Picture by Stefan Cohen
I usually hear that we reside in anxious occasions. I’ve definitely stated that extra usually than I want I needed to. For the reason that pandemic, it might probably really feel like we’re buffeted with one disaster after one other. In America, the performing arts usually reply by retrenching, programming joyful issues, identified issues, inspirational issues. And that definitely fulfills a necessity. But I can consider so many operas, performs, and musicals which have been created throughout anxious occasions that confront the nervousness immediately. And that fulfills one other want that usually is uncared for.
The San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra has chosen the latter. Its fourth subscription live performance of the 2025-26 season (titled “Pearls of Sorrow”) provided a grasp class in musical curation. The live performance featured countertenor and co-curator Reginald Mobley in a program of German Baroque cantatas alongside African American spirituals organized by Henry Lebedinsky.
The conductor and co-curator was Christine Brandes. I can recall first seeing and listening to Brandes as Iris, Juno’s rainbow-clad messenger, in San Francisco Opera’s manufacturing of Handel’s Semele method again in 2000. I nonetheless bear in mind her shiny and centered lyric soprano voice, which took her all around the world. She has since turned to educating and conducting, holding professorships and lectureships at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State College, and conducting each opera and live performance repertoire throughout america, specializing in the Baroque and Classical intervals. It was a full-circle second for Brandes to return to Philharmonia Baroque, the place she was as soon as an everyday presence, to steer the orchestra that after backed her on the stage.
I applaud the orchestra’s administration for programming a live performance with the box-office-threatening title “Pearls of Sorrow” at a time when escapism can be comprehensible given our anxious age. I observed a number of extra empty seats at Bing Live performance Corridor in (and at) Stanford, and I puzzled if the unadventurous or incurious have been scared away by the specter of sorrow.
It’s too unhealthy. As a result of the live performance was one of many extra life-affirming occasions I can think about. From Mobley first taking the stage for Johann Christoph Bach’s “Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte” to when he had sung the ultimate notes of “My Lord What a Morning” on the finish, the live performance was something however dour.
This system was in 5 elements: Trauma, Sorrow, Ache, All My Trials, Discovering Peace/Freedom/Resilience. It’s very easy for a program like this to develop into maudlin. Brandes and Mobley traced an arc that made absolute sense. The trauma was not low-cost, the resilience was not saccharine. Two astute musicians made positive none of it turned trite.
This music of grief and, ultimately, resoluteness requested us within the viewers to confront sorrow not as some performative trauma-bonding however as part of life we too usually fake doesn’t exist. Music that was created by enslaved Africans within the American South and by German composers on the top of sectarian violence in Europe gave voice and witness to actuality. The live performance each nurtured and impressed.
The German composers featured favorites like J.S. Bach, Dietrich Buxtehude, and Heinrich Schütz, to which Brandes added composers whom I used to be assembly for the primary time: David Pohle, Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, and Johann Christoph Bach (the older brother). I appreciated Mobley’s and Brandes’ determination to focus squarely on the Baroque period, even resisting the urge to veer towards the brighter, extra theatrical early Classical period. There was an nearly meditative high quality to the German picks. The choice of spirituals combined the acquainted and not-so-familiar, permitting me to develop my understanding of the style.
Giving voice to all of it was Mobley as each soloist and co-curator. He’s an trustworthy and dignified presence: no singer’s mannerisms, no affectations, no fussiness. He trusted the textual content. He trusted the music.
That’s to not say he wasn’t deciphering the music. Honoring the composer isn’t an act of subordination. Mobley’s strategy inflected the textual content with sufficient pathos to provide voice to the emotional situation, however not a lot to create one the place it didn’t exist. He bit into his German constants when the music requested for defiance. Different occasions, the consonants slid out, the voice extra introspective.
The mechanics of his voice are fascinating. Within the higher register, it’s ethereal (with out being overly aspirated). It’s even ethereal. As I heard it within the acoustics of Bing Live performance Corridor, it’s not a muscular or authoritative voice. It doesn’t muscle its method into the corridor. It glides. This allowed the German to be understood, since he wasn’t darkening the sound. I’ve not often heard a singer be so beneficiant to the textual content.
This lightness made the extra mournful choices, equivalent to Schutz’s “Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott” (“Have mercy upon me, O Lord God”), notably affecting. Mobley additionally discovered the authenticity in passages that known as for a extra extroverted strategy, equivalent to Bach’s “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” (“Cross and crown are certain collectively”) and Buxtehude’s “Wenn Ich, Herr Jesu, habe dich” (“If I’ve you, Lord Jesus”). Even beneath strain, the voice by no means soured or turned ugly.
After I coach actors in voice and textual content, I typically ask them to “sit on” their voice, put it beneath a little bit of strain to see what comes out after they’re not being so guarded. When Mobley sat on his voice, it was clear that its theatricality was within the modal (chest) voice. If the music he sang by the German composers lived within the higher confines of the pinnacle, then the spirituals lived within the chest. For a voice that isn’t gigantic, the place he positioned it within the spirituals gave it a bluntness that wasn’t brutish. It caught me off guard. It was one thing I received’t quickly neglect.
The spirituals—notably “Typically I Really feel Like a Motherless Baby”, “There’s a Balm in Gilead”, “Sinner Please Don’t Let This Harvest Cross”—benefited from his deft potential to barter the passaggio, that difficult break between the modal voice and the alto voice. I may nearly name it belting, however with out the displaying off related to that vocal selection. I might swear that Shirley Verrett had taken him over from the past. In a live performance about remembrance, he allowed me to recollect how I got here to spirituals through singers like Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett, Jessye Norman. It was one thing I so appreciated. I might pay severe cash to listen to extra of Mobley sing in that decrease a part of his voice.
Brandes was a respectful presence on the rostrum, guiding the orchestra with quiet confidence. Not even essentially the most dolorous of picks was ever heavy or syrupy. Her tempos by no means let the music sag, by no means allowed mawkishness to creep in. She paced the afternoon in that candy spot between Wagnerian significance and having a practice to catch. She let the music breathe with out over-inflating it.
To have a Baroque vocal live performance backed by the Philharmonia Baroque is like having Martha Argerich play you “Completely happy Birthday” at a resort piano bar. It’s pure luxurious. As he was within the final PBO program, oboist Gonzalo X. Ruiz was a standout, each half Mobley’s equal in spinning out phrases that honored the emotionalism with out cheapening it. It was the analogue to Mobley’s increased alto voice. On the opposite facet of the stage was Nate Helgeson on the bassoon, doubling Mobley’s modal voice with each energy and adaptability. One other delight was Adam Cockerham on the theorbo (a long-necked instrument of the lute household), which, when paired with Mobley, gave the music a form of troubadour sound, gently accenting the sung textual content. As all the time, concertmaster Elizabeth Blumenstock got here in together with her normal mixture of gusto and precision, the heartstrings of the accompaniment.
For many who embraced a program that leaned into grief and resilience, they have been rewarded with a live performance that was each good and transferring. And it was carried out by artists daring sufficient to strategy what may have been a pass-the-Kleenex affair with class. Right here’s to hoping that different performing arts organizations observe Philharmonia Baroque’s lead in these anxious occasions. There are pearls to be discovered amidst the sorrow.
Matthew Travisano
Matthew is a San Francisco-based educator and actor. He has taught and lectured on the performing arts for greater than twenty years. He has skilled a era of actors within the higher Bay Space at each Oakland Faculty for the Arts and Ruth Asawa Faculty of the Arts, the place he has additionally taught literature, composition, literary idea, and aesthetics. He holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley and a Grasp’s in Educating (MAT) from San Diego State College.
