Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
The latest New York Festival of Song “NYFOS Next” concert opened with a song called simply “Peace.”
Pianist Nathaniel LaNasa had curated a set of art songs on the theme of things that are out of reach, titled “The Color of Where You Can Never Go.” Peace does seem to be out of reach around the world, a “place” we can dream about but never really go. Yet music defies conflict. It connects cultures and provides interludes not only of calm but of positive, constructive excitement.
LaNasa and the four singers he had gathered, and whom he accompanied on piano, offered both. While the Rubin Museum of Art sadly closed its doors last year, its performance space remains open, and it’s just the right size for a concert of interesting and innovative contemporary song. An appreciative audience included several of the composers.
Peace and Passion
Baritone Gregory Feldmann led off with a velvety rendition of Eve Beglarian’s satin-soft “Peace.” But placidity was by no means the concert’s overall feeling. Next up, soprano Emily Finke delivered the program’s most striking performance. Amelia Brey’s “Eurydice” is a setting of four lyrics from a suite of poems by H.D. The text gives voice to the female half of the legendary story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She is usually depicted as passive, an object rather than a subject. Brey’s music reflects the bitter, accusatory tone of the poems, especially as bitingly sung by the massively talented Emily Finke. After a piano introduction, the sequence begins a cappella. Finke immediately established an ability to fully inhabit both music and text with superb control and power, equally precise and passionate, the high notes powerfully operatic, the jagged intervals acidic. “So for your arrogance / and your ruthlessness / I am swept back…I have lost the earth / and the flowers of the earth.” It was a stunner of a performance.
Eurydice followed Orpheus through a liminal space before it all went south for the mythical lovers. Mezzo-soprano Devony Smith penetrated another kind of in-between: the strange universe of microtones in Sofia Rocha’s “The River.” The composer’s skillful placement of notes at frequencies between the piano’s 12 tones, and Smith’s misty-toned performance of them, made their weirdness intelligible, indeed pretty easy to absorb. As the piano accompaniment made a stirring change from muted chords to roaming broken arpeggios, Smith transformed the text by poet Sara Teasdale, about a river that seeks the sea, into a spell, varying her vocal color from subdued to steely and back.
Soft melodies define most of the seven-part “the color of where you can never go” by Christopher Trapani. Initially intriguing, the suite progressed like a (not very) dramatic monologue, with little variety from one section to another. (I couldn’t place where some of the delineations were.) Soprano Sharon Harms’s wonderful phrasing and refined technique were obvious, and her high notes shone with glowing intensity. But overall I found the piece just, well, kind of boring.
The Perils of Posting – and Parking
“Blue,” Shawn Chang’s amusing ditty about social media, lightened the mood. “I wasn’t looking for guidance, just confirmation,” pouts the narrator of an anxious monologue about comments, comments on comments, and so forth. There’s a lot of “I” in the text, and when Smith held a very long note on that word, it stressed just how much social media is all about the social me.
The lighter mood continued, but with nuance, with “A Tuesday Spot” by Herschel Garfein, a composer adept at speaking profundity with the language of pleasure. In the program’s only duet, Finke and Feldmann portrayed a couple having a serious conversation about male-female relations while looking for a New York City parking spot. Parking scarcity occupies far more of an NYC car owner’s mind daily than is healthy, so this droll and muscly piece really spoke to me.
“A Tuesday Spot” was also the only part of the program that brought two singers together. If I could have asked for anything to improve this impressive program it would have been a little more joining of forces.
Finke returned in a more somber setting for another Eve Beglarian song, a flowing one with a slow, pretty melody over ever-moving arpeggios up and down the keyboard. And the concert finished with Feldmann warmly singing a gorgeous selection from a concert-long suite by Gabriel Kahane. I found Kahane’s 8980: Book of Travelers as a whole tedious when I saw it at BAM in 2017, but individually many of the songs are lovely, and this was one of them.
Kudos to Nathaniel LaNasa for this artfully constructed program, both thought-provoking and entertaining, and for his exquisite piano work as well. For information about upcoming New York Festival of Song events visit its website.
