The recital which Susan Graham brought to Carnegie Hall last night united a wide variety of moods and musical styles around famous female figures from literature, and a few literary females. From Purcell to Poulenc and beyond, Graham gave vivid life to the personae of the songs. With beautiful legato phrasing and dynamic control, she created a series of emotionally rich portraits, with Malcolm Martineau as her worthy partner. Purcell's "Tell me, some pitying angel," set to the text of seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish poet Nahum Tate, is a richly imagined monologue for the Virgin Mary. Based on the episode where her son, at the age of twelve, is lost (to her) for days in the crowds of Jerusalem, this text has Mary, with some bitterness, meditating on the contrast of this desperate human problem with the grace she had been promised. There is no general rejoicing now, and no angel responds to her cry. Purcell's magnificent musical architecture, and Graham's directness, both in fierce outcry ("Gabriel! Gabriel! He comes not") and interior reflection ("I trust the God; but oh! I fear the child") saved it from religious sentimentality.
Berlioz' La mort d’Ophélie takes as its text the scene depicted by countless pre-Raphaelites: the madness and death of Ophelia, who drowns, singing, amid her flowers. Here, even as Gertrude (the narrator) seems to seek to evade horror in description, the piano creates an eerie and uneasy atmosphere, with harmonies plaintively unresolved. Ophelia's own melody is echoed by singer and piano in turns, until it dies into silence. After this second extended scene, we were given a set created from the Mignon-inspired melodies of six composers (making me think I really should try Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre again.) First, Schubert's "Heiss mich nicht reden," a Lied the apparent simplicity of which belies its haunting beauty. From Schumann's Lieder und Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister was taken one of the less frequently excerpted songs, "So lasst mich scheinen," which Martineau and Graham handled with admirable delicacy. This restraint was also very welcome in the selections by Liszt ("Kennst du das Land") and Tchaikovsky ("None but the lonely heart.") Graham did full justice to the extravagant sensuality of the former, and the romantic melancholy of the latter, but rather through expressive phrasing and vocal coloration than overt theatricality. The set concluded with two contrasting settings of the same text, Duparc's wistful "Romance de Mignon" and Hugo Wolf's tempestuous, intense "Kennst du das Land." It is to Graham's credit that she explored so effectively the range of possible moods and meanings within the enigmatic verse.
