SOLO RECITAL IN DALLAS
Catonsville, MD, 30 August 2008

We leave here next Wednesday on our way back to Guayaquil. But first we stop for a week in Dallas, Texas, to visit my 93-year-old Mum and my sister, Lois. Mum is physically perhaps no longer as spry as a 40-year-old- “Being old is not for wimps!” she says – but, she’s very much still with it. When we last visited her at the time of her 90th birthday celebration, she had asked us to do a song recital at the nursing home where she lives. I was unprepared for that at the time since I had no place to practise. She hadn’t forgotten, however. When Mum heard that we were coming, she immediately brought the subject up again. So, I have put together a programme, found the music at the venerable Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, made copies and begun to practise again.

I have often said that the single thing that I miss most about the cruising life is music. I don’t mean just whistling a tune or even singing on the boat. Anybody can do that. I miss the challenge, the concentrated work needed to prepare for a concert, learning each song and then honing it so it is as expressive as possible. Music is so local: you always have to be at some specific place to sing; you usually have to be in some specific place even to organise it. Aboard a sailboat, of course, you are nearly always on the move - or at least not in any one place for long. Anyway, I would estimate that not many of our cruising friends are actually much interested in the kind of music I specialise in (Lied and oratorio). Here in Baltimore at least it has been fun to sing in Kathleen’s church choir at St. Mark’s-on-the-Hill in Pikesville, like Catonsville, a Baltimore suburb. I have also done some solos and duets during services and will, in fact, sing a solo tomorrow at the church in Alexandria, Virginia, where she will substitute this weekend again. But now, a whole programme!

Preparing a complete recital of solo music is a big challenge. A leading soloist might sing for only a total of about 20-30 minutes during an opera performance, even though he or she might be on stage much longer. A recitalist, on the other hand, has to carry the whole thing alone with a pianist for an hour or more.

Mindful of this and of the limited time to prepare, I decided not to try to learn anything totally new for this recital. I remember when I was learning all these songs back in Frankfurt! What a lot of hours in the practice room! I estimated that each two or three-minute song took on average of about 35 hours to learn for the first performance. That’s getting close to a full work-week for each song! Getting your first recitals together therefore required a lot of lead time.

At the beginning my voice is croaky and tires quickly. But after a few days of practising I am happy to note that my voice is still fairly elastic and youthful-sounding, although perhaps a little darker and lower nowadays. I bring to mind Cornelius Reid’s dicta that if you sing 'naturally' you can sing into high old age, and that there is no need to sing unnecessarily loudly. Everybody can hear you even at pianissimo. That removes a lot of pressure and lets my voice warm up and remain supple. At the beginning I put in earplugs to prevent myself from over-singing’ in the dry practice room. It's a good trick I learned when working on J.S. Bach’s complex and demanding coloratura passages. I have a strong middle register and can sing nearly as high as a counter-tenor. The hard part is at the break, for me between F# and G#, where the head voice and the chest voice have somehow to mix while keeping the same vocal colour throughout the whole range. Tenors are always singing over “the break”, and the old masters said that it takes seven years to make a tenor, i.e., to learn to handle “the break”. The 'mix' seems to be coming together this week again. Nevertheless, I always found singing Schubert in ‘tenor’ versions more than a little tiring, though other composers, Schumann, Brahms or Stra
uss for example, did not effect me that way. This time I found a version of Schubert songs set for “Light Baritone”. I feel much happier with these.

I am also pleased that the songs now after so long seem so fresh again. I don’t have to spend hours repetitively rehearsing, say, the sometimes odd rhythms and intervals of a Richard Strauss song. The pieces come back rapidly and I can spend my time polishing each sentence and each word of the poem as set to music. I have decided not to stress myself out completely by trying to perform from memory. That ought to make life easier.

So here are the songs:

Franz Schubert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert
In addition to Der Musensohn (The Muses’ Son, a poem by Goethe), several songs from Schubert’s famous, early-Romantic song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin (The Pretty Maid of the Mill). Kathleen groaned when she heard this; those constant and insistent broken chords are killers for the accompanist! Even she has to practise!

Robert Schumann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schumann )
Die Lotusblume and Der Nussbaum (The Lotus and the Nut Tree), two extremely romantic poems by Mosen and Heine set to Schumann’s fabulously rich piano accompaniments. Then Widmung (Dedication), the young Schumann’s declaration of love to Clara Wieck, and Die Beiden Grenadiere (The Two Grenadiers), Heinrich Heine's hoary old poem about two French soldiers, survivors of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign. Schumann cleverly integrates snippets of La Marseilliase into the piece (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseilleise). Corny but effective. That piece ought to wake up the octagenarians at the home!

Richard Strauss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Strauss ).
Any of Strauss’s art songs are lush and interesting. The piano part reminds me so much of Strauss’s orchestral music, in Der Rosenkavalier for example, where the chords are thick and
wide and the music swells up briefly and very emotionally between the singer’s lines and then dies away within a bar or two. The accompaniment line plays with the singer, sometimes taking over the whole melodic line itself. The song group includes Zueignung (Dedication), Du, Meines Herzens Krönelein (You, My Heart’s Diadem), Breit über mein Haupt (Spread over my Face), and Allerseelen (All Soul’s Day). Performing these songs well is to a singer what batting a pitch out of the ball park is for a baseball player.

Others
Purcell: Passing By
Old Irish Air: The Last Rose of Summer
Old English Air: Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes
Edvard Grieg: I Love Thee, Dear
Leonard Bernstein: A Simple Song (from Mass)

So, how's that for a programme? All the music has been photocopied for the recital and arrangements have been made to perform in Dallas next Thursday afternoon. I am practising about two hours a day now and enjoying it. Since I have no place to rehearse once I get to Dallas, we asked to schedule the recital as soon after arriving as possible. Singing in retirement homes means being sure not to make the recital too long or elderly people start getting restless. That’s fine; we’ll keep it short and sharp. I love doing recitals and I love the preparation for them almost as much. I hope the listeners will enjoy the recital as much as I plan to do. Thanks to Kathleen for her wonderful playing. Mum ought to be pleased.