Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York
Monday, 27 February 2012, 7:30pm
Gerald Finley (bass-baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
Carl Löwe:
Erlkönig
Tom der Reimer
Die wandelnde Glocke
Edward
Franz Schubert:
Grenzen der Menschheit
Der Zwerg
Der Schiffer
Der Kreuzzug
Der Einsame
Erlkönig
Huw Watkins:
Look Down, Fair Moon (North American premiere)
Benjamin Britten: Selected songs
Lemady
Greensleeves
I wonder as I wander
The Crocodile
Encores
Sullivan: The Lost Chord
Porter: The Tale of the Oyster
Schumann: Dein Angesicht
What the critics say
Allan Kozzin, New York Times, 28 February 2012
Displaying Acting Skills to Go With Vocal Ones
As anyone who has tried it can tell you, singing is an acting job, even if you are not in costume or on a theater stage. To project a song well, you have to define a character, imply a set of circumstances and show how one or both change, usually in less than five minutes.
The Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley is best known for his operatic work: he is in town to sing the title role in “Don Giovanni” at the Metropolitan Opera, and he created the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer in John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.” But he has proved that he is also a master of the more intimate art of song, both on recordings and in a memorable recital at Zankel Hall in 2010.
When Mr. Finley assembled the program he sang at Alice Tully Hall on Monday evening, with the superb pianist Julius Drake as his partner, he raised the stakes by devoting much of the program to songs that required him to convey the thoughts and emotions of two or more characters.
His portrayals tended to be subtle rather than broad. In the two settings of Goethe’s dark “Erlkönig” that framed the first half — a dramatic rendering by Carl Loewe, a contemporary of Schubert’s, and Schubert’s electrifying version — he used modest gradations of vocal weight and color to capture the child’s terror, the father’s assurance and the Erlkönig’s deathly seduction, but the distinctions could not have been clearer. In Loewe’s “Tom der Reimer” and Schubert’s “Zwerg,” the distinctions between the narrator and the male and female characters were drawn with similar restraint.
Mr. Finley expanded his palette in Loewe’s “Edward,” where he used the full depth and resonance of his voice in the murderous title character’s verses, and a lighter tone with a hint of tremulousness for the interrogating mother’s. And he played up the urbane comedy in Cole Porter’s “Tale of the Oyster,” one of his encores, by giving the oyster and the complaining Mrs. Hoggenheimer voices of their own.
Mr. Finley was no less effective in songs with a single perspective. In “Look Down, Fair Moon,” a new cycle by the Welsh composer Huw Watkins, he affected a moody nonchalance — a studied plainness, with little vibrato and the barest hint of a slide — to convey the moonbeam-drenched nocturnal ruminations of Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and the other poets in Mr. Watkins’s artful setting. And Mr. Finley’s imaginative, varied readings of four Benjamin Britten folk-song arrangements, which closed the program, were the perfect counterweight to the macabre minidramas of the first half.