What Makes a Singer

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Not long ago, a young singer contacted me to solicit my advice. It seems that she was being strongly encouraged by her coach and the director of her repertory company to move strictly into soprano roles, even though she felt, both in her heart and in her throat, that she was a natural mezzo. Her lack of comfort had already suggested the proper path, and on her own she soon decided to defy her handlers and plunge headlong into the lower regions. I am pleased to report that her career has since blossomed.


I suspect something similar may be happening in the creative life of Measha Brueggergosman – a difficult name, with a story attached. (When this aspirant married, she and her husband decided to combine their surnames, but rather refreshingly jettisoned the now ubiquitous hyphen.) At Friday evening’s recital at Weill, Ms. Brueggergosman seemed to be the embodiment of a midrange mezzo, but was forcing herself into the stratosphere of the higher tessitura. Maybe they just do things differently in Canada.


The recital program was an intriguing one. The first four sets of songs were each in a different language and in decidedly disparate styles. The commonality was that all of the pieces on the program were written in the 20th century. This was a challenging undertaking, requiring a subtle actor and a technically sound singer. Unfortunately, Ms. Brueggergosman was neither.


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times in the Benjamin Britten suite “On This Island.” The most striking performance of the evening was Ms. B’s rendition of “Nocturne,” an amazing masterpiece tossed off one day before lunch as a eulogy for Britten’s early sexual guide Peter Burra.


The pacing was stately and reverent, the low notes fully formed and affecting, the piano accompaniment somber. There was even a bit of stillborn applause from the crowd, as this is not the final song of the set. I make much of this particular song’s realization because it was the exception; no other individual performance was anywhere near as satisfying.


In fact, in the same set, the stumbling and awkward massacre of Auden’s nimble lyrics for “Now The Leaves Are Falling Fast” was positively embarrassing. Ms. Brueggergosman should certainly stay far away from this type of fast paced tongue-twister as her diction is not very good. Her energy level this night was consistently low and, worst of all, every one of her individual breaths was painfully, even exaggeratedly, audible. This created a wall of noise that the soloist desperately needed to scale but that ultimately defeated her.


These deficiencies can all be improved with a great deal of hard work, but my first impression of this singer is not an encouraging one, at least in terms of her dedication to the art of classical singing. As she made her way through differing styles and languages, the one common phenomenon was enervation.


Like Jane Eaglen, but without her prodigious lung capacity, Measha Brueggergosman seems to prefer the easy way out of vocal dilemmas, and there is little evidence thus far that she would be willing to expend the energy needed to reach the next plateau.


The other bugbear this night was a lack of ability to communicate stylistic nuance. The program began with the exotic Ravel, specifically his “Cinq melodies populaires grecques,” normally a colorful tour-de-force for a supple and subtle soprano. Next up was Austrian Joseph Marx, whose “Selige Nacht” is a compilation right out of Richard Strauss, complete with rotting roses in its lyrics. Then 1940s pop songs of the Catalan Xavier Montsalvatge, specifically his “Canciones negras,” then the Britten and some Copland and Bolcom to round out the program.


The problem was that all of these songs were sung in exactly the same manner – except for that one memorial nocturne – and any sense of hue or shading was either nonexistent or subsumed by sloppy technique.


None of this was aided by the poor pianism of J.J. Penna, who often introduced a particular sung passage with a minor second rather than a pure leading tone. To her credit, Ms. Brueggergosman survived this onslaught of relativism by establishing and maintaining a steady sense of pitch throughout. She has the building blocks of a fine singer, but is still a work in progress.


***


Arnold Schonberg is generally considered by the uninitiated to have been a crabbed stereotype of the humorless academic, the inventor of the uncompromising dodecaphonic system of composition. But what is not often emphasized is that he was also equally invested in the world of popular culture, starting out as a cabaret manager and composer and ending life in California playing tennis with Gershwin and mentoring Oscar Levant and Dave Brubeck.


Schonberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 2, which he revised in Hollywood, was featured at Carnegie Hall on Saturday evening along with the jazzy “Suite for Chamber Orchestra” of Erwin Schulhoff, as Ute Lemper and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra explored serious music’s sleazier side.


Ms. Lemper is an electrifying performer and this evening she was an electrified one as well. The portable amplification was turned up so high that the orchestra had to scramble to keep up dynamically, wasting the considerable talents of Orpheus and destroying any sense of instrumental nuance. But Ms. Lemper is the seminal representative of this type of sardonic music, the literal embodiment of the genre. Hearing her is a bit like having attended a recital of Irish art songs by John McCormack: This is the real deal.


Every inflection, emphasis, and gesture from this remarkable artiste rings true. I could easily imagine her not in evening gown but rather tuxedo and top hat, an exaggerated red smile painted on her face. Her renditions of Weill and Brel were stunning, although the evening took a turn for the maudlin when she presented her own compositions about the Berlin Wall and September 11 and degenerated into a EuroDisney version of Edith Piaf’s Greatest Hits.


But, then, this type of descent into the maelstrom of the sordid and pandering is consistent with a recreation of the Weimar aesthetic. Where would Brecht have been without the lumpenproletariat?


The New York Sun

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