Tenor proves that art songs live in America

July 4, 2003

By Grant Menzies for The Register-Guard.

It was poet Emily Dickinson who pointed out that while some people claimed a word was dead as soon as it was said, she believed a word, once spoken, only just began to live.

Dickinson could have been describing the state of the American art song. She certainly supplied verses to some of the finest ones set by a living composer, Jake Heggie, who created a cycle around them called “The Faces of Love.”

Of the six men whose works were presented in an Oregon Bach Festival recital Wednesday night in the acoustically exquisite Beall Hall, Heggie and Dominick Argento are the only American art song composers alive and kicking. The others – Samuel Barber, John Jacob Niles, John Duke and Charles Ives – are all dead and buried.

It would be easy to assume that the art of the distinctively American art song rests with them, were it not for the fact that in the end, it’s not just composers who keep the flame alive, but the superb vocalists who inspire them.

In the voice and presence of tenor James Taylor, with his sensitive accompanist, Donald Sulzen, we had all the proof we need that far from being dead, the genre of the American art song is excitingly, beautifully alive.

By definition, a well-crafted art song – think Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Henri Duparc – is a study in saying the most in the least amount of time and space. You have a thumbnail sketch in which to air Grand Canyon-size feelings.

For this reason, the form is as much about acting as it is about singing.

Vocally and physically, Taylor is blessed with all the necessary equipment. He is a rare pleasure both to watch and to hear. He arrives on stage and you can’t wait to hear what he’ll do with the phrasing, with the words, and with the drama.

Taylor’s voice has a clear brilliance that paradoxically carries powerful emotional weight. It’s filled with a light that is not opaque but rather is transparent, rich in depth.

It is a voice that he is ready to lend lavishly to the communication of intimate sympathies, of personal meanings and private concepts of beauty. And he does so in a frankly heartfelt way that is all the more unique for seeming as utterly natural, honest and open as his own bright face.

In shades of Dickinson herself, Taylor’s interpretive powers ranged over a broad topography of the spirit, from the comic, thumbs-in-vest Americana of Niles’ “Gambler Don’t You Lose Your Place,” to the sweetly tender poetry of John Duke’s setting of e.e. cumming’s “i carry your heart.”

“Hymn,” from Argento’s Elizabethan Songs and praising the virginal huntress Diana, showed off Taylor’s silver tone to perfection, as well as the moon-cold beauty of this most Elizabethan of 20th century songs.

In Ives’ “Memories: A. Very Pleasant, B. Rather Sad,” he won his acting wings with a quicksilver switch from vaudevillian slapstick to poignant elegy.

However, it was Heggie’s settings of Dickinson’s poetry that were the program’s high point.

Dickinson’s verse has been stigmatized unfairly for its simple meter by those who don’t know how ironically she was echoing the naive structure of church hymns. She was filling the geometric interstices not with complacent Bible homilies, but rather with wild nights and nameless loves.

Heggie, who unlike many modern romantics always has something fresh to say, understands this (as does the greatest female interpreter of these songs, Renee Fleming).

Taylor, too, took his hushed audience into those strange, timeless places where Dickinson saw unrequited love as a sting from “the Goblin Bee.” And he also brought to life a love attained in “At Last – To Be Identified,” using a light touch, as did the poet, to plumb to the very heart of the profound.

Grant Menzies is classical music critic for Willamette Week in Portland.