Music review: Hart and Friends
Recital done by the numbers
ByPeter Jacobi
October 30, 2007
What does one say at the outset in reporting mezzo-soprano Mary Ann Hart’s accomplishments during her Sunday afternoon recital at Auer Hall?
Four things: (1) she is one of the most sincere and giving performers; (2) she plays few tricks but, rather, employs her voice instinctively, seeming to grasp from within just how a note, a phrase, a passage should best be expressed; (3) she knows which colleagues to ask for collaboration; (4) she keenly understands programming that, for a listener, mixes the comfort of the familiar with the intrigue of the new.
To explain: (1) the statement speaks for itself, but there’s honesty, the heartfelt, in what Hart does; (2) she understands what she sings, more from an emotional within than from what intellectual study of a score has brought her; (3) she talked faculty pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer, to be her performance partner, along with a key trio of others late in the concert; (4) keep reading for her program selections.
Hart opened with music that a devotee of the art song recital most likely has come across before, five settings by Robert Schumann of ardently romantic German poems, starting with the popular “Widmung” (“Dedication”) and a joyous exclamation about spring, “Er ist’s.” Hart and Haguenauer, as a team, produced shimmers for “Mondnacht” (“Night of the Moon”), sweetness of mood for “Der Nussbaum” (“The Walnut Tree”) and feverish rapture for “Fruhlingsnacht” (“Spring Night”).
At that point, the recital departed from the expected. Haguenauer took solo possession of the stage to play rarely heard piano transcriptions by Franz Liszt, these of three songs just heard: “Widmung,” “Er ist’s” and “Fruhlingsnacht.” He commanded the sweeps and the subtleties, shaping the same sort of dreamy aura that Schumann sought to create in the originals.
Together, Hart and Haguenauer explored the lyrical world of Edvard Grieg, introducing the audience to a cycle of eight songs called “Haugtussa,” the content taken from a verse novel by fellow Norwegian Arne Garborg, which is about a clairvoyant girl. It is abundant in drama, and drama is what the performing team engaged spiritedly in throughout.
With flutist Kate Lukas and violist Yuval Gotlibovich joining Haguenauer to supply the descriptive instrumental accompaniment and with baritone Jake Sentgeorge as her singing partner, Hart turned to a 1990 musical prose poem, funny and sad, called “The Husbands,” a composition x-raying a busload of fall foliage lovers stopping in Bar Harbor during a New England tour. Their thoughts and foibles are pointedly captured. Hart and Sentgeorge gave them a three dimensional and very musical life. A responsive audience cheered, as it had earlier, too.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
