THE SINGER'S SINGER

Donald Sulzen and Anna Caterina Antonacci (photo by Sarah Shatz)

Zankel Hall made a fine home for an unusual recital by "the singer's singer" Anna Caterina Antonacci and the collaborative pianist who partners her well, measure by measure, phrase by phrase. The recital was presented by New York City Opera and the excitement began at the end when impressario and General Director Michael Capasso got down on his knee (we kid you not) to present flowers to Ms. Antonacci.  Now that is something we have never seen before, but exactly right when one encounters royalty!

There were so many opera lovers wanting to hear Ms. Antonacci that we had to wait for the second night to get tickets. The recital was eagerly awaited; we don't believe Ms. Antonacci has performed in New York City since 2013 when she gave an outstanding performance of baroque music for Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. That was quite a show involving unusual staging, scenery, and costuming (review archived and available through the search bar).  Last night's recital was also unusual, but unusual in a different way.

We begin by saying that our taste in music was best met by the encores. The brief piece by Girolamo Frescobaldi entitled   "Se l'aura spira" thrilled us to the bone and lingers in our ears like the early 17th c. jewel that it is.

The second encore astonished us by making the familiar fresh. Ms. Antonacci sang the "Habanera" from Carmen as an intimate chanson rather than an operatic aria. One must recognize Ms. Antonacci as an idiosyncratic artist who will put her individual stamp on things!

The program itself held surprises for us. Most impressive was Francis Poulenc's major concert aria "La Dame de Monte Carlo" which is almost an entire opera in and of itself, or at the very least, a character study of a depressed widow, addicted to gambling. and down on her luck. No longer young and loved, she plans on drowning herself in the Mediterranean. Ms. Antonacci brought out every nuance of despair and bitterness.

There were further contributions from Poulenc on the program--Le Travail du Peintre is a cycle of songs, settings of text by Paul Éluard who created verbal descriptions of the famous painters of the early 20th c.  Poulenc created the musical portraits and Ms. Antonacci gave us an aural tour which reminded us conceptually, but not musically, of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Perhaps it is only coincidence that we favored the magic realism of Marc Chagall as we visualized the huge murals at the entrance to The Metropolitan Opera!

Another surprise was the nearly perfect English with which Ms. Antonacci sang Benjamin Britten's On this Island. We are not wild about W.H. Auden's text nor Mr. Britten's music but we definitely enjoyed the artist's ironic delivery of "As it is, plenty". This is a difficult text to make sense of, but she succeeded.

"Nocturne" , from the same cycle, began meditatively, grew in emphasis and power, and ended in a quiet postlude.

The program also comprised Debussy's lovely settings of Paul Verlaine's evocative text, of which our favorite was the sensuous "C'est l'extase langoureuse" in which Ms. Antonacci seemed to savor every word.  This made a nice contrast to the opening "Mandoline", a frisky affair.

We have heard a great deal about Nadia Boulanger as a composition teacher to many 20th c. composers, but had never heard her own vocal compositions. "Versailles" struck us as ethereal but we preferred the melody of "Cantique", with text by Maurice Maeterlinck.  "Elle a vendu mon coeur" , text by Camille Mauclair, is an affecting tale of betrayed love and consequent bitterness.

With so much French on the program, we were happy to hear some Italian. Ottorino Respighi's Deità Silvane gave Mr. Sulzen a chance to shine with some rippling figures in "Crepuscolo". However, we found the marriage of text and music most impressive in "Acqua".

We are happy indeed that New York City Opera is bringing us more than opera! We have feasted on music today and are replete.

(c) meche kroop

A SINGER'S SINGER

Anna Caterina Antonacci and Donald Sulzen

The more you know about singing the more you would have been in a position to appreciate last night's recital--part of Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series.  Although even someone who knew nothing about vocal production and performance would have been enthralled, this was an evening for the connoisseur.  Ms. Antonacci is an artist's artist, truly a marvel of musicianship.

The program was entirely in French, a language with which she is not only comfortable but incredibly adept, keeping the words in the forward part of the mouth and enunciating as clearly as one might have hoped.  She sings soprano roles at present but her past experience with mezzo-soprano roles is evidenced by the rich coloring of her tone.

She began the program with Hector Berlioz' La mort d'Ophélie, the sad tale of Ophelia's death from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  The heartfelt emotion of the text by Ernest Legouvé was beautifully conveyed by apt word coloring while the piano of Donald Sulzen created the flowing of the brook.  Indeed Ms. Antonacci is a proponent of Berlioz' music and one could tell how intensely she felt it. The thrill of the entire evening could be heard in the way this amazing artist handled the melismatic exclamation "Ah!"

Our personal favorite of the evening was Claude Debussy's impressionistic Chansons de Bilitis.  Pierre Louÿs' text is very special, creating pictures of Ancient Greece in the mind's eye.  We have heard these songs so many times but Ms. Antonacci made them new again.  "La chevelure" was particularly successful in its sensual imagery and word coloring. Mr. Sulzen conveyed the richly textured harmonies magnificently.

One of Henri Duparc's few jewels, "La vie antérieure" was similarly evocative, while the Francis Poulenc cycle which followed--La fraicheur et le feu with text by Paul Éluard--represented a more modern and surrealistic idiom.  The poetry in French is quite lovely, far lovelier than the English translation.

The first part of the program closed with Maurice Ravel's "Kaddisch" from Deux mélodies hébraïques, sung in Hebrew.

The second half of the program was given over to a riveting performance of the monodrama La voix humaine, Poulenc's 1958 opera based upon Jean Cocteau's 1930 play of the same name.  This one-act one-character piece is a tour de force for the singer who must convey the wide range of emotions felt by the character  "Elle" as she speaks on the phone with her about-to-be-ex-lover.

Although one never knows what the man on the other end of the line is saying, we must draw our conclusions from the reactions of "Elle". At first she puts on a cheerful face but as the act progresses, she unravels in front of our eyes and ears, even confessing to an attempted suicide.  Anyone who has endured a broken romance would appreciate the text, given in short bursts of conversation.

Today we do not have party lines to interrupt our conversations but we do have cell phone batteries running down so we can make the leap to understand the character's frustration.

Ms. Antonacci's acting was memorable and effective, as it had been all evening.  It was truly astonishing. Her partnership with pianist Donald Sulzen was marked by sensitivity from one moment to the next.

There would be no encore.  The audience cheered and cheered to no avail. From the artists' perspective, we are sure that they were totally drained emotionally. From our perspective, the evening was complete and completely satisfying.

(c) meche kroop