Lyric Fest's salute to 1912

1912 may have brought the sinking of the Titanic and the invention of the Oreo cookie, but those events had nothing to do with Lyric Fest's salute to that year. As mezzo-soprano Suzanne DuPlantis explained in her opening remarks at Sunday's concerts, she and her colleagues had always wanted to devote a program to a single year. 1912 got the nod simply because this is its hundredth birthday.

The result was one of Lyric Fest's most varied and entertaining programs, complete with an after-concert mingle that included birthday cake and champagne in the Academy of Vocal Arts reception room.

The event included two spectacular young talents— soprano Meagan Miller and tenor Zach Borichevsky. Miller owns the kind of voice that made me sit up and take notice as soon as she launched into an excerpt from Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It's a strong voice that's pure throughout its range, and she wields it with the sure touch of an artist who understands the full range of emotions demanded by opera. Miller maintained the wow factor with pieces that included a long, powerful song by Rachmaninoff and an aria from Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.

Borichevsky displayed the same virtues when he joined her in the Puccini excerpt. In other pieces, he proved he can move between the power demanded by opera and the quieter, nuanced style required by art song. Borichevsky's opening number, a setting of Shakespeare's Orpheus With His Lute, was a beautiful example of a simple, effective musical setting, simply and effectively performed.

Borichevsky can handle more popular styles, too. He's a half-Irish native of Doylestown, so he picked When Irish Eyes Are Smiling as his preferred pop song from 1912. A tenor with an O at the beginning of his name couldn't have done a better job of making the angels sing.

Deceptively simple A. E. Housman

The third guest vocalist, Randall Scarlata, contributed the kind of performances that have made him a mainstay of the Philadelphia vocal scene. Charles Ives's Camp Meeting transforms a description of a folksy gathering into a solemn ritual and finishes with the altar call hymn, "Just as I am without one plea." Scarlata delivered the first section with imposing authority and faded perfectly into the melody and gentle piety of the hymn.

Scarlata's reading of a Finnish love song combined power with effective shading. In a setting of an A. E. Housman poem by the British composer George Butterworth, he captured the intense high drama hidden beneath Housman's deceptively simple language.

Lyric Fest's founders have been spending less time on stage recently but they played a major role in this event. For her first number, soprano Randi Marrazzo had a good time with the comic lyrics from Victor Herbert's "Baghdad," which describe a fabled world in which modern aberrations like alimony and women voters were taboo.

Later, Marrazzo contributed the long melody line of a French chanson by the Venezuelan composer Reynaldo Hahn, and a moving performance of the song Irving Berlin wrote on the loss of his first wife, who died on their honeymoon in 1912.

Two eccentrics, together

Suzanne DuPlantis presented one of the afternoon's big surprises: A John Cage song that set a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. (Cage made the program by virtue of having been born in 1912.)

On paper it looked like the most unpromising item on the program— a pairing that combined one of the 20th Century's great musical eccentrics with a text of legendary unintelligibility. Instead, it turned out to be stunningly haunting. Cage created a surprisingly expressive setting, and DuPlantis's dark, knowledgeable delivery added the final touch.

DuPlantis's other turns included well-chosen songs in Italian and Ukrainian, and a setting of Yeats's poem, Cloth of Heaven, which combined well-chosen words with an appealing melody.

The third Lyric Fest founder, pianist Laura Ward, again contributed accompaniments that surrounded the vocalists with atmosphere and instrumental color.

Kings and peasants

Lyric Fest's programs are so varied that you can't expect to like everything. A choral setting of a passage from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, sung by the Chamber Singers of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, seemed prosaic and predictable, despite Randall Scarlata's strong solos.

The finale ended the program with an affirmation tinted with poignancy. Sir Edward Elgar's 1912 choral work, The Music Makers, takes its text and title from Arthur O'Shaughnessy's poem in praise of dreamers and visionaries. The soloists joined the chorus for an excerpt declaring that "The soldier, the king and the peasant are working together as one, 'til our dream shall become their present, and their work in the world be done."

Two years later, the hopes of the Belle Epoque died in the mud and slaughter of the First World War. Lyric Fest's quirky, genre-spanning birthday bash provided a glimpse of the creative vitality that flourished in the years before the catastrophe.