NEW YORK — The art song recital as we know it is a product of the mid-19th century, when homegrown domestic entertainment moved into the concert hall with the first public performance of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. The Liederabend eventually calcified into a formula of short sets of songs in several languages, sung to piano accompaniment by a formally dressed singer performing from memory and without commentary. Opera singers were expected to include a few famous arias. In the 1950s, the rarefied stuffiness was lampooned by the singer-comedian Anna Russell. Song recital audiences dwindled.
But thanks in part to champions of song literature like baritone Thomas Hampson and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, the concept of the vocal recital began to evolve. Most of today’s recitalists have expanded the canon beyond the “classical” standard repertoire and are presenting personal and often surprising artistic statements in their one and a half hours onstage. This month, I attended three such programs in New York, each more stimulating than the last.
In a Feb. 10 recital at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, baritone Joseph Parrish and pianist Amir Farid treated a gratifyingly diverse audience to a rich program of “Songs from the Harlem Renaissance.” Parrish is in the competition and apprenticeship stage of his very active young career, but he has already created a congenial niche showcasing African American composers from the later 19th century and the early mid-20th century. In four sections — heritage, identity, love, and spirituality — Parish gave a personal survey of the Black experience. Traditional work songs, arranged by Hall Johnson, Harry T. Burleigh, and others were followed by three newer songs about Black identity.
David N. Baker’s “Status Symbol” (1970) stood out both for its musical angularity and caustic account by a new hire, descended from slaves and civil rights activists, of receiving the key to the locked White washroom. Love songs by Undine Smith Moore and Harry T. Burleigh were squarely in the 19th-century parlor song tradition. Spirituals, arranged by Hall Johnson, Moses Hogan, Margaret Bonds, and Damien Sneed, had a nearly symphonic weight. In addition to the composers, poetry by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and NAACP founder James Weldon Johnson were featured. Parrish encouraged the audience to sing along with the encore, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” With his smooth voice of many shadings and his polished but natural demeanor, Parrish is a singer to watch as he grows into his artistic skin.
On Feb. 12, the New York Festival of Song program “Fugitives” presented songs by German and Austrian composers whose careers at home were cut short by the suppression, expulsion, and murder of Jews by the Nazis. Entartete Musik (degenerate music, showing Jewish and Black jazz influences) was considered a threat to the purity of German culture and was banned by the authorities.
In the 1990s, the conductor James Conlon began exploring and programming the “Recovered Voices” of these forgotten composers, and this rich vein of repertoire is becoming more familiar in concert and opera halls. The operatic mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey had recently performed a German cabaret recital at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall; baritone Gregory Feldmann (replacing Justin Austin, who was ill) already knew some of the music from his recital of “Degenerate Music” given at Weill in 2019.
Despite having only a week to prepare the program with a new artist, the two vocalists, solidly supported by festival founder Stephen Blier and co-artistic director Bénédicte Jourdois, meshed style and energy for their duets. Blier supplemented his excellent program notes with illuminating and often witty comments throughout the evening. Lindsey scaled down her voice for the intimate Merkin Concert Hall, tending to croon her softest passages, but she has an intimate relationship with the style. Feldmann, a younger singer, has a fine voice, with focus and depth, and theatrical instincts that smoothed over any uncertainty with new material (he occasionally did use music).
The first four songs, by Alexander Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Franz Schreker, from around 1900, were as German as could be; Blier pointed out the irony that when the Nazis silenced Jewish composers, they lost a generation of Austro-German music. Cabaret songs by Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Tucholsky, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler received arch cabaret treatment, with plenty of physicality and humor. A pair of impassioned pacifist songs by Eisler (texts by Bertolt Brecht and Tucholsky, respectively) prompted Blier’s observation that the outspoken Eisler was prosecuted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and deported from the U.S.
Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann, Franz Schreker, and Tucholsky lost their lives before or during World War II; Erich Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Eisler, Brecht, Weill, and Hollaender came to America and forged careers. Beyond the classical stage, Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley provided work for the survivors. The New York festival concert gave a vivid picture of their influence on American music as well as the talent stifled by Nazi ideology.
Of the three recitals I attended this month, tenor Freddie Ballentine’s Feb. 3 concert at the 92nd Street Y was the most eclectic and personal. Ballentine is a seasoned veteran of opera and concert stage; based on his program with the pianist Kunal Lahiry, he could easily add cabaret to his resume. Singer and pianist wore trendy black clothing, revealing chest or bare arms (halfway in, Ballentine tossed his jacket onto the floor), and lights illuminated the back wall with a shifting rainbow of colors. Ballentine’s spoken commentary was relaxed and entertaining, and he rarely stood still in front of the piano.
Titled “Our People,” Ballentine’s program unfurled responses to different states of mind triggered by identity: Isolation, Damnation, Remembrance, and Revolution. The categories were fairly loose: The first section ricocheted from a spiritual to a pair of songs from Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson to the sassiest of William Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs, “George” (about the funeral of a trans prostitute, delivered in full camp mode), then pivoted to Schubert’s despairing “Memnon.” I had arrived expecting Blackness to be in the spotlight; only with David Krakauer’s “The ’80s Miracle Diet” (about the AIDS crisis, and set to texts by Melvin Dixon) did I realize that gay identity was even more central to the programming.
Ballentine has a mesmerizing presence and a dramatic range of vocal colors; though he is billed as a tenor, his basic timbre is more baritonal, as was the tessitura of most of his selections. Only in Rachmaninoff’s “Spring Waters” did he display tenor qualities and high notes. But this is not an artist to follow for his pristine lyricism (though the voice is resonant and handsome) — it’s his communication. Songs by Margaret Bonds, Purcell, Nina Simone, and Ricky Ian Gordon were written for intelligibility of text, though Ballentine could get the point across even in untranslated Russian (song texts would, however, have been appreciated).
Most music-streaming services call a unit of music a song, be it a movement of a symphony or string quartet, a Puccini aria, or the latest hit by Bad Bunny. Most streaming services claim to have an inventory of over 100 million songs, and it’s as easy to ask Alexa to play music on a general theme as by a particular artist. Surely the random playlist model of programming has had some influence on the evolution of recital programming, though Peter Schickele was mixing it up in his 1990s radio program Schickele Mix.
Today, Renée Fleming’s touring recital reflects on the climate crisis with songs by Fauré, Liszt, Hahn, and Grieg mixed with new works by Kevin Puts, Caroline Shaw, and Nico Muhly. Even more loosely, British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote is programming “The Rebellious Recital” in March at Oper Frankfurt with music by 26 composers spanning four centuries in five languages. I can’t quite imagine how it will flow, but I’d love to hear it.
