HOW TO FILL THE EMPTY CHURCHES

Renate Rohlfing and Julia Bullock

It was excessively warm and close inside of St. Michaels's Church on the Upper West Side where Carnegie Hall offered one of its neighborhood concerts yesterday. Nonetheless, the church was packed with worshippers--music worshippers!  Even the priest noticed that the church had never been that full.

The air was still.  The worshippers were still. No one dared risk missing a single note of what amounted to a devout performance. Soprano Julia Bullock is nothing if not devout in her commitment to vocal artistry. It is not just the superlative soprano instrument but the fact that she serves the music and text equally, while serving up her soul from deep within.  Every song is filtered through her personalized nature and made her own. Do we sound like a fan? We are in good company. There are so many of us.

Accompanied by the gentle hands of collaborative pianist Renate Rohlfing, Ms. Bullock began her program with a startling work by John Cage on prepared piano entitled "She is Asleep". The vocal sounds and the piano sounds were novel--meaningless syllables, something sounding like bird calls, all expressed with variety of color and dynamics. Who else could have sung this?

The pair of artists then shifted from this 1943 work to a 1960 cycle by Francis Poulenc entitled La courte paille, setting of texts by Maurice Carême, composed toward the end of Poulenc's life. We are not sure why the title "the short straw" was chosen. The songs refer to childhood--a tender lullaby entitled "Le sommeil", some fantasies "Quelle aventure!" and "Le carafon" (our personal favorite), and a few surrealistic pieces. All were performed with a depth of understanding that was communicated successfully to the audience.

Modest Mussorgsky's The Nursery always delights us. A good performance of these songs requires that the singer draw forth images of childhood innocence and curiosity; this, Ms. Bullock accomplished completely. Even her appearance was transformed and one could easily picture her as the child relating to her nanny, her fear of the bogeyman, her wish to hear good stories, her saying her prayers, her request for her mother's sympathy. We sat transfixed.

Songs by Samuel Barber followed with the strange "My Lizard", the accessible "The Daisies" and "Nuvoletta" from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake which seemed to be a tale of suicide obscured by wordplay. As the character leans over the "bannistars", Ms. Bullock leaned over the strings of the piano. We felt a chill.

Richard Strauss' Drei Lieder der Ophelia were movingly sung and Ms. Bullock seguéd directly into the fine spiritual Harry T. Burleigh's "Deep River" and closed with Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free".

As encore, we heard "La Conga Blicoti", popularized by Josephine Baker. It was a generous performance by a most generous artist and her fine accompanist.  Bravissime!

(c) meche kroop

A POST-MODERN VOCAL RECITAL

Cree Carrico and Jamison Livsey

As part of Opera America's Emerging Artist Recital Series, we heard a riveting recital by Chautauqua Operas Young Artist Recital Finalists soprano Cree Carrico and collaborative pianist Jamison Livsey.  Most vocal recitals these days are presented in a limited variety of forms.  Sometimes, the singer chooses sets of songs from a number of different composers; sometimes the focus is on one particular language; sometimes the focus is on one composer alone, as was the case with last season's Schubert&Co. recitals.  Last night's recital was unique in that the artists focused on a particular character from Shakespeare's Hamlet--Ophelia, Hamlet's abandoned love interest who drowns herself.  Indeed, the work was entitled Yesterday I stopped Killing Myself: The Ophelia Project.

We are familiar with Ms. Carrico from her performances at Manhattan School of Music as Marie-Antoinette in John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles and as Jenny in Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.  The Ophelia Project gave her the opportunity to show completely different aspects of her many talents.  The work seemed to tackle the many colors of Ophelia's madness as interpreted by a variety of composers.

The program opened with "A vos jeux, mes amis" from Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, a mad scene to rival that in Lucia de Lammermoor.  Ms. Carrico appeared barefoot and wild-eyed conveying the madness not just with her diamantine voice in the elaborate coloratura but with her entire body.  The intensity of the performance was overwhelming and one could absolutely not allow one's gaze to waver.  It was so convincing that we imagined Ms. C. had dredged up that pain from her own personal experience.  (We were relieved to learn that it was just good acting and that she is a happy young woman with no evidence of a broken heart or suicidal tendencies).

The remainder of the work comprised Drei Lieder der Ophelia (Op. 67) by Richard Strauss,  Jake Heggie's Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia with texts by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and songs by Ned Rorem and Sergei Rachaninoff that were pressed into service, mainly by references to flowers.  This madwoman tore flowers into shreds which she showered onto the audience, carried on with audience members, threw chairs around and interacted with Mr. Livsey who entered into the spirit of the piece.  She donned red jewelry and red patent-leather pumps, stacked red apples on chairs and delivered Ophelia's monologue into a cell phone--a jarring image and yet making fine sense of Shakespeare's text.

We liked the alteration of intense passionate songs with some quiet gentle ones.  What we missed was some rationale for dividing up the song cycles and interlacing them.  It certainly pulled the work into the realm of the avant-garde which we did not mind at all; we just wanted more of a dramatic arc that has not been made clear.  This is clearly a work in progress and as Ms. Carrico works with her director Christopher Mirto, we hope this arc of madness will emerge and give a sense of madness developing.

© meche kroop