Duo recital loses 1 voice — but the other dazzles
One of the great things about a duo recital is that if one performer gets sick, it’s not nearly as hard to reconfigure the program. And when the healthy remaining performer is Miah Persson, it means the audience gets to spend twice as much time luxuriating in the gift of her singing.
The Swedish soprano put in a communicative and often dazzling appearance in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon, March 19, in a more extensive vocal workout than anyone
had counted upon. The recital, presented by Cal Performances, was originally planned as a chronological tour of Schumann’s songs, delivered by Persson and the Austrian baritone Florian Boesch.
But Boesch wound up with severe laryngitis, leaving it to Persson to carry the show herself, accompanied with characteristic dexterity by pianist Malcolm Martineau. She proved entirely up to the task.
Persson hasn’t been heard in these parts for a decade, since she made a glorious San Francisco Opera debut as Sophie in Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier,” and Sunday’s recital was a reminder of what local audiences have missed. She boasts a combination of lustrous high notes and a husky, almost improbably expressive middle register, and her phrasing and diction are so pristine that everything she sings come through with uncommon clarity.
Rejiggering the program was mostly a matter of expanding the Schumann material that had been originally planned as more of a sampler. So we got the entire song cycle “Frauenliebe und —leben” instead of selections from it, and more excerpts than planned from some of the collections of Schumann’s middle period.
But it also meant that Persson led off with an enchanting account of Grieg’s Six Songs, Op. 48 — his only songs in German, and an apt stylistic link to the Schumann model. Persson and Martineau collaborated to give these songs a wealth of eloquence and grace, from the slow-paced urgency of “Dereinst, Gedanke mein” (“One day, my thoughts”) through the frisky erotic wit of “Die verschwiegene Nachtigall” (“The discreet nightingale”) to the big dramatic climax of “Ein Traum” (“A dream”).
And Schumann — who aside from one Grieg encore dominated the rest of the afternoon — fared no less well. Persson took the full measure of “Frauenliebe,” conveying the exuberance of first love and the somber tragedy of widowhood, with a perfectly judged account of “Du Ring an meinem Finger” — at once soulfully sustained and emotionally unbridled — at midpoint.
The familiar “Mondnacht” from the Op. 39 “Liederkreis” found Persson’s singing at its most limpid and shapely, and she wisely included a few selections by Clara Schumann as well — two beautiful selections published under her husband’s name in the Op. 37 collection, and a vividly Schubertian setting of Heine’s “Lorelei.”
From the end of Schumann’s life came two excerpts from “Poems of Queen Mary Stuart,” for which Martineau offered a spoken apologia that the dark-hued, rather lumpy music didn’t quite support. No matter — Persson’s singing was as radiant here as elsewhere. How much longer must we wait for a return appearance?