Issue #67

These dramatic, soaring vocal lines ended the aria "Do you still love me as once you did? For if you do not, I shall ask you to leave this house this very night!" from Vanessa by Samuel Barber (1910-1981). Rachel Holland, who is Director of Vocal Studies at Christopher Newport University, chose to open her first Tidewater recital with this demanding showpiece, just a beginning demonstration of how confident she is in her instrument, power and training. Pianist Jeffrey Brown, also on the faculty of CNU, underscored the emotional intensity of Do not utter a word from the Gothic tale written by Isaak Dinesen, pseudonym of Karen Blixen (1885-1962) and adapted for the stage by Gian Carlo Menotti (July 7,1911 - February 1, 2007), Barber's life partner.

For 20 years Vanessa has waited for the return of her lover Anatol, struggling to remain just as beautiful and youthful as she was then. It is no wonder that she was so intense in this aria. It turns out that this is Anatol's son. They marry, he gets her young cousin Erica pregnant and Erica watches as the couple go off together since she can not bear to destroy Vanessa's illusion.

Continuing the theme of the opening song, Ms. Holland followed with four songs from France by Henri Duparc (1848-1933). Duparc was a perfectionist who destroyed all but sixteen of his songs. In Au pays où se fait la guerre (To the land where war is being fought), the singer's lover has gone off to war and she sits in her tower in a lovely, natural setting. Moonlight and mystery in the piano brings the sound of striding footsteps below. It is only the page. She waits, remaining emotionally overwrought. In Extase (Ecstasy), a brief, lovely moment in time is so precious, so fleeting and captured perfectly in the beauty of her sound. Chanson triste (Sad song) and L'invitation au voyage (Invitation to a journey) are languorous, sensual songs with fine piano work and fully engaged singing.

All the music in the recital comes from the 20th century. Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote his opera Peter Grimes in 1945. From it we heard the Embroidery Aria. Ellen pours out her passion and her heartbroken feelings for this misery of a man Grimes who is a seafarer. He has slapped her and allowed the death of a second orphan cabin boy. I hear anger in her voice as the song ends! In conversation after the recital we learned that Ms. Holland had performed the roles of Ellen and Vanessa while a graduate student at Indiana University. This experience allowed her performance to offer a much deeper understanding of the characters she created.

One of the most lushly romantic arias from all of opera is Marietta's Lied from Die Tote Stadt by Erich Korngold (1897-1957). There is a tear in the sweetness of the piano and Ms. Holland sang with a meltingly lovely sadness. This aria is all most of us know from the opera which is rarely performed. The piano postlude has a lightness after this intense, vocal meditation on love and loss of the beloved to death followed by speculation on resurrection.

The spacious lyricism of Sergey Rachmaninoff's (1873-1943) piano compositions is there in his songs. I only wish that the boldness that is in the voice in these songs had been matched in Dr. Brown's playing. After all, Rachmaninoff was as grand concert pianist and wrote music that made the performers equal partners. The singer is nostalgic for his home in Georgia, so much so that he says Oh, Never Sing to Me Again.

You hear a hopping frog in the piano in The Water Lily. The shy frog averts her eyes from the sky, only to find the moon reflected in the water. With a sort of French melodie sound in the piano, The Dream, which is really about the joys of sleep, builds energy in the piano which is overtaken by the vocal sound. Spring Waters celebrates the exaltation of spring. The piano is restrained here, letting the voice shine.

Rachel Holland appeared as Mrs. Hayes in Virginia Opera's Susanna by Carlyle Floyd in November, 2006. This recital, her first in our area, was delayed from February. We heard her in the Music and Theatre Hall at CNU on April 21, 2008. Here is an artist poised on the brink of a potentially fabulous career. We certainly hope to hear her soon in a leading role at the Harrison Opera House.

In a concert at Willett Hall on March 1, 2008, Odetta and Robert Sims sang in memory of Ruth Brown, a nationally known jazz singer born in Portsmouth. In a program billed as spirituals, folk songs and freedom songs we were carried into a world of traditional American music, authentically sung and played.

The concert opened with Odetta asking us to leave whatever we brought with us and sing together and affirm ourselves as she led us in This Little Light of Mine. It had been a surprise when her pianist Seth Farber brought her on stage in a wheelchair and positioned her near a stool with tissues and water. The sound of that familiar voice cut through my emotional reaction. Looking back, it has been 34 years since I last saw her in a live concert (Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, c.1974).

After Odetta led us in This Little Light of Mine she introduced Robert Sims who has built an exciting career embracing the traditional spirituals that came down from Roland Hayes, Harry T. Burleigh and Paul Robeson and other recitalists. These pioneers of the African-American art song created the arrangements that Mr. Sims sang. His opening song Anybody Here Who Loves My Jesus warmed his audience to receive the message in song that followed. Pity a Po' Boy,a field holler and Lord, I Want Two Wings with its falsetto ending and a winning rhythm, were moving.

When Robert Sims sang Going Home on the Morning Train he tapped into a deep vein of history. Escaping from slavery by running away to the North was metaphorically described as riding the Underground Railroad. As he sang a cappella he snapped his fingers with his left hand and tapped his upper chest with his right. This percussive accompaniment is related to Jubilee Beating, described by Frederick Douglas in his Life and Times. He says the Jubliee beater "sings his merry songs, so ordering the words as to have them fall pat with the movement of his hand... Among a mass of nonsense and wild frolic, once in a while a sharp hit is given to the meanness of slaveholders." This body percussion was also called pat juba or jubas and could be as simple as patting the foot for rhythm to very complex patterns involving many body parts.

Roland Hayes had to go to Europe to build a career as a recitalist. He caused such a sensation there that when word got back to the United States it created a demand that he sing here. Before him, black men just did not sing classical art song repertory. As composer, Hayes' arrangements were featured in a set titled "Life Cycle of Christ" by Mr. Syms: Sister Mary Had-a but One Child, Lit'l Boy and Children Did You Hear (when Jesus Rose). In the middle song, Lit'l Boy, Syms very effectively tells the story of a twelve year old Jesus who created a great sensation by the wisdom of his answers when questioned by the temple elders.

A rollicking joyous rhythm infuses Low Down the Chariot Let Me Ride (published by Lomax in 1941), now called I'm a Soldier, Let Me Ride. The song opens with "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" in a traditional setting but morphs into a protest song of recently returned Black servicemen asking for their right to the freedoms they fought for in two World Wars.

The last spiritual My Good Lord's Done Been Here was followed by Old Man River from Kern's Showboat made famous by William Warfield. Syms says of Warfield "He was a wonderful teacher, colleague and more than that he was my friend." Odetta then returned to the stage for the duet When I Lay My Burden Down.

Many of the songs listed on the program I first heard on LP recordings by Odetta in the mid-sixties. But this night she chose to sing the blues, starting with Something Inside so Strong, a song so deeply moving, which was written in 1987 and became an anti-Apartheid anthem, a song of defiance in the face of oppression and bigotry. The text is by Avril LaVigne. There was Huddie Ledbetter's ("Leadbelly" 1885-1949) Bourgeois Blues. By way of an introduction she explained that Leadbelly, who was recorded by John Lomax, "gives a sense of our people." Offering the next song as a tribute to Bessie Smith, she sang her Rich Man Blues (music by Thelma Lowe). Bessie Smith (1894-1937) was a major influence on Odetta's style and career. The Grove Dictionary of Music sums up Bessie Smith's contribution "Smith was unquestionably the greatest of the vaudeville blues singers and brought the emotional intensity, personal involvement and expression of blues singing into the jazz repertory with unexcelled artistry." The same can be said for Odetta's performances.

She opened the last set with a modern woman's work song, as Odetta termed it, You Don't Know My Mind with a fine bluesy piano throughout. Next came Roberta, Let Your Hair Hang Low. Sippie Wallace's You Gotta Know How showed the spirit of a woman who knows her own powers. The pathos in House of the Rising Sun (Ledbetter) and her frail physical state worked well to underscore the message of the song.

With his pianist Paul Hampson accompanying, Robert Sims and Odetta dialogued There's a Hole in the Bucket. They ended the program with Down by the River Side/Goin' to Study War No More. We were left with the message "I'm Going to Walk with the Prince of Peace Down by the River Side."

For listeners who came to hear spirituals, work songs and folk songs sung with authenticity and power, often accompanied by her guitar, seek out Vanguard recording BCD 43/44, The Essential Odetta. It offers 21 selections including the powerful Another Man Done Gone, No More Auction Block for Me, and Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. Odetta, Blues Everywhere I Go (15 songs) M.C. Records (MC0038) can be ordered at www.mc-records.com or phone-516-754-4725.

Robert Sims has recorded 4 CD's and a DVD. To purchase visit www.RobertSims.com or canticlassics.com

As a teenager I was deeply moved by the novel Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. The message was that embracing our common humanity was the way forward in healing the racial divide in South Africa during apartheid. Playwright Maxwell Anderson turned the novel into a play and Kurt Weill (1900-1950) composed the music and called it "Lost in the Stars. In the late 1940's all of Weill's works were focused on bringing needed social-issue messages to America. In this play he speaks to our deeply divided racist nation.

It is a measure of how things have changed in our country in the 50 years since the piece first came to the stage that an evenly racially mixed audience saw the musical in the recently restored, historically black Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia on April 26, 2008 (other performances were April 25 and 27). Although the play is dated with pretentious dialogue that is both preachy and tedious, the emotional impact of the conclusion is powerful because the healing of divisions between people is always relevant.

Weill called it a musical/tragedy in two acts. Composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1989), who was reviewer of the first staging, described it as "not purely or chiefly a musical narrative. It is a play with musical numbers, a singspiel." He found the tunes weak but their scoring masterful.

Playwright Anderson plotted the book scene-by-scene and brought the story to the stage that way. The minutia of every aspect of the story was acted out in a very long first act. The role of Leader, powerfully sung by local baritone Larry J. Giddens, Jr., gave him little to do. Used as a narrator he could have moved the story along, making several staged scenes unnecessary. Perhaps if the structure of the play were more concise we wouldn't have lost a quarter of the audience at intermission.

The work contrasts the rural world with the urban, white with black, idealism with cynicism, and prejudice with tolerance. Two families in a rural area of Natal province collide in apartheid South Africa. The Kumalo family is black and the Jarvis family is white. Stephen Kumalo, played by Herbert Perry, is a black Anglican priest, with a son Absalom, played by his twin brother Eugene Perry, who works in the mines and a brother John who lives in Johannesburg and is a political activist with street smarts. Rich planter James Jarvis, played by Martin Giles, has a son Arthur, played by Stephen Neely, a celebrated campaigner for racial equality, who also lives in Johannesburg. Stephen goes in search of his son at his wife's urging, only to find the son is in trouble with the law, has a pregnant girlfriend who deeply loves him and has inadvertently killed Arthur Jarvis in a bungled robbery attempt. The law takes its course and the priest's appeal to planter Jarvis to help spare his son's life is to no avail.

On the evening before his son is to be hanged Stephen resigns his pastorate only to have Jarvis, who was outside listening, come to be with him and refuses to leave because, as he says, they have both lost a son. Race divided them. Common humanity has brought them together. The young boy each is raising will be allowed to play with the other.

To bring Lost in the Stars to a local stage was a huge undertaking. It involved Virginia Arts Festival, Virginia Stage Company and Opera Theater Pittsburg where the production was presented in February with the same cast. The 14 player theater orchestra for our local performance was drawn from the Virginia Symphony and was conducted by Julius Rudel who had put it all together. John Eaton of Opera Theater Pittsburg directed the production and Stephen Neely was chorus master for the chorus of 47 singers.

Danila Korogodsky created an excellent unit set consisting of high grass with a black backdrop with stars. The 47 member chorus, sometime as characters in the drama on stage, more often as a Greek Chorus singing from the boxes on either side of the stage, helped to make the production more dynamic by their movements and this placement helped expand the performing space. The singing was excellent with clear diction.

Irina, Absalom's pregnant girlfriend, well acted by Dzidzofe Avouglan, had the best known song, the emotionally wrenching Trouble Man. Linda Huston, as the priest's wife, has a small but memorable role. The only scene of nightlife in Soweto, Johannesburg's shanty town, seemed to be out of place in this stark drama. Denise Sheffey Powell created the sensually dangerous character Linda. Her song Who Will Buy, is about selling various fruits and vegetables as a metaphor for sex. Kevin brown was excellent as the priest's city brother who has a much clearer grasp of the class struggle.

Conductor Julius Rudel, who turned 87 on March 6th, led an excellent performance. We heard much but saw nothing except the snowy crown of his head projecting above the orchestra pit. We clapped anyway. At the end he did take a bow on stage to acknowledge much deserved applause.

All reviews by John Campbell unless otherwise noted.