Welcome to simonkeenlyside.info - 2002 April 30: recital, Herbst Theatre, San Fransisco

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San Francisco, Herbst Theatre, 30th April 2002

Simon Keenlyside, baritone

Malcolm Martineau, piano

John Ireland:

Sea Fever

John Liptrot Hatton:

To Anthea Who May Command Him Anything

Arthur Somervell:

Birds in the High Hall-Garden

Percy Aldridge Grainger:

The Sprig of Thyme

Peter Warlock:

My Own Country

Sleep

Piggesnie

Herbert Howells:

The Little Boy Lost

Gustav Holst:

Betelgeuse

Benjamin Britten:

Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, op. 74

Franz Schubert:

Lied des Orpheus, als er in die Hölle ging (Orpheus’ song when he went to hell)

Die Einsiedelei (The hermitage)

An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht (To the moon in a night in autmn)

Der Wanderer an den Mond (The wanderer to the moon)

Die Sterne, D 939 (The stars)

Gabriel Fauré:

Mandoline (Mandolin)

En sourdine (Muted)

Green

Notre amour (Our love)

Secret

Le papillon et la fleur (The butterfly and the flower)

Serenata toscana (Tuscan serenade)

Encores:

Gabriel Fauré:

Après un rêve (After a dream)

Franz Schubert:

L’incanto degli occhi (The magic of the eyes)

What the critics say

San Francisco Chronicle, 2nd May 2002 (Joshua Kosman)

Baritone has strong second half. Keenlyside struggles with English songs but masters Fauré.

It would be reasonable to suppose that it takes an Englishman to give English songs their due. Reasonable but wrong, to judge from baritone Simon Keenlyside's striking but uneven recital in Herbst Theatre on Tuesday night.

Appearing under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, Keenlyside devoted the first half of his program to music of his native land -- a handful of songs by minor Victorians and Edwardians -- followed by Britten's late "Songs and Proverbs of William Blake."

It wasn't until the second half, though, in music of Schubert and Faure, that Keenlyside's rolling, resonant baritone and incisive mastery of the words paid the richest dividends. Here at last, the singer delivered lyricism, shapely phrasing and dramatic cohesion in full, forceful measure.

The five Schubert songs, none of them top-10 selections, benefited from Keenlyside's ability to sketch out an expansive dramatic scene in a few efficient musical strokes. "An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht" ("To the moon on an autumn night"), a sprawling fantasia of a piece, emerged with its swift changes of mood and direction fortified by the performance's inner logic.

The more concise melodic charms of "Der Wanderer an den Mond" ("The wanderer addresses the moon"), with its walking piano accompaniment, and "Die Sterne" ("The stars"), came through sweetly.

Even greater pleasures followed in the concluding set of seven Faure songs. Accompanied with quiet dexterity by pianist Malcolm Martineau, Keenlyside endowed the music with emotional intimacy, delicacy and just enough sentiment to keep them true without succumbing to bathos.

The set included an elegant account of "Mandoline," an ardent, high-flown rendition of "Notre amour" ("Our love") and a glittery, translucent performance (after a memory lapse forced a second take) of "Le papillon et la fleur" ("The butterfly and the flower").

In a witty touch, Keenlyside concluded the set with the "Tuscan Serenade," sung in Italian rather than French and sounding, as he pointed out, utterly idiomatic. Faure's "Apres un reve" made a luminous encore, following Schubert's odd setting of Metastasio's "L'incanto degli occhi" ("The enchantment of eyes").

Keenlyside's vocal gifts include not only his robust tone and probing intelligence but also a rhythmic mastery that shows up in the precise placement of phrases and words. His weak spot is intonation, which revealed itself periodically throughout the evening but particularly in slow passages -- long sustained notes would often begin in tune, then veer away -- and in music that was less than straightforward harmonically.

That was one reason his performances of the English songs seemed less than persuasive -- also perhaps a case of jet lag, to judge from his bleary, unshaven demeanor and his poignant side remarks on the subject of sleep.

Certainly there was not much in his performance to make a listener suspect hidden treasures in the dull Victorian parlor songs of John Ireland, John Hatton and Sir Arthur Somervell that began the evening.

Gustav Holst's slow, ghostly "Betelgeuse" (about the distant star) suffered most severely from Keenlyside's pitch problems. The most interesting offerings were three by Peter Warlock, whose apparently clear modal writing conceals rhythmic booby traps.

The Britten cycle, written in 1965 for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, emerged sounding strained and unpersuasive. The abstractions of Britten's late style -- with 12-tone structures to underlie the brief, gnomic utterances of the proverbs and more expansive settings of the poems themselves -- called for a surer, more precise reading than Keenlyside could muster.

San Francisco Classical Voice

Near Perfection in the Art of Song

By Stephanie Friedman

Simon Keenlyside

"A Cambridge man," my Cantabrigian companion was heard to mutter as the baritone Simon Keenlyside strode onstage with his accompanist, the excellent Malcolm Martineau, at Herbst Theatre on Tuesday. Indeed, from the first of his many sweeps of fingers through hair (lest it be too neat) to his one-second buck and wing performed onstage while Martineau went back to find the page turner for the second encore, Keenlyside proved himself the epitome of an educated, entertaining performer, Cantabrigian to the core.

(As an undergraduate, Keenlyside studied not music but zoology; Ian Bostridge has a Ph.D. in history. Cambridge has a tradition of turning amateurs into good musicians, and producing college students who then go on to become outstanding performers. Think the Kings College Chapel Choir,or Monty Python's Flying Circus.)

What, then, might a "Cantabrigian's" song recital be like? It would be like Simon Keenlyside's recital (and for that matter, Malcolm Martineau's — also a Cambridge man): a program as immensely satisfying as a well-planned meal; an easy rapport between singer and audience; and perhaps most importantly, the singer's certainty that if he can infect the audience with his own enthusiasm for the songs, the unfamiliarities and complexities of this unusual and difficult program will slip down their eager gullets like a good wine. Finally, let us not omit periodic comments, informal and informative, charmingly delivered.

Broad representation

A variety of English songs from the Victorian era to mid-20th century, which constituted the first half, ranged from little-known composers — John Hatton and Herbert Howells — to the better known: Sir Arthur Somervell, Percy Grainger (an honorary Englishman: he was born in Australia and became an American citizen, dying in White Plains, N.Y.), Peter Warlock (aka Philip Heseltine), and Gustav Holst, whom Keenlyside loosened from the gravitational pull of The Planets long enough to present his haunting "Betelgeuse," an evocation of the gigantic red star six-hundred million miles wide.

The English songs progressed in complexity and bitterness, moving inexorably towards the knotty center of the first half, Britten's Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Keenlyside articulated masterfully the texts of Warlock's "My Own Country," unabashedly English in its love of the land, and "spoke" the beautiful text of "Sleep" to Martineau's entrancingly antiquey piano acompaniment. Howells' "The Little Boy Lost" (to a text of William Blake), whose sad theme of the neglected child Keenlyside linked in his remarks to the same theme in the second Britten song, "The chimney sweeper," featured a motif of treble bells in the piano that moved steadily down the keyboard as the tragedy of the poem unfolded,ending with heavy minor seconds and deep tolling open fifths. The last song before the Britten was Holst's "Betelgeuse," with its incantatory pulse and Keenlyside's eerie falsetto on the word "haunts" putting the final touches on the scene set for the Blake songs.

Keenlyside had hoped to continue without break directly into the Britten, but was interrupted by applause, which he thrust from him with a sweep of his arm, at the same time tearing into the first Proverb with furious gusto. His well-honed, multi-colored baritone is entirely appropriate for these gnarled songs, written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with texts selected by the tenor Peter Pears. They run the gamut: The child-like second song "The Chimney Sweeper" depicts the misery of the "little black thing among the snow," yanked from his happiness "upon the heath" by his parents and "clothed . . . in the clothes of death" to crawl into the dark, sooty chimneys of industrial England.

Two artists well partnered

The biting "Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright / In the forests of the night" almost doubts the ability of God to approve this creation: "Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" which Britten renders in a soft, sardonic, upward filigree for each line. Never has a question been so artfully conceived as music. Keenlyside and Martineau evoked every bit of irony contained in these unnerving lines. "The Fly," the most innocent but not by any means the least complex of the songs, calls for a key-tickling technique in the piano and a wan, passionless tone in the singer, both of which it received. As a final example, "Ah, Sun-flower" throbs with a long-lined, passionate legato in the voice, while the piano performs a series of hollow doodlings like clumps of little, other-worldly bells.

Textually and musically, these songs are ferociously difficult to execute and perhaps to listen to. They hurt, in every respect, but they are worth the pain. The songs require subtle, refined interpretation from both artists and a strict attention to pitches on the part of the singer, who must repeatedly sing in jarring half-steps around the piano pitch, pulling against it as if fighting for existence. Keenlyside and Martineau handled this formidable technical challenge with aplomb, allowing the listener to focus fully on the powers and strange beauties of these songs.

After the intricacies and dissonances of the Britten cycle, I anticipated relaxing into the different, more immediately rewarding pleasures of Schubert and Fauré in the second half. But that expectation grew into an unexpected delight as the songs of the second half revealed surprising correspondences with the songs of the first half. The English songs, it turned out, looked forward to, and built towards, not only the Britten but the Schubert and Fauré songs too, creating resonances that the musical memory picked up, thus spinning a marvelous web of reminiscences and retrospective pleasure and finally, understanding. This is the essence of intelligent program planning.

Love and death

The heroic thrust of John Ireland's "Sea Fever," to John Masefield's famous poem, added by Keenlyside as opener to the program, and of John Hatton's "To Anthea, who may command him anything," poem by Robert Herrick," found echoes in Schubert's "Lied des Orpheus" ("Song of Orpheus") and the forthright yet poignant "Der Wanderer an den Mond" ("The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon"). In the magnificent "En sourdine" ("Muted") by Fauré, to the breathtaking poem by Paul Verlaine, the piano accompaniment weaves its own love-drenched spell while the singer speaks the music of the lovers' souls, glancing backwards once again to "Sea Fever," this time to the sea voyage's ending — death — and the phrase, ". . . when the long trick's over." Ireland delays the final syllable of the word "over" until after the piano has stopped, so that it drapes itself over the stilled chord like an exhausted limb. Death becomes sensual, like love — a particularly apt correspondence.

The unfamiliar Schubert song "An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht" ("To the moon on an autumn night") is like a meditation, starting with an appreciation of the "friendly-faced moon" who witnesses all human smiles and suffering, and ending with the "dark chamber" where its light cannot penetrate: ". . . but I will smile no more/and weep no more/no one will think about me again/upon this fair earth."

To speak of Keenlyside's artistry in terms of vocal attributes or shortcomings seems irrelevant. He sang the texts, foremost and at all times, charmingly, passionately, or coolly as required, with utmost discernment. But it should also be said that he negotiated the abrupt register changes of Schubert's "Song of Orpheus" seamlessly, and that his voice was as rich as one could ask for in, for example, the affecting "Der Wanderer an den Mond" ("The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon"). Even in the first half of the recital, when he seemed vocally less sure and his voice faltered or cracked on several attempted pianissimos, his intention was clear.

Masterly styling

In the Fauré songs Keenlyside's French was near-flawless and tellingly delivered. He breathed a beautifully articulated delicacy into the words "j'ai caché" ("I hid") in "Le secret" ("The secret"). The line "Laissez-la s'apaiser de la bonne tempête" ("Let it recover from the sweet storm") in "Green" became in his expert treatment of the text the afterglow of love that it was meant to be. And how lovely to hear the early song "Sérénade Toscane" ("Tuscan Serenade") performed in the original anonymous Italian text, from which Romain Bussine made the more familiar French translation. Here, as in the first encore, one of Schubert's settings of Metastasio texts, "L'incanto degli'occhi" ("The enchantment of the eyes"), Keenlyside sounded as if he had been an Italian tenor all along, masquerading as an English baritone.The suave lightness of his voice was perfectly suited to the song's skittery "embroidery."

As a second encore, Fauré's famous "Après un rêve" ("After a dream") sounded burnished and ardent in Keenlyside's upper-middle range, like a French baritone. In a supreme manifestation of control, he effected a diminuendo while negotiating the triplet melisma of "lumière" ("light"). This was not mere vocal beauty. It was a revelation of the singer's intelligence and taste, which,along with Malcolm Martineau — upon whom enough praise cannot be lavished — achieved the glories of this evening.