Vocal Arts Society of Washington

Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 7.30pm
Austrian Embassy, Washington DC

Gerald Finley (bass-baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)

Robert Schumann: Heine settings
I
Tragödie I, II Op. 64 No.3
Der arme Peter I, II, III Op. 53. No. 3

II
Lehn’ deine Wang’ Op.142 No. 2
Es leuchtet meine Liebe Op.127 No.3
Dein Angesicht Op.127 No. 2
Mein Wagen rollet langsam Op.142 No. 4

III
Belsazar Op. 57
Die feindlichen Brüder Op. 49 No. 2
Abends am Strand Op. 49 No. 3
Die beiden Grenadiere Op. 49 No. 1

Interval

Maurice Ravel: Histoires naturelles
Le Paon
Le Grillon
Le Cygne
Le Martin-pêcheur
Le Pintade

Samuel Barber: Four Songs
The Daisies
Solitary Hotel
Bessie Bobtail
Nocturne

Charles Ives: Four Songs
West London
In the Alley
Charlie Rutledge
Slugging a Vampire

Encores

Maurice Ravel: Chanson à boire
Piotr Tchaikovsky: None but the lonely heart

Photo Gallery

With many thanks indeed to Karl and Andrea Schrammel of the Austrian Embassy in Washington

What the critics say

Marsha Dubrow, Washington Examiner.com, 18 March 2010

Met baritone Gerald Finley’s gorgeous voice, dramatic acting thrilled DC recital audience 3/17

If Gerald Finley had simply stood there and sung at last night’s Austrian Embassy recital, that would have been glorious enough.

But in addition to his rich, lush voice, the baritone’s powerful, expressive acting transformed each selection into an engrossing one-song drama or comedy.

He began as an impassioned lover imploring his maiden to “Flee with me and be my wife,” in Schumann’s “Tragödie I”, one of the evening’s several Schumann ballads set to Heinrich Heine’s poems. Finley also embodied “The Brothers”, dueling to the death over their smoldering love for a countess, and the Babylonian King “Belshazzar”.

In Samuel Barber’s “Bessie Bobtail”, Finley’s impish face became “screwed and wrinkled tight, Just like a nut” as he/Bessie cries, “O God He knows…”

Finley even personified a Texas cowpuncher, with accurate accent, in Charles Ives’ “Charlie Rutledge”.

In fact, when it comes to combining dramatic and vocal talent, “We have no bird more brilliant”, as Finley sang in Ravel’s “The Kingfisher”, one of the “Histoires Naturelles” set to poems by Jules Renard.

Finley moved as gracefully as “The Swan” among all emotions and characters, especially in Ravel’s nature creatures – including an increasingly inebriated fan of drinking, in “Chanson à Boire” from Ravel’s “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée”. That was the second encore demanded by the enthusiastic audience.

Finley and masterful accompanist Julius Drake meshed perfectly. “They blend together like mist,” as Finley sang in one of the Schumann/Heine songs.

The Finley/Drake pair paid the ideal tribute to Schumann during this bicentennial of his birth (June 8, 1810) and to Barber for the centennial of his birth (March 9, 1910).

One attendee, affiliated with several opera organizations in Washington, summed it up by saying, “This was the most amazing evening of music I’ve had in years.”

Finley demonstrated that as a recitalist, he is even more riveting than he is in the title role he created in John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic”. Finley’s outdoing his renowned success as J. Robert Oppenheimer may be hard to imagine, but oh, how the embassy audience loved him and Drake. 

Their music, to quote Barber’s “Nocturne” (text by Frederic Prokosch) was a sublime way to “Fill my heart and end my day.”

Anne Midgette, Washington Post, 19.3.2010

A performance of easy precision

The opening set of a song recital reveals a lot about what is to come. Some singers plan something beautiful and easy to win over the audience and get over their nerves. Some plan something flashy to take the audience by storm.

Gerald Finley, the Canadian baritone whom the Vocal Arts Society presented at the Austrian Embassy on Wednesday night, opened his recital with a two-part song by Robert Schumann on Heine texts: “Tragödie I, II.” The first part was violent and full of aching bravado: A lover orders his beloved to run off with him, while the piano sounds a final note of warning. The second part was quiet, with a stillness beyond sorrow: The young couple, lost, wanders until they die.

Finley didn’t show off in either. He simply shaded his voice to every meaning and nuance of the words, knowing exactly what he wanted to convey, but without any hint of mannerism; illustrating emotional and musical opposites with ease. It was the work of an artist, not a craftsman. It was an appropriate start to a formidable recital.

Singers can have trouble untangling art from artifice: There’s so much technique and know-how involved in producing an operatic sound that the voice can become like a mantle, something to be donned at appropriate moments. Finley, by contrast, was all natural. He could take his voice and expand it to a stentorian roar (in Schumann’s “Belsazar”), or pare it down to a falsetto as tender as a new crocus (in the same composer’s “Dein Angesicht,” your face), or even carry it over into a kind of pop-song folksiness at moments in “The Daisies” by Samuel Barber.

But high or low, whatever its timbre, it was always essentially his voice, produced as part of the same fluid line: It didn’t break, or divide, or leap abruptly from one mood or register to another. And every song was offered with the same fundamental directness, or honesty, as if he were speaking to his listeners.

That honesty applied, too, to the quality of his observations. To say Finley is a brilliant actor might give the erroneous impression that he struck poses, or declaimed, or seemed to do things to bring the songs across. What he did was simply inhabit them, with tremendous precision of detail, so that each one came alive, a small world of its own.

There was the pastoral hum of “Mein Wagen rollet langsam” (My cart rolls slowly), in which the baritone is startled from a sunny reverie into, briefly, the range of a tenor when three children jump up to tease him. There was the gruff patriotic bombast of “Die beiden Grenadiere,” the two grenadiers, heartbroken that their emperor is vanquished. There were, in Ravel’s “Histoires naturelles,” the finicky uptightness of “Le grillon” (the cricket), or, in “Le martin-pêcheur” (the kingfisher), the held breath of the enraptured human observer who doesn’t want to scare the beautiful bird away. (This was expressed, at the beginning, in a shining skein of song extended like a soap bubble between a few spare piano chords.)

All of this is what songs are supposed to do, but very few singers are actually able to get them to do it so consistently, and with such easy precision. Finley has already distinguished himself as an opera singer, particularly as the star of John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.” He may be even better as a recitalist.

The program was also beautifully assembled, with a focus on two of the year’s birthday boys: Schumann (200 this year) on the first half, showing the composer in a range of moods from short and sweet to bombastic (with four dramatic ballads); and on the second, four songs by Barber (a centenarian), along with the Ravel cycle and a set of Charles Ives. Julius Drake, the accompanist, seemed to have to work to achieve the power Finley got without effort: There was more drive, and a little sloppiness, in some of his work on the first half, but he was certainly expressive.

Finley, though, was far less obtrusive, and more effective. He made it look easy. Would that it were. From the applause, it seemed that everyone present would have been happy to hear him sing whatever he wanted.