United States Varied: Raehann Bryce-Davis (mezzo-soprano), Jeanne-Minette Cilliers (piano). Introduced by San Francisco Performances, Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, 27.1.2024. (HS)
Amy Seaside – Three Browning Songs, Op.44
Wagner – Wesendonck–Lieder
Melissa Dunphy – ‘Come, My Tan-Confronted Kids’
Margaret Bonds – ‘Beginning’
Florence Worth – ‘The Crescent Moon’
Maria Thompson Corley – ‘I Am Not an Offended Black Girl’; ‘The Magnificence in My Blackness’; ‘Black Riders’ Freedom Tune’
Peter Ashbourne – ‘Banyan Tree’; ‘Fi Mi Love Have Lion Coronary heart’; ‘No one’s Enterprise’
Songs by and about ladies, particularly Black ladies, made for a rousing night of fantastically voiced music from mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis. Those that keep in mind Bryce-Davis from her time as a Merola artist at San Francisco Opera have been rewarded by her profitable stage presence, and by how her voice has developed a wealthy, ripe gleam.
Style had further which means right here. Her fiancé, a clothes designer, outfitted her in two eye-catching robes, an off-white quantity dripping with threads of sparkly beads and a black-and-white caftan with daring diagonal stripes and a spangled hoodie and again. Pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers sported one other of the designer’s outfits, a decent jacket and pants that contrasted their darkish grey shade with a yellow, skirt-like prepare.
Bryce-Davis has been getting raves internationally for roles as Azucena, Ježibaba and Baba the Turk at top-tier opera homes, and she is going to return to the Metropolitan Opera this season as Ella in X, The Life and Occasions of Malcolm X. The fantastic thing about her sound within the opening set of the recital, Amy Seaside’s Three Browning Songs, demonstrated cautious consideration to the poet’s texts, and a spread from unstrained excessive notes to resonant low notes.
The main focus of this program, she defined after that set, was music written by or in any other case related to ladies.
As if to determine classical-music credentials, she took a powerful run at Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder (written by his then-secret paramour, Mathilde Wesendonck, the spouse of his patron, Otto Wesendonck), the one piece within the recital that she sang from a written rating. The note-perfect singing had moments of perception, which boded effectively, but it surely was clear she was nonetheless settling into the nuances of those 5 florid songs, two of which discovered their approach into Wagner’s rating for Tristan und Isolde.
The remainder of the recital provided temporary examples of two nice twentieth-century African American ladies composers; modern songs by Melissa Dunphy and Maria Thompson Corley; and classical settings by Peter Ashbourne of songs that Raehann’s Jamaica-born mom sang to her.
The standout for me was the set of three songs by Maria Thompson Corley, a Jamaican Canadian composer. Particularly shifting was ‘The Magnificence in My Blackness’, a proud, lyrical assertion in phrases, music and sultry perspective by the singer. It was sandwiched between ‘I Am Not an Offended Black Girl’, a defiant, roiling accusation of anybody who would possibly take the title actually, and ‘Black Riders’ Freedom Tune’, a rollicking gallop in a 6/8 meter that saluted women and men of shade who discovered liberty within the post-Civil Battle American West on horseback.
Each Bryce-Davis and pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers (on the college on the Manhattan College of Music and in demand as a collaborative pianist) celebrated the variability and spice in these songs, attributes that have been briefly provide through the in any other case devoted rendition of the Browning songs earlier.
‘Come, My Tan-Confronted Kids’, a setting by Dunphy of traces from Walt Whitman’s ‘Oh, Pioneer!’, created a extra racially conscious and political slant than Whitman meant. The music, written for Bryce-Davis, was straightforwardly modern operatic, which framed the textual content extra subtly than might need been meant.
The songs that adopted, neither greater than a minute lengthy, have been ‘Beginning’ by Margaret Bonds’ and Florence Worth’s ‘The Crescent Moon’, an all-too-brief style of two pioneers who proved that Black American ladies might write high-level classical music.
Within the remaining songs. Ashbourne, a Jamaican American composer, long-established elaborate piano trappings round three Caribbean ditties. I’d have appreciated much less operatic heft to the voice in these charming, lilting tunes, which Bryce-Davis remembers her mom singing round the home.
For an encore, Bryce-Davis harked again to a 2022 efficiency at Herbst Theatre, the place the second half of ‘The Majesty of the Religious’ opened with ‘No Methods Drained’ in an inspiring association by Jacqueline B. Hairston. As an encore right here, it introduced an explosion of soul and brilliance to a considerate, musically wealthy program.
Harvey Steiman
