Schubert Sings Schubert (and Others) at Mason House

REVIEW

Anna Schubert, soprano & Milena Gligić, piano, Mason Home Concerts, Mar Vista

RODNEY PUNT

A snug living-room full of music lovers was treated to a terrific song recital on the fourth Saturday in January, delivered by soprano Anna Schubert and collaborative pianist Milena Gligiċ. As LA Opus readers will know well, the venue was the private house in LA’s Mar Vista neighborhood where owner/impresario/composer Todd Mason has presented his home concerts for the last 12 years. While instrumental music has predominated, vocal music is increasingly popular.

Anna Schubert is well known to this writer from her performances at the Long Beach Opera (reviews here and here, where her tall presence (almost six feet in heels) projected authority in two strong Handelian character roles. Nonetheless, the two most important art-music forms for the human voice couldn’t be more different in form and function.

While opera is grand, with big emotions, and often bigger performers who go at each other fiercely, art song is small in scale, its universe of emotions delivered by a single singer. Opera productions are easy to follow, with evocative sets, and plenty of physical action between the singer-actors. Nowadays printed lyrics are either festooned above the proscenium or on the backs of seats facing the viewer, vastly improving comprehension of the opera’s action.

Song recitals are an entirely different experience because each song is its own encapsulated story-world in miniature. The challenge for the singer is to articulate lyrics clearly while conveying varied emotions in each story. Given the lack of physical action, the singer must convey a song’s emotional meaning by face and voice only. Further complicating matters, most art songs in the repertory are sung in languages other than English.

This evening’s 14 songs were divided, eight and six, between French and German settings. The French first half opened with three of the Ariettes oubliées L. 60, a song-cycle written between 1886 and 1887 by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Schubert and Gligić gave us Nos. 3, L'ombre des arbres, 5 Green, and 6 Spleen (both the latter designated as Aquarelles), all three of which shared a mood of romantic nostalgia and resignation, eloquently projected by Anna Schubert.

The Gallic ennui continued with Elégie (1874), Extase (1874), and L'invitation au voyage (1870) by Debussy’s older countryman Henri Duparc (1848-1933), and was thoroughly maintained with the final pair from Debussy, Beau Soir L. 84 (1890-91) and Apparition L. 57 (1884). If I have a criticism it’s that there was no break in this first set, which made for a long string of songs that might have been better grouped in two sets of the two composers. The audience did not know when/if they should clap, so didn’t.

After the break, as ever enriched by refreshments including a hot dish from the skilled hands of Ethel Phipps, we had, first, Schubert singing Schubert, with Anna charmingly acknowledging that she just might have a distant family connection to the great Austrian master. The selections were Suleika I, D. 720 (1821), Du bist die Ruh, Op. 59, No. 3, D. 776 (1823), Nacht und Träume, Op. 43, No. 2, D. 827 (1823), and finally the early but astonishingly original Gretchen am Spinnrade, Op. 2, D. 118 (1814), its passion transfixing in Anna’s performance.

Two widely differing items completed the program. First was Ich scheide, S. 319 (1860), by Franz Liszt (1811-1886), the haunting tenderness of which might have come as a big surprise to anyone used only to the barnstorming virtuosity of much of his solo piano music. Then, to close an evening that followed approximately reverse chronological order, the ineffably beautiful soprano aria Bete aber auch dabei, the fourth number in J. S. Bach’s church cantata Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, BWV 115 (1724).

Almost needless to say, this shortish but memorable recital had a rapturous reception from Mason House’s capacity audience, its success owing much to Anna Schubert’s collaboration with Milena Gligić, a last-minute substitute for another indisposed pianist, and a singer herself, playing Mason’s 1986 Yamaha C7 with German hammers. Those hammers really help give it the softer tone so welcome in chamber music and here accompanying a voice. In addition, the acoustic design of this small concert room magnifies the low end so it sounds a lot better than if it were in a typical home or even a big stage.

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