No, this is not going
to be one of those nostalgia pieces about
the dear dead vocal days beyond recall. What
I want to enthuse about is the wealth of talent
we have heard in Philadelphia just in the
past few weeks.
The sequence of notable
singers began on February 20, when Ewa Podles
gave a recital in the Kimmel Center’s intimate
Perelman Theater under the auspices of the
enterprising Philadelphia Chamber Music Society–one
of some 60 programs offered by the Society
this season. In this case, I would say "notable"
but not "great." The Polish contralto
has a remarkable voice, and an unusual one
in these days when mezzo-sopranos seem in
vastly greater supply than the genuine alto
article. But at least in this program of songs
by Moniuszko, Szymanowski, Turina, and Dvorák,
while the lower reaches of her range encompassed
some thrilling chest tones, everything above
that register suffered from monotony of color:
there was precious little response to either
the sound or the sense of the words, and the
vowel sounds in particular were all homogenized
into a pervasive and stifling "aw."
Much more to the point
of my "Golden Age" claim was the
appearance, the very next night, of Lorraine
Hunt Lieberson, in Christoph Eschenbach’s
Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the
Mahler Third Symphony and in a charming post-concert
Lieder recital with him, both of which I have
already reviewed on this site. By contrast
with Podles, Hunt Lieberson has a vividly
pointed sense of verbal nuance to go with
her fluently produced voice. But it was later
in the same weekend that the really wonderful
singing was to be heard, from two Russian
soloists in Shostakovich’s harrowing and profound
Fourteenth Symphony. I should mention that
I do not usually offer critical comment on
the activities of the Chamber Orchestra of
Philadelphia, being very much involved with
that organization as program annotator and
presenter of pre-concert talks. This program,
however, which prefaced the Shostakovich with
Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion,
and Celesta, provided performances so superb
that I cannot resist saluting them. To be
sure, the kind of criticism that spotlights
supposed personal affinities between performer
and music performed is usually misguided.
Yet I find it hard, when Shostakovich’s devastating
if oblique portrait of Russian suffering is
the matter at hand, and the man on the podium
is named Solzhenitsyn, not to infer some significance
from the circumstance. Ignat Solzhenitsyn,
son of Alexander, lives, to our great good
fortune, in Philadelphia. A relatively recent
graduate of the Curtis Institute, where he
is now a professor of piano, he is also principal
conductor and music director designate of
the Chamber Orchestra, with which he gives
about six pairs of concerts a season. This
one featured soprano Elena Prokina and bass
Sergei Leiferkus. I have heard Leiferkus a
number of times in the past, and knew what
a superb artist he is, but I was unprepared
for the extraordinary impact of my first experience
of Prokina. In her riveting performance, intensity
of dramatic characterization was enhanced
by a voice of impressive purity and steadiness,
as well as an ability to veer in the space
of a few measures from the most subtle of
pianissimos to an overwhelming fortissimo
without the slightest hint of clumsiness or
harshness. It was, in every respect, the finest
realization of one of Shostakovich’s most
challenging and rewarding scores that I have
ever encountered.
As if all this was not
enough, a few days later–again thanks to the
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, this time
in collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s
"Mahler’s World" festival – Christoph
Eschenbach stepped onto the Perelman Theater
stage as a wonderfully sensitive pianistic
partner to the German baritone Matthias Goerne.
With a first half devoted to Mahler and a
second half of Schumann (including such unfamiliar
and fascinating songs as Die Löwenbraut),
Goerne achieved a level of identification
with text and music no less total and inspiring
than that of his Russian colleagues the week
before. The voice, too, is of surpassing beauty,
and was deployed with the kind of expressive
concentration and often of sheer delicacy
that makes the enthralled listener forget
to breathe. This too was one of the great
evenings, and it was closely rivaled later
in the week when Goerne joined Eschenbach
and the orchestra in Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder,
as prelude to a thrilling performance of Shostakovich’s
Tenth Symphony. (At least, it thrilled me–it
is only fair to add that the Philadelphia
Inquirer’s critic took a very dim view
of Eschenbach’s conducting.)
So what is all this
we are always hearing about the Golden Age
of Singing as a thing of the past? I know
my comments are unlikely to impress devotees
of–to offer just a few examples – Ponselle,
Tebaldi, and Callas, or Caruso, Martinelli,
and Björling; or in the Germanic sphere
Elisabeth Schumann, Lotte Lehmann, Viorica
Ursuleac, Gerhard Hüsch, Heinrich Schlusnus,
and their like. Indeed, I share their devotion
to most of those artists. But it seems to
me that a period when, quite apart from the
singers I have heard these last weeks, we
can listen to such luminaries as Véronique
Gens and Natalie Dessay, of Cecilia Bartoli
and Barbara Frittoli and Sara Mingardo, or
Sophie Daneman and Susan Graham and Ian Bostridge,
or Anne Sofie von Otter and Marijana Mijanovic
and Magdalena Kozená, or Thomas Hampson
and Thomas Quasthoff, or – even at this late
stage in his career – Placido Domingo, not
to mention the current crop of magnificent
countertenors including Andreas Scholl, Daniel
Taylor, David Daniels, Robin Blaze, and Bejun
Mehta –well, it seems to me that this is not
a period that need fear comparison with any
great age of the past.
Bernard Jacobson
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