The art-song is alive and well and living mainly in the US, where a whole range of composers are busily setting their own literature from Whitman right up to the present. The mezzo-soprano Susan Graham's sometimes magical recital combined a cross-section of these home-grown products with Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn, pointing up the connection between the French and American traditions that has persisted since young composers began to make the trip across the Atlantic in the 20s to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Some of the American songs were French too: Samuel Barber's Mélodies passagères sets some of Rilke's Poèmes francaises in a style that would have not have surprised Ravel, and at one point even alludes to one of Debussy's piano preludes. Graham delivered these settings with seraphic poise, just as she and Malcom Martineau unfolded Debussy's three Verlaine settings of 1901 and the Hahn group with a consummate understanding of their every nuance.
Graham is one of those rare singers who can find musical depths in the most unpromising material. That alchemical ability was occasionally required in the American half of the programme - in four songs by John Musto, where it was sometimes difficult to decide whether or not the settings were ironic takes on some pretty indifferent texts. But two numbers from Leonard Bernstein's Songfest, the finest of all his concert works, needed no special pleading, while a pair of Lowell Liebermann's settings of poems by Randall Jarrell were a revelation, a wonderfully sensitive marriage of text and music that Graham made quite spellbinding.
Her ability as an interpreter of Ned Rorem's songs should be well known by now through her exceptional collection of them released on CD earlier this year, but it was even more impressive in the concert hall, from the opening ecstatic Alleluia, through settings of Paul Goodman, Elinor Wylie, and especially Whitman and Theodore Roethke. Rorem makes a jewel of out of the tiniest fragment of text, and every word acquires enormous significance. Graham understands that incomparably.
Andrew Clements
