Last night at Gallery 345 Rachel Fenlon gave a preview performance of her new one woman show Fenlon & Fenlon:Liebesbotschaft. It’s a program of fifteen more or less well known Schubert lieder put together to create some kind of thematic arc around love and loss and redemption. There’s scarcely a Bächlein to be seen. The USP, of course, is that Rachel accompanies herself on the piano.
It’s curiously difficult to figure out just how this approach makes the experience different for the audience, especially when, as in this case, one is not familiar with the singer in normal mode. It’s also quite hard to sort out what one thinks ought to be happening from what objectively is. For example, I initially thought that Rachel sounded balanced much further back relative to the piano than usual. Then I shut my eyes and the impression completely disappeared. It’s odd. Certain songs certainly seem to gain from the approach. Gretchen am Spinnrade perhaps most of all, with the piano more than ever seeming to be the spinning wheel. Another effect was it made me reconsider my impression that the piano parts in Schubert are pretty simple (in a sense they are compared to, say, Strauss) but played this way one realises that they are far from trivial.
The last Songmasters concert of the season featured a selection of works that sorta kinda had a Finnish or Hungarian connection. The first part of the prgram featured songs by Sibelius, all but one to Swedish texts, and piano pieces by Selim Palmgren, whose music sounds like a sort of cross between Debussy and Sibelius. The songs were sung Stephen Hegedus with plenty of power and quite a bit of subtlety. We had been told he was quite ill but one wouldn’t have known it. Fine, delicate work at the piano by Robert Kortgaard. 
