The first of two DMA recitals I attended on Tuesday in Walter Hall was given by contralto Nicole Percifield. It’s always interesting to hear this comparatively rare voice type; especially in an interesting and well thought out programme.
The first half of the programme was songs scored for contralto, piano and viola. It’s intriguing because the range of the viola is very similar to that of a contralto. In this case Grace Kyungrok Moon played viola with Joel Goodfellow at the piano for Brahms’ “Gestillte Sehnsucht” (from Zwei Gesänge, Op. 91). The text is by Rückert and it’s definitely at the romantic/sentimental end of the spectrum. It was pleasant to listen to with Nicole’s rich lower register brought out nicely. Continue reading
Lines of Life is a CD produced out of a deep collaboration between German baritone Benjamin Appl and Hungarian composer György Kurtág. It’s a mixture of works by Schubert and Kurtág (with one song by Brahms at the end). It centers on Kurtág’s Hölderlin-Gesänge Op.35a but there are other Kurtág works on the disk too, Most of these are sung a capella but there are four settings of texts by Ulrike Schuster that have piano accompaniment (Pierre-Laurent Aimard). The Schubert songs feature James Baillieu on piano except for the last one, and the Brahms, where Kurtág himself accompanies. 
Tuesday’s RBA concert with members of the Ensemble Studio was themed around composer rivalries though not the really toxic ones. No Mozart/Salieri or Wagner/Meyerbeer here! The most convincing as a rivalry was the first; Berlioz vs Rossini. So Queen Hezumuryango sang “Le spectre de la rose” with some sensitive handling of the text and a pretty fiery “Cruda sorte” from L’Italiana in Algeri with plenty of emotion. I definitely like her voice more when she’s going for drama as she’s got plenty of power and expressiveness.
The second disk in pianist Malcolm Martineau’s project to record all the Brahms songs will soon be available. It features twenty nine songs for low voice with, as far as i could tell, no theme. All the works have titles like Fünf Gesänge Op.72 which actually starts the disk.
operaramblings 