Depth of vocal talent on display
In the opera world, it’s the high singers — your sopranos, your tenors — who get the girl or guy, the showstopping aria and all too often the acclaim. But let us never lose sight of the glories of a rich and rumbling lower register.
Those splendors were doubly on display on Sunday, March 26, when the Schwabacher Debut Recitals series got its four-part season off to a fine start with a joint appearance by mezzosoprano Taylor Raven and bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum. In a tagteam appearance in the Taube Atrium Theatre, handsomely accompanied by pianist Mark Morash, these two young artists took turns plumbing the nether reaches of the song repertoire.
Hearing just one artist operating at this level of excellence would have satisfied even the most demanding listener. Two felt like an embarrassment of riches.
Of the two singers, Raven proved initially more striking, if only because the quality of her voice is so unusual. There’s a weighty, almost cavernous aspect to it,
with a chesty resonance that seems to be in fulltime operation against the force of gravity; when Raven makes a move into an even moderately high range, she does it with a faint air of heroism.
Yet at the same time, there’s nothing labored or difficult about her delivery. You can tell, from the ease and clarity of her phrasing and the wealth of colorings she brings to her tone, that the sonorous depths are her home.
And that, in turn, can cast a new light on wellworn repertoire. When Raven opened the program with Purcell’s “Music for a while,” the song’s soothing rhetoric took on an almost otherworldly cast; the bewitching strain that can often be implicit here suddenly came right to the fore.
Debussy’s “Songs of Bilitis,” too, emerged with all their sensuality intact, but also with a troubling sense of the uncanny. It was hard not to feel a slight implied reproach, as though we’d been taking these songs too lightly all these years — and with them the shadowy power of Eros.
In a less unsettling and more traditional vein, Raven also gave a heartfelt, vivid account of Montsalvatge’s “Cinco canciones negras,” and brought clarity and grace — as well as a lovely parting of the tonal clouds — to Korngold’s 1933 cycle “Unvergänglichkeit” (“Eternity”).
Quattlebaum, meanwhile, undertook a display of unbridled suavity and flair, matching the vigor and sinew of his voice with a wondrous strain of dramatic urgency. He was at his best in Ibert’s “Songs of Don Quixote,” in a reading that combined swagger and romantic ardor; the sheer tonal loveliness of the “Song for Dulcinea” was just one highlight among many.
In Berg’s Four Songs, Op. 2, Quattlebaum never shied away from the technical demands of the music (either for himself or the audience), and he gave a little lesson in how to bring out the lushness underlying the composer’s music. And for sheer ingratiating beauty, it would be hard to top his account of the “Four Songs on Galician Texts” by the Spanish composer Antón García Abril.
The program’s only real weakness was the fact that it combined two such lithe and powerful voices, then kept them apart from one another for nearly the entire duration. By the midpoint, I was already beginning to wonder how long I’d have to wait to hear these two square off in the third act of “Siegfried”; instead, they wound up their joint recital limply with Marc Blitzstein’s “Stay in My Arms,” a ditty that could be charitably described as second-rate.