Thursday May 3, 2012 - At a recent concert by the Juilliard Orchestra, my friend Alan and I found our ears pricking up at the sound of tenor Spencer Lang's voice singing Berlioz's Au Cimitiere. Alan and I have heard thousands of voices over the years and it takes something sonically special to really seduce our ears at this point in time. But seduced we were, and wanting to hear more of this voice.
Tonight I had a second opportunity to hear this young singer and since Alan was tied up with GOTTERDAMMERUNG at The Met, I went alone to Juilliard's Paul Hall where Spencer Lang and pianist Dan K. Kurland performed four Britten cycles. It's been a long time since I last sat in Paul Hall - the place back at the turning of the last century where I first heard my now-departed friend Makiko Narumi singing Schumann, and where singers currently thriving on the international scene - people like Meagan Miller, Erika Wueschner, Nicole Piccolomini and Jason Collins - gave some of their first public performances. It's a nostalgic place for me; I sat in my usual seat tonight, recalling all the musical experiences I had enjoyed in this room and waiting for Spencer to appear.
This all-Britten programme was devised as a way to show how the composer dealt with setting words to music. The four cycles are each in a different language: The Sechs Hölderlin Fragmente in German, The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in Italian, Quatre Chansons Françaises (French) and Winter Words, in English.
The blonde, youthful tenor and his handsome dark-haired pianist looked casually dapper as they launched into the opening Quatre Chansons Françaises, and several things immediately became evident: first, that Spencer's voice is every bit as distinctive and poetic as I remembered it; second, that his timbre falls more pleasingly on the ear than that of several tenors who have sung Britten; third, that he steered clear of preciousness - favoring instead a clear and ardent delivery - and fourth, that he had a pianist with whom he could conspire to deliver a full palette of musical colours.
Above: pianist Dan K. Kurland, photo by Larry Lapidus.
The French songs, composed by Britten at the tender age of 14, are astoundingly beautiful: pensive and impassioned by turn. In the course of this cycle, singer and pianist drew us into their world. From there we moved on to the Michelangelo Sonnets with their panoramic variety of rhythmic, dynamic and harmonic nuances; Spencer was not fazed by the high tessitura of some of these songs. The two musicians had everything worked out to the finest detail yet it all seemed wonderfully spontaneous and alive.
The Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente provided more revelatory vocalism, with Spencer's dreamy Heimat a particular high point. Sokrates und Alcibiades sounded like a love song, and the mystery of Halfte des Lebens was hauntingly explored. Turning in the end to the English language and poems of Thomas Hardy, in Winter Words the singer and pianist captured the ironic sense of naive simplicity which weaves thru these post-World War II vignettes and which concludes with the deeper context of Before Life and After with its longing for a time “before the birth of consciousness, when all went well”. In this final song, Britten’s perennial theme of the conflict between innocence and experience is movingly set forth.
Throughout this long and demanding sing, Spencer maintained both beauty and clarity of sound and an unerring rightness of poetic expression, with his pianist an ideal collaborator. What could have been a more perfect encore than Britten's poignant folksong setting of Down by the Sally Gardens, which was performed with touching directness of emotion and which also served as a reminder to me that it is not only the young who are foolish when it comes to love:
It was down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet.
She crossed the Sally Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree,
But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.
In a field down by the river, my love and I did stand
And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.