COME TO THE CABARET....IN BROOKLYN

Spencer Myer, Kristin Gornstein, Justine Aronson, Richard Valitutto, Samantha Malk, and Michael Brofman

Last night at the beautiful Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Art Song Society presented their fifth and final entry in a season devoted to Vienna in the first half of the 20th c.  It was a time of decadence, intrigue, and radicalism....and marvelous music. Cabaret was the subject of last night's sold out performance and we enjoyed witnessing three singers we love pushing their boundaries.

Cabaret is a broad term but, in our opinion, it should be naughty and counter-culture. To our ears, it sounds best in German because of the sound and taste of the words as well as the facility with rhyming. Toward this end, soprano Justine Aronson's performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Brettl Lieder more than fulfilled our expectations.  We have heard his "Galathea" performed onstage but we have never heard it the way Ms. Aronson sang it, with devilish glee.

Although she used the loathed music stand, somehow she managed to incorporate ample gesture to accompany her ironic coloration and the song became completely new. We believe she plumbed the depths of meaning and came up with pearls. "Gigerlette" and "Der genugsame Liebhaber" were replete with doppelbedeutung. Richard Valitutto made a fine collaborative pianist.

Her performance of a set of French cabaret songs was a far different affair--not satirical but soulful. We particularly enjoyed Edith Piaf's "La Vie en Rose", Poulenc's "Les chemins de l'amour",  and Erik Satie's "Je te veux" -- but it is Piaf's "Padam padam" that keeps going around in our head.  It's a song that we first heard sung by Kim David Smith who performs a totally different type of cabaret. The piano accompaniment of Artistic Director and Founder Michael Brofman sounded just right.

Mezzo-soprano Kristin Gornstein is well known to us from Heartbeat Opera, so we have never seen her without extravagant makeup design. Last night was the first time we heard her in recital format, although that word fails to describe the intense performance she gave of Kurt Weill's music, for which Berthold Brecht wrote the lyrics. Mr. Valitutto's piano was forceful but never overwhelmed the voice.

We far prefer "Mack the Knife" in German but Marc Blitzstein's translation is quite good and Ms. Gornstein made every word count.  In "The Ballad of Sexual Obsession" there was plenty of ad libbing, about a man with an orange face and stringy yellow hair, that had the audience laughing out loud. This topicality meets a major requirement of cabaret!

Accompanied by Spencer Myer,  mezzo-soprano Samantha Malik performed a set of songs by William Bolcom, making each song into a little opera. The songs are mainly about contemporary society. Ms. Malik's interpretations were all right on point--romantic disappointment, a party turned sour, an overnight date that lasted too long. The most familiar of the set was "Amor" which we have often heard and enjoyed as an encore number. But the hymn-like "Waitin'", short, sweet, perfectly written and sung, seemed out of place with the other songs.

Ms. Malik also performed some songs by Benjamin Britten, settings of texts by W.H. Auden. They were fine songs but did not strike us as cabaret.  Perhaps we need to broaden our definition but we found them lacking in satire and naughtiness.

Although this was the conclusion of the series on Viennese music, B.A.S.S. is not finished with their season. On March 31st there will be a fine program of Debussy, Hahn, Poulenc and Heggie at National Sawdust.

(c) meche kroop

DEBUSSY AND THE MOON

Maya Lahyani, Ben Laude, and Elad Kabilio

In six seasons, Elad Kabilio's MUSIC TALKS has become a most important feature of the music scene in New York City. If you have ever listened to chamber music in a large hall, feeling removed from the action and baffled by the academic language of the program notes, you will appreciate the unlimited pleasures of sitting in a casual and comfortable environment within a few feet of the performers and experiencing all the intimacy the composer intended.

We seem to be in the middle of a movement to bring good music to a new audience, an audience comprising people who love music--not just people who buy tickets to see someone with a "big name" or people who want something to do on a Saturday night.

We are not sure where this trend began but several years ago we attended several series of Rob Kapilow's WHAT MAKES IT GREAT? in which Maestro Kapilow took apart a beloved piece of music to teach us why it is great.

Mr. Kabilio is similarly an educator but he is also a fine musician with a great touch on the cello; he clearly adores performing and communicates this enthusiasm to his loyal followers. Every single show we have attended has taught us something about music and gotten us to hear it with fresh ears.

Now Mr. Kabilio has found just the right performance space with great acoustics and flexible seating, a place where one can feel right at home and relaxed in a way that fosters better listening, not note-taking.

Last night we learned a great deal about Debussy, a composer we have enjoyed but sort of taken for granted.  That has changed. We have been made aware of Debussy's place at the beginning of the 20th c., as part of a movement to connect with real people and life as it is lived, a movement seen in the visual arts among the Impressionists and in opera among the verismo composers.

The first piece performed by Mr. Kabilio and the versatile pianist Benjamin Laude (who also writes about music) was a Scherzo for Cello and Piano dating back to Debussy's student days (1882). The work is filled with enthusiasm and playfulness as the simple melody is tossed back and forth between the two instruments. There is much staccato playing on the piano and pizzicato playing on the cello. At this point, the young composer still had one foot in Romanticism.

The second offering was a piano solo from Preludes Book 1 of 1910 which was clearly inspired by Impressionism and by the wealth of new colors and rhythms Paris had been exposed to from the 1889 World's Fair.

From Preludes Book 2, composed shortly after, we heard "Brouillards", a subjective depiction of thick London fog in which the white keys are used to depict the image with the black keys used to illustrate the obscuring fog. The overall effect was one of anxiety. The pianism of Mr. Laude was outstanding.

These points were illustrated before the performance so that we in the audience would know what to listen for.  This pedagogical strategy was most effective!  Even understanding how a spacious feeling can be conveyed by intervals of an octave or fifths was helpful.

A waltz from 1910 was discussed in terms of nostalgia for the past vs. mocking of the past. Just listen to the delicious schmaltziness of the right hand and the subtle irony in the left! Another subtlety we would have missed!

This was all gravy to us, since it was mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani's performance of Trois Chansons de Bilitis that attracted us to attend this event. From her intense performance we learned something that went beyond words. We were familiar with the history of the poetry--poet Pierre Louÿs invented the fiction that his poetry was from Ancient Greece and written by a woman named Bilitis.

Debussy selected three out of 140 poems to set. They are snapshots taken from three periods in a woman's life. (We are reminded of Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben). In "La flûte de Pan" Ms. Lahyani conveyed the innocence of a young girl's first flirtation. The piano writing is in the Lydian Mode giving the work a mythic feel.

In "La chevelure", the sensual colors of her voice let us know that this woman was embarking on a serious romantic adventure. The chromaticism of the piano writing suggests the sensuality of the woman's cascading hair.

 In "Le tombeau des Naïades", there was the disillusionment that is felt when a man mocks his partner's dreams. It took Ms. Lahyani's consummate vocalism and dramatism to show us all this and we wondered why we'd never heard it before. We loved the way she colored her voice when the man was speaking. We were moved to tears by the universality of disillusionment springing from this very particular event. Major wow!

But the major wows were not over!  Oh, no! An original event occurred that left us wide-eyed in wonder. Israeli actor/dancer/mime Ido Rozenberg created a piece choreographed to the final selection on the program, Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor from 1915.  The character of Pierrot from commedia dell'arte was, at that time, somewhat of a cliché; Arnold Schoenberg had already written Pierrot Lunaire three years earlier. But from the pen of Debussy and the artistry of Mr. Rozenberg, everything seemed new and fresh.

In the Prologue, Pierrot contemplates the moon, for whom il est tombé amoureux.  Part II is a sérénade, in which the besotted but untalented Pierrot tries to win her love. Mr. Kabilio's cello is obliged to imitate some bad lute-playing. The finale is written in a pentatonic scale and shows Pierrot's disappointment and frustration.

To the best of our knowledge, this work has never before been performed with a dancer.  Leave it to Mr. Kabilio to come up with fresh ideas that help us hear music differently.

We have already cleared our calendar to attend the next Music Talks on November 30th. We have thrilled to soprano Larisa Martinez and the quartet of cellos that join her; but we hear this program of Bach in Brazil will be a new one.

(c) meche kroop

MAN OF THE (50 minute) HOUR

Janai Brugger, John Brancy, Steven Blier and Michael Barrett

Our dear Steven Blier seems never to run out of original ideas for recitals for New York Festival of Song, of which he is the Artistic Director.  Last night's recital was entitled "Art Song on the Couch: Lieder in Freud's Vienna" and Mr. Blier introduced the program from the piano by describing Gustav Mahler's four-hour session walking with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.  He waggishly pointed out that it seemed to have helped and left Mahler transformed for the better.

We in the audience had but two hours to be transformed for the better.  Reading the program notes describing the circumstances in Victorian Vienna up to the 1930's gave an excellent background for appreciation of the music.  A society pretending to be respectable and controlled was seething with rebellion underneath, just as a person with a conservative exterior may be hiding some pretty wild secrets.

New ground was being broken in all fields and so it was with music.  We no longer hear the strophic melodies and reassuring harmonies of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Instead we are hearing experiments in rhythm, strange harmonies, and a searching quality in the melodies.

Bringing this challenging music to vivid life were two superb artists--one well known to us for several years since Juilliard days--baritone John Brancy-- and the other a dazzling soprano new to NYFOS--Janai Brugger.  It's thrilling to witness the meteoric rise of someone we have long appreciated and it's thrilling to hear someone as a recitalist whom we have previously heard only on the opera stage (as Liu in Puccini's Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera).

The evening opened and closed with Mahler.  The first set of songs comprised Herr Mahler's "Erinnerung" and his wife Alma Mahler's "Laue Sommernacht".  The first made use of Mr. Brancy's baritone and Ms. Brugger's soprano in alternating stanzas exploring the relationship between song and love.  The final couplet was sung as a duet and we found the entire song quite lovely.  

But Frau Mahler's "Laue Sommernacht" was even lovelier with it's intense yet intimate feel.  She was taught by Alexander Zemlinsky and Herr Mahler was disapproving of her composing--perhaps because of societal restrictions or perhaps out of envy.  Who knows?

After many wonderful songs by Hugo Wolf, Erich Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss, we were treated to an encore of a 20th c. Tom Lehrer song "Alma" which satirizes Frau Mahler's succession of famous husbands. We will spare you the lengthy list of lovers.  What a gal!

The songs were nearly all new to us with the exception of two cabaret type songs which we had heard at the Austrian Cultural Forum.  Hugo Wolf's "Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens" was sung by Ms. Brugger who communicated all the naughty suggestiveness of the lyrics.  She did the same for Schoenberg's "Der genügsamer Liebhaber", a song one would expect to have been sung by a man.

But Mr. Blier is fond of gender-free casting and put Zemlinsky's "Das bucklichte Männlein" into the mouth of Mr. Brancy who picked up the humor ball and ran with it all the way to the goal post.  (Forgive us our sports metaphor.)  Mr. Brancy is usually a contained stage presence, using vocal colors to convey the drama so this was novel and fun seeing him let loose.  Here, although the lyrics are funny, the piano line conveys substantial anxiety.

Ms. Brugger's finest moments were in "Frühlingsfeier" when she cried out for Adonis and in "Drei Ophelia-Lieder" both by Strauss.  Her dramatic instincts are as fine as her beautiful instrument.

We also enjoyed Mr. Brancy's amusing delivery of Korngold's unpublished early song "Die Geniale".  Short but sweet.

The two fine singers joined voices for the final work on the program "Arie aus dem Spiegel von Arcadien".  Apparently we were in a particular mood for humor last night. We had trouble imagining the super-serious Schoenberg setting the light-hearted words of the long-dead Emanuel Schikaneder.  But he did and we enjoyed it.

We measure the success of this type of recital by how many hours of reading they inspire.  We have been reading about the denizens of turn-of-the-20th c. Vienna for hours.  What a fascinating junction of time and place--zeit und stelle.

ⓒ meche kroop