NEW YORK — This month New Yorkers heard from two of this year’s Grammy Award recipients — American soprano Karen Slack and Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron — in recitals skillfully tailored both to their musical abilities and their intellectual and societal interests. Both evenings introduced devoted followers of these accomplished singers and new audience members to an exciting range of novel music.
Like so many prized cultural institutions, vocal recitals are facing multiple challenges these days. Too frequently the offerings are “opera singer recitals,” with high-profile stars presenting — in generalized, full-out fashion — a smattering of chestnuts before moving on to operatic arias or (rarely successful) takes on musical theater or popular songs. Of course, a few of today’s international opera singers — Golda Schultz, Matthew Polenzani, and Gerald Finley, to name but three — are also keen recitalists who present thoughtful programs. But it’s become harder for singers primarily interested in the song literature to establish themselves, and harder for presenters to sell seats for concerts by such singers unless they’re familiar from the HD circuit. Kudos to 92NY and Carnegie Hall for offering such worthwhile evenings.
Philadelphia-born and -trained (at the Curtis Institute of Music), Slack netted a well-deserved Grammy for her disc Beyond the Years (on Azica) with pianist Michelle Cann of 19 previously unpublished songs by Florence Price. While she has some conventional operatic credits — in recent years Freia in Dallas Opera’s Das Rheingold and a triumphant Serena in Porgy and Bess at the Metropolitan Opera — this extremely questing artist has also taken roles in world premieres and tackled both classic and contemporary work with orchestras and in chamber music settings. Her 2024 New York Philharmonic debut with Beethoven’s often treacherous “Ah, perfido!” proved highly impressive technically and expressively. She’s also been an outspoken and savvy digital presence in the post-George Floyd era, highlighting and confronting issues facing artists of color in the classical music industry.
As a performer, Slack has increasingly gravitated towards advancing and commissioning works by living artists, especially Black composers. Her stirring March 11 appearance with the deft, versatile collaborative pianist Kevin Miller at the 92NY’s intimate, sonically admirable Buttenwieser Hall was the local leg of a national tour of her project African Queens. Slack engaged with nine working composers to create a balanced journey that suited her aims, defined in an interview on the 92NY’s website:
“African Queens is a set of art songs I commissioned centered on Black queens and warrior women from the African continent and diaspora who did extraordinary things. The project was born out of frustration. In opera, singers are never part of the creative team when stories are being chosen. In a recital, I get to tell the stories I want to tell. And even in the recital space — I’m not interested in singing about flowery love or about taking poison because of a man (!). So, I did a lot of research, and well, one stone leads to another stone leads to a boulder. That’s how I came up with the concept, by looking for stories of women that inspired me, and feeling the need to tell the ones not being told.”
With Miller’s indispensable aid, Slack held this musically and linguistically varied program together with force of presence and musical gifts — a richly textured spinto comfortable in mezzo depths and up to searing B flats and Bs — plus her own chosen orations and chants for frame and context. To me, this marked a wiser choice than the now oft-encouraged practice of recitalists giving little personalizing squibs between numbers, too often punctuated by the redundant “I hope you enjoy it.”
Two songs by Dave Ragland alternated sung text with parlando and called upon Slack’s gift for melismatic passages. “The Queen of Sheba,” set to empathetic verse by Alicia Haymer, proved particularly affecting and beautiful. Carlos Simon’s “Behold, the Queen,” a vibrant praise song for the Black Venus, evoked Weill in its pace and tonal development. Jessie Montgomery’s spellbinding “Song of Nzingah” (nuanced text by Jay St. Flono) presented a bilingual internal monologue of a 17th-century ruler of what is now Angola. St. Flono’s “A Prayer” was deftly set by baritone-composer Will Liverman, with an eloquent piano prelude. Shawn Okpebholo’s intriguing, delightful “A Letter from Queen Ufua” concerns the matrilineal bequest of (conceptual and emotional) gifts across generations.
Damien Geter’s “Amanirenas” also dealt with legacy (of a victorious Kushite queen to her daughter), but the piano writing sometimes obscured the word setting. Fred Onovwerosuoke contributed the sorrowful dirge “Luwah” (“Bitter Tears” and the prayer “Duniya,” which showed Slack’s command of plush contralto-ish timbre and softer dynamics. Jamaican-American Joel Thompson penned a winner in “Queen Nanny’s Lullaby,” a bewitching and then scary song turning colonial stereotypes on their (properly menaced) heads; Slack showed her comic gifts as she conveyed the tragic scope of Zulu history in Jasmine Arielle Barnes’ powerful “I Am Not Your God” in the persona of Queen Nandi (1760-1827. The response was duly fervent and appreciative. Further stops on the African Queens tour include Rockport, MA; Newport, RI; Tanglewood; and Portland, OR.
Fleur Barron’s Grammy came for her taking the title role in Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater under Esa-Pekka Salonen for Deutsche Grammophon. She alternates recital and orchestral concert work with operatic explorations from the Baroque to the contemporary; projects include Ravel’s Concepción (L’heure espagnol) and paired roles in Huang Ruo’s M. Butterfly. Belief in cross-cultural musical dialogue informs Barron’s stance as a performer and certainly fueled the repertoire choices in her March 20 Weill Hall recital debut. Several of her championed composers attended the event, as did many relatives from Singapore.
Indian-American pianist Kunal Lahiry did not hide his light under a bushel, sartorially, rhetorically, or musically. The artists are clearly equal collaborators, as it should be but rarely is. Like Slack, he has commissioned and collaborated on much cutting-edge work, in his case often on LGBTQ themes. But he often works with song singers; in the 2025-26 season, he returns to Weill with another Curtis-nurtured talent, baritone Jarrett Ott. I was impressed by Lahiry’s commitment, his musical versatility (some of the numbers played required prepared-piano techniques), and his uncanny ease at soft dynamics and in arpeggiated passagework. Sometimes — as in Mahler’s “Von der Schönheit,” in which Barron affirmed her suitability in timbre and depth of feeling for the Bohemian Jewish composer’s nonpareil style — Lahiry’s work grew over-percussive, with an awful lot of pedal for the small venue.
The program encompassed multiple (and challenging) styles and languages, with some numbers aptly joined without pause via the artists’ skilled timing and concentration. Everything performed was worth hearing — not a sentiment I often voice after recitals. Barron has a very distinctive personal timbre that can turn soulful or fiery plus a secure technical foundation enabling a wide range and precise dynamics. She impressively commanded the bouche fermée technique several of the works required; her approach can be incisive or teasingly subtle as needed.
Particular highlights included the disarming “La señora luna” by Cuba’s Ernesto Lecuona (1895-1963), the devastating “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt” by Czech-born Ilse Weber, who perished at Auschwitz in 1944; Kamala Sankaram’s effective “The Far Shore,” which found Barron absolutely absorbed in the music; and Zubaida Azezi’s moving Uighur folk song “Ananurhan.” The last four numbers, in Chinese, evinced special meaning in Barron and Lahiry’s traversal: Ruo Huang’s slightly improvisatory “Fisherman’s Sonnet,” Chen Yi’s grippingly rendered “Monologue,” and the traditional “Northeastern Lullaby” and “Fengyang Flower Drum Song.” As with Slack and Miller, Barron and Lahiry proved themselves engaged artists well worth seeking out.
