NEW YORK — For a young singer on the rise like Brooklyn native Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, acing your first hometown solo recital must bring a special thrill. A vociferous crowd in Carnegie Hall’s intimate Weill Hall witnessed that on Feb. 13, when the deservedly confident but also musically inquisitive countertenor — collaborating with pianist John Churchwell — put across a testing, varied program with panache, artistry, and something not given to all in his voice category: consistently enjoyable timbre.
This appearance marked the second of a four-stop tour by the two artists. It kicked off in St. Paul on Feb. 9, hits the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Feb. 20, part of the excellent Vocal Arts DC series and ends at Houston’s Menil Collection on Feb. 24. The singer furnished commentary between groupings of selections, but not excessively so (as has become increasingly the fashion).
In sartorial terms, Nussbaum Cohen opted for an electric blue jacket for the more eclectic first half and a traditional black jacket for the song cycles by Jake Heggie and Robert Schumann. The most noteworthy and applaudable formal aspect of the event was that he had the words and music down by heart — in fact he had supplied the German and Hebrew translations for the program book — and thus was free to address the music to the audience rather than a music stand.
The program started ambitiously, with a trio of selections from the moving Abschiedslieder of Korngold. Here, as he often did, the Viennese Jewish wunderkind channeled Richard Strauss, but with a melancholy admixture of Mahler and Hugo Wolf.
The long, slow lines of Korngold’s “Sterbelied”— a German translation of a Christina Rossetti poem — immediately made clear Nussbaum Cohen’s fine breath control and ability to transition among registers seamlessly. The vocal color leans to brightness, but even under heavy decibel demands he avoids any avian piercing quality; like some other gifted countertenors, he is able to use his dynamic range expressively to avoid a sense of timbral monotony.
There followed a trio of stylistically divergent songs of prayer. The harmonically complex “Prayer” from Nightsongs by Leslie Adams (1932-2024) made one want to investigate more of the Black composer’s oeuvre; Churchwell paced it eloquently, and his partner showed his considerable knack for pointed and judicious utterance in his native tongue. There are many compelling songs by Florence Price, as made evident by Karen Slack and Michelle Cann’s recent Grammy-winning Beyond the Years, a fine collection of previously unpublished numbers. Though pleasant enough, and well vocalized here, 1938’s “Sunset” seems a minor Price effort, in the manner of an Edwardian parlor ballad.
Handel is one of this countertenor’s strongest suits, so he programmed “O Lord, Whose Mercies Numberless,” David’s stop-time prayer from the 1739 oratorio Saul. He offered it with lovely legato phrasing plus well-chosen and well-executed ornamentation, showing the flexibility of his technique. The rendition surprised only in its lack of a cadential trill, something I’ve heard Nussbaum Cohen deliver with aplomb in several concerts and online.
A threesome of Lieder by the emotionally and professionally intertwined Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms suggested how indebted Brahms (like Robert Schumann) was to Clara Schumann’s pianistic technique in the formulation of his songs. Her eloquent prelude to the Heine setting “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen” afforded Churchwell a fine opportunity, as did Brahms’ urgently arpeggiated “In meiner Nächte Sehnen.” Nussbaum Cohen seemed most connected to Brahms’ haunting “Unbewegte laue Luft,” the singer’s favorite Lied, he stated, since hearing it on a recording by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
From childhood, Nussbaum Cohen spent nine years as an assistant cantor in synagogues. As we know from recordings by Hermann Jadlowker, Igor Gorin, Jan Peerce, and Richard Tucker, cantorial training can open the door to uncommon fluency in melismatic and coloratura passages. Both Max Janowski’s wrenching “Avinu Malkeinu” and Maurice Ravel’s setting of “Kaddisch” from Deux mélodies hébraïques received gorgeous, committed performances.
In some ways the recital’s high point was the New York premiere of Heggie’s Oh Children: Three Poems by Margaret Atwood, commissioned by the performers for this tour. The insightful, timely Atwood poems focus in contrasting ways on issues of environmental survival. After a percussive Lisztian prelude, “The Moment” presents a dialogue, with a narrator, between settlers and trees as to who takes primacy in the interaction. Slyly drawing on music-theater idiom, the deft “Cicadas” gives a horny insect’s ruminations on the sex and death drives. The lyrical, stop-and-start “Oh Children” ponders future generations in the wake of climate change; it bears some generic kinship with one of Rachmaninoff’s most moving songs, “To the Children.”
Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, is usually the province of tenors or baritones. Each voice type has its advantages in addressing different moments of the dozen songs; the nuanced traversal here made clear that the same is true of a higher instrument as well. In fact, other countertenors have performed this cycle, such as Paul Esswood in a 1989 Hungaroton recording with Nicholas McGegan at the piano. The duo at Weill were well prepared and always musical. Occasionally Nussbaum Cohen took extra breaths in particularly long lines; on the other hand, he showed mastery of triplets, an essential building block in performing Schumann songs.
For an encore, the countertenor sought to demonstrate some of the quick-tempo Handelian bravura that has won him acclaim in Europe. He and Churchwell rolled out “Quel torrente che cade dal monte,” the exultant final aria of Giulio Cesare‘s title character. Daring and accurate as the vocalism was, with responsible ornamentation — in my experience, fast Handel arias in recitals make far less impression than slow ones — a piano simply can’t provide the needed coloristic baroque framework; where Churchwell had done just fine with the Saul aria, here he struggled.
There’s a reason why slow Handel arias like “Angels ever bright and fair” (Theodora) and “O sleep, why dost thou leave me” (Semele) were staples of the flourishing early 20th-century recital culture. Another singer for whom Nussbaum Cohen has voiced admiration, Joyce DiDonato, has shown that a Giulio Cesare aria that makes a devastating effect as a piano-accompanied encore is Sesto’s “Cara speme.” (Above, find “Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in 2019 at the San Francisco Opera, singing Medoro’s aria from Orlando, Act II.)
Nussbaum Cohen clearly displayed the goods for high-octane Handelian singing, and his Oratorio Society of New York Messiah at Carnegie on Dec. 23 confirmed that he can project that quality in a large hall. Let us hope the Metropolitan Opera, where he has performed only Rosencrantz in Brett Dean’s Hamlet, will take note.
