LOVE: RUSSIAN STYLE

Dina Pruzhansky, Briana Hunter, Meryl Dominguez, Sungwook Kim, and Paul An

In its annual coproduction with the Lyric Chamber Music Society, Bare Opera presented a delightful evening of Russian song and arias. The cast could not have been better chosen, nor could the material have been better curated. Composer/pianist Dina Pruzhansky contributed to the pleasure in several ways--first by narrating and introducing the selections, encouraging the singers to give their take on the material--but, more significantly by her stunning pianism.

Regular readers will recall our distaste for contemporary compositions but the pen of Ms. Pruzhansky plays a different tune, paying tribute to the composers of the 19th c. whom we so greatly admire. We do love melody and her songs have no lack of melodic invention. We noticed most of all how well the melodies reflected the sound of the Russian language. One advantage of hearing songs in a language one doesn't speak is that one can hear the abstract connection between the language of the poet and the rise and fall of the vocal line.

The poet in question was Alexander Blok, a symbolist poet whose words were probably not completely comprehensible in Russian and rather untranslatable into English. In this case, tant mieux! Meryl Dominguez, a singer we remember well from Santa Fe Opera, gave the four miniatures an excellent performance with great attention paid to the sound of the words. Each song had a different mood and the final one was filled with anxiety. We are really looking forward to hearing more of Ms. Pruzhansky's music at Carnegie Hall on March 3rd.

Ms. Dominguez' soprano is a generous one and her performance of Shemakha's "Hymn to the Sun" from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel was glorious in its melismatic seduction, all done in an Eastern mode. Her voice opened like a parasol at the top of the register. We loved that opera in Santa Fe when Ms. Dominguez was in the chorus. We would love even more to hear her sing the role of Shemakha! We shall put that on our wish list.

Mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter, always astonishing in her ability to enter a role and give it all she's got, gave an outstanding performance of Olga's arioso "Ah, Tanya, Tanya" from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. She explained to the audience how unusual it was to assign the role of a light hearted girl to the mezzo fach; yet when she sang it the feeling was perfectly natural and it was easy to visualize the reserved Tanya sitting in a chair nearby, mildly accepting the loving teasing from her extroverted sister.

The sister, we know, is no saint and somewhat lacking in judgment, having also teased her devoted Lensky by flirting outrageously with Onegin, thus provoking a duel--which takes us to the next selection on the program. Tenor Sungwook Kim was so convincing in Lensky's aria "Kuda, kuda" that our emotions got drawn in. We had to stifle the urge to rush up and stop the duel! And Mr. Kim accomplished all this with pure vowels and crisp consonants. He paced himself well and built to a searing climax.

Bass Paul An shone in Aleko's cavatina "The entire Gypsy camp is asleep" from Rachmaninoff's first opera Aleko, adapted from Pushkin's poetry, as was Eugene Onegin, and so many other works on the program. The piano prelude was particularly portentous. Mr. An impressed us with a pianissimo note, floated at the upper end of the register; this is exactly what we like to hear from tenors and hearing it from a bass just blew us away.

Strangely enough, three days ago we reviewed a song cycle by Janáček about a young peasant who runs off with a gypsy woman. Aleko begins where that cycle ends!

Three songs by Rachmaninoff were finely handled as well. Ms. Dominguez exhibited her fine vibrato in the upper register in "Sleep" whilst Ms. Pruzhansky's piano created a dreamlike state with some gorgeous arpeggi.

Mr. Kim performed "Dream" in lovely fashion; he surely knows how to swell a note in careful crescendo and how to hold a note with sustained energy--all evidence of superlative breath control. He generated lots of excitement in an expansive delivery of "Spring Waters", amplified by parallel excitement in the piano.

Ms. Pruzhansky delighted us with a solo--Tchaikovsky's Nocturne in C# minor, begun at a leisurely tempo but moving on to a livelier theme and ending with what in vocal performance would be called embellishment of the line. We hope pianists will forgive our lame description but we are unaccustomed to writing about piano music.

The conclusion of the program was a quartet by Alexandre Dubuque, a 19th c. composer of French origin who was raised in Russia. The song "Don't Be Cunning" involved men making advances and women rejecting them. The gimmick of the performance, which took it right into the 21st century, was that the men kept trying to take selfies with the women. It was all in good fun and made the perfect end for a perfect concert.

© meche kroop

THE BARD OF LINDEMANN

Whether you perceive Elliot Madore as barihunk or baribard depends upon whether you were using your eyes or your ears.  Mr. Madore sings as if he wrote the poetry and the music himself and that is one rare gift.  In his recital last night for the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program he demonstrated skills as a recitalist that equal his skills onstage at the Met where we recently thrilled to his performance of the role of Lysander in Enchanted Island.  Wisely, he scaled down his strikingly rich voice to suit the size of the room and similarly modulated his dramatic intensity to just the right degree.

Accompanied by Natalia Katyukova, he opened the program with a song by Glinka entitled “I remember that magical moment” which allowed him to express a wide range of emotions.  Two songs by Tchaikovsky followed--”At the ball” and “Don Juan’s Serenade”.  It was during the latter that Ms. Katyukova’s piano skills were most evident.

Switching from Russian to the deceptively light hearted Banalités of Poulenc, we enjoyed the humor of “Chanson d’Orkenise”, the languor of “Hôtel”, the wistfulness of “Voyage à Paris” and the exquisite diminuendo at the end of “Sanglots”

But it was Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen that broke our heart as Mr. Madore seemed to be authoring on the spot the compelling emotional journey of a young man disappointed in love.  Using impressive dynamic control and word coloring, he made the trip from grief to irony and false joy to fury and finally acceptance.  One could scarcely hold back the tears and deal with the lump in the throat.  Comprising only four songs, this cycle, Mahler’s first, covers similar material to Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise only far more succinctly.

The program closed with some songs by Ives, one of which is a setting of Heine’s poem “Ich grolle nicht” which, while beautifully sung, could never match the setting by Schumann in his Dichterliebe.  As encore, Mr. Madore sang “My Boy Bill” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.  He sang it with the same dramatic intensity and connection with the text that was shown in the rest of the program.

As Mr. Madore finishes his second year with the Lindemann program and pursues his operatic destiny we wish him all the best.  With talent like that, luck is unnecessary.  We hope to see him at the Met singing Don Giovanni, perhaps his signature role?

© meche kroop