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Recital
9 March 2007
Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, Canada
Gerald Finley
Julius Drake
Robert Schumann:
· Dichterliebe
o Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
o Aus meinen Tränen sprießen
o Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne
o Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’
o Ich will meine Seele tauchen
o Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome
o Ich grolle nicht
o Und wüßten’s die Blumen
o Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen
o Hör ich das Liedchen klingen
o Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen
o Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen
o Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet
o Allnächtlich im Traume seh’ ich dich
o Aus alten Märchen winkt es
o Die alten, bösen Lieder
Interval
Charles Ives
o "Ich grolle nicht"
o "Swimmers"
o "The Housatonicat Stockbridge"
o "The Side Show"
o "The Greatest Man"
o "Tom Sails Away"
o "1, 2, 3"
Ned Rorem :
· War Scenes
o A Night Battle
o Specimen Case
o An Incident
o Inauguration Ball
o The Real War Will Never Get In the Books
Samuel Barber
o There's Nae Lark
o In the Dark Pinewood
o The Beggar's Song
· Three Songs, Op. 10
o Rain Has Fallen
o Sleep Now
o I Hear an Army
ENCORES:
Charles Ives
· Memories:
o a. Very Pleasant
o b. Rather Sad
Samuel Barber
o Sure on this Shining Night, Op. 13, No. 4
What the critics say
Ken Winters, 12 March 2007
Perfect pairing of piano and voice on par with greats
Surely the Canadian-born Gerald Finley is the best living baritone currently at the peak of his powers. Finley sang Friday night at Roy Thomson Hall with a piano collaborator very much on his own level of accomplishment and artistry: Julius Drake. Together the two men delivered a recital extraordinary in its strength, its musicianship, its imaginative sensibility, its dramatic range and its rock-solid vocal and pianistic skill.
Finley knows exactly how to sing. His voice is a beautiful, steady, flexible, fundamentally and undeviatingly tuneful dark baritone with full, resonant lows and an astonishing high extension when he needs it.
Similarly, Drake knows exactly how to play. He is a pianist of strength, character, exquisite precision and the courage not to vanish into paroxysms of dainty discretion when he has a singer of Finley's calibre and vigour to play up to.
These matched strengths laid the foundation and cleared the way for the team's deeper objectives in conveying the specific elations and despairs of Robert Schumann's great kaleidoscopic cycle Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love) to 16 poems of Heinrich Heine. The team's close-combined virtuosities also freed them to plumb passionately the meanings and idiosyncrasies of seven songs by Charles Ives and six by Samuel Barber. In the American half of the recital, only the middle set failed, five War Scenes in which the composer, Ned Rorem, had bitten off a good deal more than his slender art could chew from Walt Whitman's magnificent and shocking diary of the American civil war. Rorem's unconvincing settings could not be redeemed even by the combined arts of Finley and Drake.
In the Schumann cycle, I set out to mark the most moving performances of the 16 for later reference, but gave up as each song emerged not only beautifully sung and played, but deeply understood and conveyed in all its singularity. Finley and Drake were able to inhabit the emotional centre of each song, giving each its full peculiarity and its ability to strike the listening heart with full potency. They made you realize not just what good performers they were, but how much more profound the songs of Schumann's Dichterliebe are than their lovely, lyrical, seemingly spontaneous surfaces would indicate.
The Ives songs came across similarly, as highly individual and freshly arresting, from the amazing evocation of The Housatonic River at Stockbridge (poem by Robert Underwood Johnson) to a boy's touching and funny admiration of his dad (The Greatest Man, poem by Anne Collins), to Ives's settings of three of his own odd and wonderful verses.
The Barber songs that ended the program, some familiar, some rare (the rapt idyll In the Dark Pinewood, to a poem of James Joyce; and the charming Beggar's Song, to verse of W.H. Davies) were a pleasure to hear in these wholly and individually eloquent performances.
Finley and Drake's unforced affection for Ives and Barber were reflected in their encores: Ives's Memories; and a heartbreaking account of Barber's setting of James Agee's Sure on this Shining Night.
Taken as a whole, and overlooking only the Rorem songs, this was one of the most satisfying vocal recitals I have heard in years, on a par with those of such earlier great Canadian singers as Lois Marshall, Leopold Simoneau, Jon Vickers and Maureen Forrester, or such current ones as Karina Gauvin.