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"Last Songs' by Lyric Fest
Tom Purdom
When ya gotta go....
TOM PURDOM
In general music history, Beethoven’s last works are his awesome final quartets. But in the history of art song, his last foray is a sprightly little jape about a stolen kiss that Beethoven wrote five years before his death.
Similarly, Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny didn’t know she was only one day away from death when she composed a bright, lively piece called Bergenlust (“Mountain Pleasure”) in May 1847. Her brother didn’t know he was writing his last song that October, when he composed a moving night song in her memory just one month before he died, too.
The Lyric Fest art song series devoted its latest program to the last songs of European and American composers. In some cases, the composers knew they were approaching death, and the knowledge shadowed their work. Others, like Beethoven and the Mendelssohn siblings, were unaware they were making their final contributions to the genre.
This was a great idea for a program, with one slight problem: A composer’s final melody isn’t necessarily his best one. But Lyric Fest provided notes with the printed texts, and the circumstances that surrounded each song were so poignant or ironic that they usually compensated for the limitations of the weaker numbers.
‘I was given more than I deserved’
Besides, the gems outnumbered the turkeys. Grieg’s Varen (“The Last Spring”) was played at his graveside, and it deserved to be. As sung by soprano Randi Marrazzo, it starts off plaintively and rises to a noble serenity with the words, “I have had much beauty to enjoy in life; I was given more than I deserved, and everything must have an end. “
Ravel’s contribution was a rollicking drinking song, one of four songs devoted to Don Quixote, sung by baritone Stephen Powell. Powell also did a fine job with Brahms’s setting of the German text of Corinthians I, 13: If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. The Brahms opens with an unexpected haranguing intensity before it settles into a solid strength that continues to the final exaltation of love.
The blessings of nationalism
As with most Lyric Fest programs, the menu covered so many songs, by so many different composers, that it’s impossible to mention every interesting item in a review of reasonable length. Soprano Barbara Shirvis’s performance of Richard Strauss’s ode to spring combined a great voice with a complex accompaniment. Katherine Pracht sang the ornaments in a Purcell song with an obvious understanding of their purpose, and she had some fun with four comic— and not so comic— musical versions of epithets written by Walter de la Mare.
The Italian composer Francesco Tosti’s Ultima Canzone, sung by tenor David Adams, was a classic gondolier song that transformed a text about unrequited love into a farewell to art and life. Julian Rodescu— who created a memorable assassin in the Opera Company’s recent Rigoletto— did his usual impressive work with Kurt Weil’s Lost in the Stars as well as the ironic mixed moods of Shostakovich’s setting of Michelangelo’s thoughts on immortality.
The program’s high point for me was a song composed in 2003 by the Ukrainian Oleksandr Bilash to a text by his longtime collaborator, the poet Dymytro Pavlychko. The song expresses the composer’s hope for the rebirth of his native land, and its full, soaring line was a perfect match for Suzanne DuPlantis’s voice and style. Ukraine did, in fact, hold its first post-Soviet election in 2004, a year after Bilash died. His song belongs to that small group of works that remind us nationalism does have its moments.
TOM PURDOM
In general music history, Beethoven’s last works are his awesome final quartets. But in the history of art song, his last foray is a sprightly little jape about a stolen kiss that Beethoven wrote five years before his death.
Similarly, Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny didn’t know she was only one day away from death when she composed a bright, lively piece called Bergenlust (“Mountain Pleasure”) in May 1847. Her brother didn’t know he was writing his last song that October, when he composed a moving night song in her memory just one month before he died, too.
The Lyric Fest art song series devoted its latest program to the last songs of European and American composers. In some cases, the composers knew they were approaching death, and the knowledge shadowed their work. Others, like Beethoven and the Mendelssohn siblings, were unaware they were making their final contributions to the genre.
This was a great idea for a program, with one slight problem: A composer’s final melody isn’t necessarily his best one. But Lyric Fest provided notes with the printed texts, and the circumstances that surrounded each song were so poignant or ironic that they usually compensated for the limitations of the weaker numbers.
‘I was given more than I deserved’
Besides, the gems outnumbered the turkeys. Grieg’s Varen (“The Last Spring”) was played at his graveside, and it deserved to be. As sung by soprano Randi Marrazzo, it starts off plaintively and rises to a noble serenity with the words, “I have had much beauty to enjoy in life; I was given more than I deserved, and everything must have an end. “
Ravel’s contribution was a rollicking drinking song, one of four songs devoted to Don Quixote, sung by baritone Stephen Powell. Powell also did a fine job with Brahms’s setting of the German text of Corinthians I, 13: If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. The Brahms opens with an unexpected haranguing intensity before it settles into a solid strength that continues to the final exaltation of love.
The blessings of nationalism
As with most Lyric Fest programs, the menu covered so many songs, by so many different composers, that it’s impossible to mention every interesting item in a review of reasonable length. Soprano Barbara Shirvis’s performance of Richard Strauss’s ode to spring combined a great voice with a complex accompaniment. Katherine Pracht sang the ornaments in a Purcell song with an obvious understanding of their purpose, and she had some fun with four comic— and not so comic— musical versions of epithets written by Walter de la Mare.
The Italian composer Francesco Tosti’s Ultima Canzone, sung by tenor David Adams, was a classic gondolier song that transformed a text about unrequited love into a farewell to art and life. Julian Rodescu— who created a memorable assassin in the Opera Company’s recent Rigoletto— did his usual impressive work with Kurt Weil’s Lost in the Stars as well as the ironic mixed moods of Shostakovich’s setting of Michelangelo’s thoughts on immortality.
The program’s high point for me was a song composed in 2003 by the Ukrainian Oleksandr Bilash to a text by his longtime collaborator, the poet Dymytro Pavlychko. The song expresses the composer’s hope for the rebirth of his native land, and its full, soaring line was a perfect match for Suzanne DuPlantis’s voice and style. Ukraine did, in fact, hold its first post-Soviet election in 2004, a year after Bilash died. His song belongs to that small group of works that remind us nationalism does have its moments.
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