Handel, Grieg, Wolf, Poulenc, Barber, Bizet

By Harvey Steiman

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.

Danielle de Niese, soprano; Ken Noda, piano; presented by Cal Performances, Hertz Hall, University of California at Berkeley. 8.2.2009 (HS)

Danielle de Niese, best known for her glittering stage presence in Handel operas, opened her recital Sunday in Berkeley, California, with two arias from Handel’s Semele. Singers like to start with the familiar before venturing out into foreboding territory, but it was not a good sign that the silvery, mercurial coloratura that serves her so well on the opera stage seemed to desert her here. She lent a coy sexiness to “Endless Pleasure, Endless Love” and “Myself I Shall Adore” but the music, despite vibrant playing from pianist Ken Noda, never lifted off. By all rights, these songs should have catapulted the program into high gear, but they deserved the tepid response they got from the half-filled house.

The problem, which she never quite overcame, was getting the voice in focus. Here, and throughout the program, she seemed to be oversinging, pushing the sound rather that letting it float untethered. Hertz Hall, with 600 seats, is not so big that she needed to do that. And indeed, she did her best singing when she throttled back in softer passages. Singing loud, the lyric voice took on a hard edge that kept the music from gathering momentum. Otherwise, she showed such fine musical values, understanding of the texts, attention to pace and rhythm, that it was doubly disappointing that the sound missed the mark.

Wearing gowns by the Vienna-based designer Thang de Hoo, the slim singer with the exotic features of her Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage cut a glamorous figure on stage. She also displayed the acting knowhow that has earned her plaudits for her operatic performances. Noda, musical assistant to James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera, gave her all the musical support she could want.

To her credit, she chose a program that went well beyond the tried and true. After the Handel, she moved on to Grieg and a selection of songs from Haugtussa. The song cycle, brimming with countryside atmosphere, needed a lighter, softer approach than de Niese delivered. She was better in five Hugo Wolf songs, especially the yearning of Vergborgenheit. Her acting chops stood her in good stead for the final song in the set, a rousing run through Ich hab’ in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen, breathlessly accounting for a roster of lovers in locations over northern Italy.

The second half opened with a set of Poulenc songs from Fiançailles pour rire (Whimsical Betrothal), which despite some shaky French pronunciation caught the humor and humanity in them. The most telling moment had nothing to do with singing and everything to do with the text. At the end of “Violon” (Violin), the piano plays an extensive imitation of a Romantic violin interlude. Listening raptly, de Niese sighed melodramatically as the music ended, and draped herself over the piano, drawing smiles and chuckles.

Her stage presence showed itself again in three of Barber’s James Joyce songs, the tricky language coming through clearly and the dramatic twists at the end of “Solitary Hotel” and “Nuvoletta” emerging naturally. Humor was the leavening in the second of two Bizet songs, “La coccinelle,” in which a youthful lad misses a chance to kiss his girl because of an unfortunate fascination with a ladybug on her neck, and two encores by American composers. The first, “I Hate Men,” from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate, made perfect use of the stridency in her voice that got in the way earlier, and the second, William’s Bolcom’s Latin-tinged “Amor,” played perfectly off her striking looks.