Curtis presents Eric Owens and Friends

This particular recital, which provided both kinds of pleasures, brought together popular opera star Eric Owens with three vocal students from Curtis Institute. The young artists had beautiful voices, but the real treat was hearing how well they coordinated with Owens in a series of delicate and wisely chosen compositions.

A native of Philadelphia, Owens studied piano, oboe, and voice at Temple University and the Curtis Institute of Music. At 45, he’s in the prime of his career. His low notes are as sonorous as ever, and he’s gained a ringing new freedom at the top end of his range. We know how powerfully Owens’s voice can fill the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera house and the 2,500-seat Academy of Music — we don’t yet know if his three partners can achieve that. But what we witnessed was art of a different sort, where nuance and finesse are the objective.

Owens, a self-effacing collaborative artist, subordinated his large voice to the demands of multi-voice harmonies in works by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Rossini, and Brahms. All of those composers, of course, are known for their big pieces for symphony orchestras and opera houses, so it was a pleasure to hear their intimate pieces.

Death, love, tears

A stark contrast emerged in the two pieces by Johannes Brahms. In “Vier ernste Gesänge (Four serious songs),” Brahms, late in his life, took Biblical texts about death and set them to grim music: “O death, how well you serve him who is in need, is old and feeble, is beset by sorrows and has nothing better to hope for.” In these passages, Owens scaled his voice down to a whisper that could make strong hearts melt.

On the other hand, in the Liebeslieder Waltzes, Brahms set 18 love poems in 3/4 time (outdoing what Stephen Sondheim was to copy in A Little Night Music a century later). These lovely miniatures — some romantic, some comical — illuminate the subtle inflections of Brahms’s tapestry of four hands on a piano and four voices intertwined. I’ve never heard a lovelier performance of this enchanting composition.

Tchaikovsky’s “Tears” presented a lovely blending of tenor and baritone voices, and, as an extra treat, a piano postlude. As with most compositions by the closeted Tchaikovsky, “Tears” conveys longing and sadness. Mikael Eliasen, the superb pianist, also deserves credit for choosing the program and coaching the singers.

During the recital, the lights in the 650-seat hall remained on, allowing the audience to follow the words to these musical poems. Some music lovers avoid recitals because they think they have less to offer. Actually, they have more, as we get double pleasure from the melding of words to music. Mendelssohn’s text was by Heinrich Heine, and Weill’s was by Maxwell Anderson; the lyrics to both the Kern and Rodgers songs were by Oscar Hammerstein — eminent wordsmiths all.