Oberon's Grove

NYFOS: Beginner's Luck

Above: Stephen Blier surrounded by Kate Morton, Zoë Zhou, Reed Gnepper, Bénédicte Jourdois, Jamal Al-Titi, and Chea Kang; photo by Cherylynn Tsushima.

Author: Lili Tobias

Thursday March 20th, 2025 - Beginner’s Luck—The Artist’s Journey at the Kaufman Music Center on was an impressive collaborative effort between four singers and three pianists; the concert was part of the New York Festival of Song, co-founded by Steven Blier who also served as artistic director, mentor to Caramoor’s 2025 Schwab Vocal Rising Stars, and one of the pianists in concert. The aforementioned Rising Stars were soprano Chea Kang, mezzo-soprano Kate Morton, tenor Reed Gnepper, baritone Jamal Al-Titi, and pianist Zoë Zhou. They were also joined by associate artistic director and pianist Bénédicte Jourdois.

All the artists worked together to craft a well-rounded program of songs, from classical to musical theater to other styles of popular song, and it was heart-warming to hear them speak about the music before performing it—clearly a lot of care had gone into choosing and preparing the songs!

The four singers all had an extensive background in classical singing and opera, so it was interesting to see how they approached the non-classical styles of song on the program. I thought that mezzo-soprano Kate Morton and tenor Reed Gnepper’s voices felt the most at home in a more musical theater-y style, but that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the other two singers’ performances of that genre. Hearing the wide variety of songs sung in four completely distinct styles revealed that perhaps the variety is not actually quite as wide. There are truly so many similarities—in the capacity for storytelling, in the emotional impact—between classical art songs, musical theater songs, and other styles of song, and depending on the singer, many performances lie within a gray area between genres.

 

 

Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima

 

I love going to concerts and recitals that feature multiple singers because it’s a joy to experience each of their personal approaches to the music, both in terms of vocal quality and technique and stage presence as well. I mentioned previously that I thought Morton and Gnepper’s voices were well suited to musical theater, and  a lot of that was due to the warmth and brightness of their singing, which filled the room with beautiful sound (and this was true for the more classical style songs as well). In contrast, I felt that soprano Chae Kang and baritone Jamal Al-Titi both sang with a more pointed intonation, hitting each note with perfect precision and articulating every single consonant and vowel. Kang’s incredible vocal control was on full display when she performed Edvard Grieg’s Die verschwiegene Nachtigall. It’s a classical music cliche for sopranos to sing music about birds, but I can see the reasoning behind it! Kang meticulously produced every single warble and trill as if she was a real nightingale.

 

 

Al-Titi (above, photo by Cherylynn Tsashima) displayed incredible vocal control as well in his performance of Mikhail Glinka’s The Traveler’s Song, the musical style of which is akin to “patter songs” most commonly found in opera buffa or other comic operas. Managing the unrelenting rush of notes and syllables was impressive enough, but I was absolutely blown away by Al-Titi’s stage presence during this song, as well as the other ones he performed. He had me and the entire audience smiling and laughing with just a raise of his eyebrow or a movement of his hand. I was also impressed with the chemistry between all the singers when they performed duets.

 

While performing Jeffery Stock’s We Two Boys and Robert Beaser’s I’m so much more me, Gnepper and Al-Titi (above, photo by Cherylynn Tsushima) casually leaned against a piano, showed off some dance moves, nailed a beautiful a cappella section, and held hands for the final bow. 

 

 

Above:  pianists Zoë Zhou and Bénédicte Jourdois; photo by Cherylynn Tsushima. The coordination between the three pianists (on two pianos, no less) deserves recognition as well! They accompanied the singers in various combinations, from the standard one pianist/one piano to piano four-hands to two piano arrangements. As a pianist who mainly accompanies singers myself, I know just how useful it is for these young singers to be able to work with multiple different pianists (as well as for the pianists to work with many singers). Every musician has their own way of interacting with the other musicians they collaborate with, so it must have been a wonderful learning and growing experience for everyone involved.

 

 

The encore to the concert was, naturally, George and Ira Gershwin’s (I’ve Got) Beginner’s Luck! Overall, this concert felt like a complete theatrical production, with a plot arc of growing up. While these musicians had only been working all together for the past week, I would have believed it if I was told they had been making music together for years. It was evident from everyone performing in Beginner’s Luck that music has the incredible ability to form deep bonds between people that will likely last a lifetime.

 

 

Performance photos by Cherylynn Tsushima

~ Lili Tobias

Jeannette Pilou as Violetta

A recording has surfaced of one of Jeannette Pilou's Metropolitan Opera TRAVIATAs. She sang the role of Violetta only three times in New York City, and I was present at this one - on November 18th, 1967 - so I am very glad to have found this memento of this matinee.

TRAVIATA Met Nov 18 1967 Pilou Alva Merrill Behr

Read my article - with lots of photos - about this entrancing soprano here.

LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO ~ 25th ANNIVERSARY

A gala concert celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Lyric Opera of Chicago was given on October 14th, 1979.

The participating conductors were George Prêtre, Nicola Rescigno, Riccardo Chailly, Bruno Bartoletti, Sir John Pritchard, and Krzysztof Penderecki, and the line-up of singers was impressive indeed.

Listen here.

Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra Make a Statement @ Carnegie Hall

Above: Maestro Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra onstage at Carnegie Hall; photo by Fadi Kheir

~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin

Tuesday March 18th, 2025 - Tuesday March 18th, 2025 - Franz Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra tonight in the first of two back-to-back Carnegie Hall performances. The second concert will feature music of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, but the Orchestra was forced to make a major change in the program of tonight’s concert after Asmik Grigorian announced her withdrawal for personal reasons. Ms. Grigorian, the Lithuanian soprano, was set to sing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs and the final scene from Puccini’s Suor Angelica with the Clevelanders.

Missing a chance to hear the Four Last Songs is a real shame, but Welser-Möst took this opportunity instead to make a timely political statement in what might be one of his last Carnegie Hall appearances before his retirement in 2027:

"This program change has given us a chance to say something important about our world today. As people fight for freedom everywhere, these pieces tell that same human story. Beethoven's Fifth shows us the journey from darkness to light. Janáček's From the House of the Dead reveals how human dignity survives even in the most desolate of circumstances. And the Leonore Overture is, to me, simply the greatest music about freedom ever written. These works together create a profound statement that I believe will resonate deeply with our audiences in both Cleveland and New York.”

The first notes of the performance were the V-for-victory theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Besides being perhaps the world’s most famous four notes, this music represents Allied Europe’s victory over the Axis in World War II. (Russia, are you listening?)

Maestro Welser-Möst (above, photo by Fadi Kheir) mobilized the full forces of the Cleveland Orchestra for the Fifth, making it an orchestra more than twice the size of that envisioned by Beethoven. The result was an impressive, explosive sonority at the expense of contrast and transparency. In the first movement the Clevelanders’ sound was burnished and energetic as it traversed Beethoven’s volatile landscape of darkness and light.

The second movement was beautifully elegant, with notable vibrato-less hushed passages and flawless string crossings throughout the later variations of the theme. The finale was brisk without being breathless and avoided the Indiana Jones clichés that this movement often receives.

The second half of the program featured the suite (arranged by František Jílek) from Leoš Janáček’s final opera From the House of the Dead as well as Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. These pieces both come from larger dramas about imprisonment and the liberation of the steadfast human body and spirit. If Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony lays out a hero’s abstract journey through conflict toward triumph, the latter two pieces give a much more visceral view into their protagonists’ struggles against adversity and fate.

Janáček’s suite is wonderfully off-kilter and begins with a herculean violin solo—a free-associating kind of playing that involves an almost desperate sawing away at the top of the instrument’s register. Chaotic passages of music played by smaller sections of instruments are interspersed between bursts of the full orchestra with towering clusters of sound, always grounded by the low strings and brass. Inventive sounds made by rachet noisemakers, wood clappers, percussively plucked strings, and relentless repetitive figures all have the effect of boring a hole into one’s skull, slipping toward madness.

Passages drawn from a scene in the opera in which the prisoners stage a play feature macabre oom-pah-pahs, vaudeville fragments, and whiffs of a klezmer band. The final movement of the suite is a fauvist palette of blurry chords, a luxuriously strange and gorgeously dissonant tableau that concludes too optimistically considering all that came before.

It seems odd, then, to conclude the concert with an overture. Rare, too, is the chance to hear Beethoven after Janáček. But the Leonore Overture—from the opera that would become Fidelio—is a concise encapsulation of Welser-Möst’s message for the evening.

This piece was better suited than the Fifth to the large orchestra, which was able to achieve subtle shades ranging from the bright fanfare of the full orchestra (in C-major, like the final movement of the Fifth) to the eerie distance in the flute after the portentous off-stage trumpet call.

Fidelio is ultimately about the triumph of enlightenment values over despotism. Although Welser-Möst’s program had the potential to come off as trite and facile, his linking of these two Beethoven scores to Janáček’s and his reversal of the obvious order of their performance charted an intelligent, moving, and novel course that he hopes—despite our current administration’s unenlightened displays of power—might be followed in Europe.

~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin

Performance photos by Fadi Kheir, courtesy of Carnegie Hall

PEARL FISHERS Duet ~ Kraus & McDaniel

Alfredo Kraus and Barry McDaniel sing the great duet "Au Fond du Temple Saint" from Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles from a televised concert.

Watch and listen here.