Urlaub (Vacation)

Blogging will be sporadic over the next several weeks. I'll be on the road and not completely back to my normal "routine" (if there is one!) until mid-September. But there are some adventures coming up and I'll be looking forward to posting about them when I can!

Liederabend 5

What, you thought that was the whole program? We have one more group of songs, from one of our favorite composers, Stephen Sondheim. Out of the entire program, these pieces probably require the most hours in the practice room for the accompanist, because Sondheim makes so many unexpected twists and turns and there is no way to fake your way through it. We'll start with There Won't Be Trumpets (cut from the world premiere for "Anyone Can Whistle" but since re-instated, and popular as a song on its own), Send In The Clowns (from "A Little Night Music") and, our big project, The Worst Pies In London (from "Sweeney Todd".) A long, long time ago I was cast in a professional production of Sweeney, singing in the ensemble and understudying Mrs. Lovett (which I never performed or even rehearsed, and a good thing too because I had no business being anywhere near that role at the time.) The music stuck with me and lately I found myself thinking that this is the one role I would really love to do someday. It's not completely unknown in Germany, in fact it's opening soon at Gärtnerplatz. Who knows, maybe someday.

Liederabend 4

Everyone who learns to sing or play and instrument has their own memories of them: those "beginner" pieces that are used because they are easy enough for a new learner to get through. For most of us who studied with classical voice teachers, these pieces are from a genre of songs called arie antiche ("old airs"), and they were the first songs we learned in the studio (as opposed to all the stuff we learned off the radio, which we didn't admit to our voice teachers.) They are simple Italian songs from the 17th and 18th centuries, re-arranged for modern singers and piano accompaniment, and they are forever connected in my brain with my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college .
Even as we learned them, we couldn't wait to get past them, to get to "the good stuff", which was more vocally challenging, maybe less tonal, in difficult foreign languages like French or German. We looked down our noses at anyone who sang these songs on his or her recital, it didn't appear to show any effort, with all the great song literature out there waiting to be discovered by each of us. Not that we were ever too good for arie antiche, but we'd associated them with freshman voice class, and the unsteady techniques of the newbies who sung them.
My own copy of Twenty-Four Italian Songs And Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (the ubiquitous yellow Schirmer Edition, what else?) lay buried among other songbooks from the past until I began to teach, and then I assigned its contents to nearly all of my voice students as their first art song. The difference this time was that, while they found them boring and old (just as we had), I began to hear them as the lovely, timeless little jewels that they are.
Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli released a CD of these songs in 1992 and it was like a breathe of fresh air to hear them performed, finally, by an accomplished professional singer. I am going to open my recital with three of them: Amarylli, mia bella; Cario mio ben; and Nel cor piu non mi sento. Why not, after all?

Nowdays the new edition comes with a CD of someone playing the accompaniment. Kids today! Why, we had to plunk out the harmonies ourselves, after waiting two hours for an available practice room. Y'all get off my lawn!

Liederabend 3

Back in the nineteen nineties I knew an extraordinary woman from Peru, a woman whose French Jewish family fled to South America when she was a small child. She returned to Europe to study singing, met an Austrian man and settled down. Childless, she acted as a sort of spiritual mother to many of us younger singers who were there in pursuit of careers, our own families far away.
She fought breast cancer for some years and in 2000 she lost that battle. What many of us hadn't known at the time was that she'd known about her illness for far longer than any of us suspected, but had been somehow frozen out of fear from doing what her doctors had urged her was absolutely necessary. Knowing this now, years after her death, colors many of the memories I have from my time with her, and gives the things she did new meanings. For instance, this song book on my shelf here, a gift from her library, given to me in her better days. At the time I didn't think much about her giving it to me, perhaps she had no use for it or needed the space. It never occurred to me that she was perhaps shedding her material possessions, passing on parts of herself obtained over the years of her life to her quasi step-children so as not to leave too much behind when she died. I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into it.

So this book — its title is "Folk Songs Of North America" — sat on my bookshelf for ten years, nearly untouched, occasionally used for reference. That is, until this spring, when I was batting around the idea of a group of spirituals for the recital. Well, you know how some things present their importance to you only when you're good and ready? I opened this book for a closer look and only now realized what a gem I had in my hands. The songs are compiled by Alan Lomax, with melodies and guitar chords transcribed by Peggy Seeger (neither of these names would have meant much to me ten years ago.) It's absolutely loaded to the brim with colonial songs, sea shanties, shaker hymns, pioneer songs, old ballads, whites spirituals, black spirituals, cowboy, railroad and miners' songs. It didn't take long for me to make a list of really interesting ones, and then narrow that down to a few I would sing.
In the end I decided upon three: 1) The Bad Girl, because of its pretty, haunting melody and also because I immediately recognized it from a cover version on the radio by Leslie Feist! 2) Go Down Old Hannah because of the equally haunting melody (there is a more upbeat version but this one sounds more authentic as a field holler to me) and because if its back story, of being heard and recorded on the grounds of a Texas state prison, where earlier a slave plantation stood. It was as if the song belonged to this bit of land, forged together by the blood and misery of the people held captive there as forced laborers. 3) Frankie, that good old 12-bar blues song, which surprised me because I'd assumed it had been written in the 1940s, not the 1890s.
Balancing out these three old songs will be "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and Copland's arrangement of "At The River", because they're nice arrangements and it'll give my accompanist something to do!

Liederabend 2

About 10 years ago I was doing summer concerts in the Sacellum in Salzburg, and the manager let me pick my own repertoire, provided it be, if not sacred, at least "philosophical" in content. That meant, vaguely, that "Gretchen am Spinnrad" (about a ruined woman) was marginally OK (because it was Goethe ), "Feldeinsamkeit" (philosophical musing of immortality while lying in a field looking up at the sky) even better. Mozart and other Austrian composers were ideal, as long as they weren't too, um secular.
With these parameters in mind I started digging through Mozart's Complete Works in the Mozarteums's reference library, looking through the song collections, masses and other works for pieces I did not know, which might be appropriate for the venue and fit my voice as well. Not an easy task, but right at the end of the Köchel Catalogue I hit what looked like pay dirt — a short cantata for voice and piano, about 8 minutes long, with a really beautiful and modern sounding text about loving your brothers and living in peace. It's KV 619, and it's quite an interesting work in how it sounds like the Mozart of "The Magic Flute" (KV 620, by the way) with feelers going out in the direction of Beethoven and other early Romantics. One fellow musician, overhearing part of a rehearsal of the piece, guessed it might be Mendelssohn.
There was only one problem — it had been written for a tenor, and it lay too high for me. So I got out my pens and my staff paper and re-wrote the thing a whole step lower, in B flat, down from C major. It hardly changed the color at all (indeed, it may have made it a little warmer and more to my liking!) I don't know for sure, but I may be the only mezzo who sings this piece, and that's a shame because it's lovely.
And it will fit very nicely on the recital program, right before the Korngold.