Sylvia McNair’s Chicago recital debut Sunday at Symphony Center, in which she shared the stage with her pianist, the remarkable Martin Katz, was not notable for vocal or musical consistency. But it had its appealing moments, and it did display the American soprano at her most glamorous. It didn’t hurt that she modeled two different designer gowns–one for each half of her program–topped by a stunning diamond and sapphire necklace.
McNair must be applauded for doing something few native song recitalists are ever inclined to do–devote fully half of her program to new American music.
The new piece was John Corigliano’s “Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.” The singer told the audience that she was impressed with the composer’s music when she sang in his opera, “The Ghosts of Versailles,” at Lyric Opera more than four years ago. Corigliano’s name came to mind soon afterward when Carnegie Hall offered to commission a vocal work for her. She and Katz gave the world premiere earlier this month at Carnegie Hall. This was its second performance.
Heretical as it may sound, Bob Dylan’s songs did not do much for me when I was growing up in the 1960s, although I could appreciate their enormous impact on the popular and antiwar culture of the Vietnam era. Perhaps Dylan’s raspy voice, blaring endlessly from dormitory rooms during my college years, put me off from the poetic content.
It not only helps but is essential that the listener distance himself from any previous associations or memories when approaching Corigliano’s very different settings of Dylan’s texts. Corigliano has admitted he did not know the Dylan songs. But the poems, including such classics as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” intrigued him. He decided to reimagine them in his own concert language–“crossover in the opposite direction,” as he explains in his program note.
The results, as heard Sunday, do not amount to very much. Corigliano has subdued his lyrical bent so it is virtually undetectable. Only the Postlude–a simple, sweetly unpretentious setting of “Forever Young”–really succeeds on its own terms. Perhaps this is because it is the only section that seems at all appropriate for McNair’s voice and artistry.
Apart from some brief flurries of inventive piano writing, the remaining six songs are gray and uninspired. That stirring anthem of the ’60s, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” becomes a depressing dirge in which the pianist trudges through a descending passacaglia bass line. Most of the declamatory vocal lines sound wrong for McNair, requiring a voice bigger and heavier than nature gave her; one can imagine what Jessye Norman in her prime could have done with them.
McNair and Katz threw themselves into the songs with skill and commitment, but this was clearly a lost cause. By the end, the singer sounded vocally spent after having to pump up her voice beyond its limits in a hall not friendly to high voices.
The first half held French and Spanish songs, sung with delicacy, restraint and the cooing vocal scoops that have become mannerisms with McNair. Technical problems, such as breathiness and lack of support in her middle register, were acerbated by the hall’s strange acoustics. Ravel’s “Vocalise-etude en forme de Habanera” displayed the singer at her very best, but Falla’s “Seven Popular Spanish Songs” evoked less the dark, dangerous Spanish soil than a finishing school for proper young English girls.
