MENIL PROVIDES APT SETTING FOR ‘DIE WINTERREISE’
Last spring, the folks at Da Camera could hardly have anticipated how ironic it would prove to be to label their 2017-18 season “No Place Like Home.” While many of their concerts have been uprooted as the Theater District undergoes extensive post-Hurricane Harvey repairs, their Monday evening program happily took place as planned at The Menil Collection.
Both organizations are celebrating 30th anniversaries this season, the Menil proved a fitting setting for Da Camera’s concert. Titled “A Stranger I Arrive, A Stranger I Depart,” the program comprised just one work: Franz Schubert’s 1827 song cycle “Die Winterreise” (Winter’s Journey).
Much more than a series of related songs, “Die Winterreise” is a complete narrative of one man’s broken-hearted journey without destination into a winter landscape. His voyage of self-exile echoes themes in the Menil’s current exhibit of Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which illustrates the fragility of “home” in a turbulent world. “Die Winterreise” is operatic in scope while intimate and personal in scale, and it greatly benefited from the Menil’s spare, minimalist, nearly all-white interior, invoking the song cycle’s winter setting while offering nothing to distract the audience’s attention from the performers, who were just a few feet away.
Song recitals are a hard sell in this country, and particularly so in Houston, where even opera superstar Renée Fleming couldn’t fill the Wortham Theater Center’s smaller Cullen Theater for a recital. So it’s particularly gratifying that Da Camera is taking up the gauntlet by programming so challenging a work as “Die Winterreise,” which is oft-recorded but difficult to encounter live outside of New York.
This song cycle’s musical demands require an accompanist of equal importance to the singer. Pianist and Da Camera Artistic Director Sarah Rothenberg was more than up to these demands. Her keyboard depicted everything from blustery gusts of wind and dramatic flashes of lightning, to the protagonist’s own leaping, racing heartbeat and the delicate drops of his frozen tears. In the fourth of the cycle’s 24 songs, “Frozen,” Rothenberg impressively dispatched the rapidly rolling triplets that underscored the singer’s roiling, desperate emotional state.
Canadian lyric baritone Tyler Duncan was a near ideal interpreter, a singer in that sweet spot in his career when he’s young enough to be in prime vocal estate, yet old enough to have enough life experience that informs his interpretation of a man so shattered by lost love that he sets off into the winter wilderness with no idea where this journey will take him. Come for the tonal beauty, stay for the interpretive insight and expressive depth.
Duncan employed a minimum of physical gestures so as not to distract the audience’s attention from where it belongs — on the expressiveness of his complex vocal shadings and face, his look of bleak despair binding the end of one song to the beginning of the next. He was helped by the Menil’s acoustics, just live and resonant enough to do some of the vocal heavy lifting for him, yet not so resonant that the audience lost the sense of immediacy. Duncan’s long, seamless vocal lines employed a wide
SARAH ROTHENBERG, PIANO, AND TYLER DUNCAN, BARITONE, PERFORMING ‘DIE WINTERREISE.’
palette of vocal colors, dynamic shading and word pointing, yet sounded natural and conversational rather than mannered or overworked.
This was storytelling at its best. Da Camera helpfully provided complete translations of the German texts and projected the English title of each song on the white wall behind and above the performers. With the language barrier removed, it seemed like not such a great leap from public radio’s “The Moth” storytelling slams to this poetic journey enhanced and propelled by Schubert’s expressive score.
Maybe there’s hope for the vocal recital after all.
Eric Skelly is a freelance writer.