Freddie Collier
A number of years in the past I despatched a assessment to parterre that, in passing, talked about a efficiency that had starred Kate Lindsay when truly it had been Kate Aldrich. The 2 mezzos have the same vocal vary, very totally different musical focus, and are each pleasant to come across in any forged. Fortunately our intrepid La Cieca, James Jorden, caught me within the act and altered the copy. Whew! Shut one! (We want editors, each one in all us.)
Final Monday I completely loved the Met’s premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, particularly delighting within the opera’s many concertati. Few trendy composers, in my humble opinion, are prepared to allow multiple singer to sing at any time, thereby depriving themselves of an incredible dramatic software and us of sensuous vocal pleasure. Heggie is fearless and I applaud him. And among the many welter of masculine sound (wonderful, throughout the board), not the least, in quartets, trios, even a duet, was the only feminine voice within the Pequod’s crew, that of Janai Brugger because the cabin boy, Pip, whose easy cherry-colored tones gave leavening and beautiful excessive complement to the night’s delight. That, I stated to myself, is a voice I’d love to listen to once more, regardless of the rep.
However I’m a foggy previous fogey. An incredible a part of the delight of being an opera-lover is determining how you can pronounce all these wacky names in all these wacky tongues (opera has been a world artwork because the day it caught a toe outdoors Italy). And although neither woman is new to me, remembering which is which is extra of a wrestle than it was once. So after I noticed that J’Nai Bridges was giving a recital at Kaufman Music Middle’s Merkin corridor on Wednesday night, I confused the names and went for it. A contented confusion!
The “recital” was extra of a season finale for the John J. Cali Faculty of Music at Montclair State (from the speeches, I assumed the identify they introduced was not Cali however Kelly). Bridges had been spending every week or two teaching college students at Montclair, which included singing duets or ensembles with them, and she or he offered a live performance corridor filled with viewers by performing a program with their help, letting her identify be the draw.
She additionally confirmed the children how these items are accomplished. For one factor, when her pianist fell sick two days earlier than the live performance, she recalled having heard a younger prize-winning Juilliard scholar from Chicago named Joshua Mhoon, and in two days he discovered how you can play de Falla and a number of other American composers with a positive hand and a chic rhythmic command—and how you can accompany a diva flawlessly.
For an additional, Bridges got here out in a robe the like of which one has seldom seen even on the recital stage. The temper was Gustav Klimt (pity she sang no Mahler or Korngold), gold metallic stripes and sparkles, outlining her voluptuous kind with only a trace of off-the-shoulder. I gained’t imagine the equality of the sexes has been absolutely achieved till males can put on such decorative gadgets in formal circumstances just like the recital stage. Simply opening a few buttons doesn’t do it; I need shade! I need sparkle! However for now, Miss Bridges has cornered the market. We couldn’t take our eyes off her. I did surprise how she had managed to develop an additional foot of black hair (piled regally excessive) since taking part in the cabin boy with brief bangs on Monday, and that was what led me to verify this system and notice I had confused two totally different girls.
However then she started to sing, and, my ears stated, “Who cares? Simply chill out and let this voice wash over you.”
Bridges produces a bountiful sound, nice robust floods of it at any time when she has to. Merkin, a wonderful corridor for solo voices, is slightly too small for her—she will be able to fill the Met or some other corridor designed for singing—however at this occasion, she usually drew herself in and perceptibly, simply, held again her opulent vocal presents.
De Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas, which makes use of folks rhythms from totally different areas of Spain and has earned its recognition within the repertory by providing the singer so many alternative types wherein to indicate off, huge cries of heartbreak’s anguish, tight, jagged sarcasms, rejoicing in younger love. Bridges gave us all of that, each the operatic grandeur and the near-recitative of tossed insults, and Mhoon’s sharp guitar-like assaults might need been studied in a Roma cave outdoors Granada.
Dario Acosta
There adopted a set of Spirituals organized right into a cantata by John Carter. Bridges let it rip in “Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells” with a gleaming sound on the impulsive, repeated “ring,” then a weary craving flooding the voice in “Generally I Really feel Like a Motherless Shild,” and an lastly explosion of triumph for “Journey on, King Jesus.”
There adopted settings by three composers of poems by Harlem’s personal Langston Hughes: Carlos Simon’s “Prayer,” Margaret Bonds’ “Minstrel Man,” wherein Bridges injected emotional selection to repeated, nearly extraordinary lyrics, and the melodrama of Florence Worth’s “Maintain Quick to Goals.”
A number of of Bridges’s college students on the college interrupted this system (as used usually to occur at musicales in an earlier age), and I loved Shawn Okpebholo’s “Steal Away,” sung by Clinton Garrison, with a light-weight, pleasingly grained baritone. Different singers joined Bridges for the farewell trio from Cosí fan tutte (the place Bridges suavely scaled her opulent sound all the way down to stability — however by no means drown — the opposite singers) and the “Barcarolle” from Hoffmann. Right here her voice fantastically blended with the soprano of Clara Luz Hernández-Iranzo, however the piece, although prettily sung, appeared unnecessarily rushed; it needs to be carried out slowly, with languor, the voices delighting of their sound, their sexiness, the temper of a gondola swaying slowly to the pier.
To conclude, with a dozen children for refrain, Bridges gave us a full-throttle “Habañera,” her wonderful French on flirtatious show. I’d be tickled to listen to her in a full efficiency of the opera—she has the sound and the depth for it. The encore was “You’ll By no means Stroll Alone.” Rodgers’s melody stands up effectively in operetta firm.
