.
Time mattered much less to Höll than to the others when perfection was the aim. With an viewers that held on his phrases and the notes he performed, there have been no objections. The chief beneficiaries of his consideration to element have been Charlotte and Aaron Wajnberg performing Berg’s ‘Nacht’ from Sieben frühe Lieder. No element escaped his consideration in his quest to remodel a wonderfully tremendous efficiency of the tune into one thing transcendent.
Baritone Yuriy Hadzetskyy, nonetheless, gave Fleming the opening for the very best line of the week. She recommended that he attempt to make his voice much less lovely in Barber’s ‘Night Wanderers’ to help in telling the story. He responded, ‘I get that all the time’. She turned to the viewers and quipped, ‘We should all be so lucky’.
To show his expertise as a storyteller, Hadzetskyy selected two of the good ballads within the German repertoire, Wolf’s ‘Der Feurreiter’ and Schumann’s ‘Belsatzar’. The songs even have terrific piano accompaniments, which You Zhao carried out brilliantly. In the ultimate recital, they introduced magnificence, drama and pleasure to the Schumann and Vaughan Williams’ ‘Bright is the Ring of Words’.
Elegance was the hallmark of soprano Eirin Rognerud’s singing. She additionally had the advantage of partnering with Malte Schäfer, a very participating pianist. They delved into the dialog components of Schubert’s ‘Im Frühling’ with Schultz, and the extra passionate sentiments of Viktor Ullmann’s ‘On voit mourir toute chose animée’ with Fleming. Two songs by Norwegian composer Eyvind Alnæs, ‘Ved syrintid’ and ‘Tidlig sommermorgen’ from Fire digte, confirmed her pristine soprano and immaculate musicianship to their finest benefit.
If there would have been a prize for pleasure of singing, it could have gone to bass-baritone Vinícius Costa. He has a character that goes hand-in-glove along with his exuberant voice. It was all of the extra outstanding that Barton informed him to cease attempting to reign in his voice. Liberating it, she suggested, would make extra space for nuance and variation, which might make his interpretation extra private and actual. And so it did, in an especially private account of Muriel Herbert’s ‘Tewkesbury Road’.
Long narrative songs have been the specialty of tenor Travon Walker. For the grasp class with Schultz, he sang Lori Laitman’s ‘On a Photograph’. In the closing recital, he carried out Britten’s Canticle I, ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’. Walker’s private reference to such works was instantly obvious. Schultz recommended that he select one second in ‘On a Photograph’ to precise how the phrases and music really feel. Walker went on to sing the phrases ‘Take him and kiss those quiet lips’ with much more fervor, making it the emotional apex of the tune.
Baritone Joël Terrin loves to inform a narrative. Voice, face and physique have been at his command in Britten’s ‘Tit for Tat’, as he informed the story of a heartless poacher who, hopefully, will get his comeuppance. For the closing recital, he sang Poulenc’s ‘Tu vois le feu du soir’ and Weill’s ’Oh Captain! My Captain!’. In the Poulenc, it was the great thing about his voice that beguiled. In Weill’s setting of Walt Whitman’s well-known poem, Terrin captured the tune with a delicate mixture of exultation and despair that amplified its influence.
What is the mystique of tune? For singers, it’s the most private of genres. As Fleming defined, singers in opera are restricted to roles appropriate to their pure vocal endowments, however tune lets them be something they wish to be. Terrin stated as a lot when requested by Jamie Barton why he needed to sing Alban Berg’s ‘Schlafen, schlafen’. He responded, ’It makes me suppose that I can sing the large repertoire’. No singer might be way more trustworthy or direct than that.
The Young Artists Recital was the fruits and best-attended of the general public periods, even on a bitterly chilly night. For these taken with polished performances, it’s undoubtedly the one to attend. If your curiosity runs to experiencing how singers and pianists make a tune come alive, then attend one of many SongStudio grasp lessons subsequent 12 months. It is the place you’ll expertise the true work it takes to change into an artist, and be taught extra about singing a tune than you ever imagined.
Rick Perdian