Infusing Brahms with charm
The romance involving Count Peter of Provence and Princess Magelone of Naples may not be familiar to many early consumers of bedtime stories, but it’s not hard to recognize the traditional narrative elements. These include love at first sight between aristocrats, strokes of sudden bad luck and miraculous reversals, a kindly shepherd, and more.
In the 1860s, when Brahms used this tale as the basis for a set of 15 songs, German audiences may not have needed too much help following the plot. But on Wednesday, March 7, when the San Francisco Opera Center presented the cycle under the title “Die schöne Magelone” (“The Beautiful Magelone”), some spoken narration and charming animated projections were useful in providing the songs with a dramatic context.
Useful up to a point, that is. The main motivation for the event, after all, was musical, and it was the twin contributions of soprano Felicia Moore and bass-baritone Christian Pursell, expertly accompanied by pianist César Cañón, that gave the evening its real charm.
This presentation in the Taube Atrium Theater, the second installment in the season’s Schwabacher Recital Series, followed one performance tradition of dividing the cycle’s 15 songs between two singers. Director Aria Umezawa interwove the songs with an extended narrative delivered by actor Albert Rubio, and added projections by Cristina Garcia Martin.
But the songs didn’t gain much from this expedient, since they’re not so much tale-spinning as emotional set pieces. And Moore and Pursell, each in their own way, helped bring the expressive points of these songs into the open.
Compared to the darker and more robust work of his later years, the “Magelone” songs find Brahms at his most overtly Schubertian in both form and harmonic approach (Schubert’s two narrative song cycles, “Winterreise” and “Die schöne Müllerin,” are obvious artistic models). There are songs with repeating verses that suddenly widen out into unforeseen byways, and others that stick closely to established song tropes.
Pursell, in a performance of impressive grandeur and depth, encapsulated each of these moments superbly. His singing was full of burnished colors, and he moved with assurance between the delicate lyricism of a song such as “Ruhe, Süssliebchen, im Schatten,” in which Peter sweetly sings Magelone to sleep in a leafy arbor, to the fiercely dramatic outbursts of the ensuing “Verzweiflung” (“Despair”), by which point things have started to go south for the two lovers.
Moore’s voice is bigger and more distinctly operatic in character, and it took her the space of a song or two to fully wrestle it to the more intimate scale of a song recital. But once she did, the results were transfixing, marked by tonal brilliance and emotional eloquence.
The alternation (not strict) between the two singers helped give the cycle a sense of tonal variety it could not have had in the hands of a single artist. And it helped set up a truly touching final duet, as the combined vocal forces of the performers mirrored the final, longawaited reunion of the cycle’s two lovers.