Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Listener’s Gallery

2022; Routledge; Volume: 79; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.53830/ohmv1038

2769-4046

Gregory Berg,

Diverse Musicological Studies

The Listener's Gallery Gregory Berg (bio) Why do the Nations?, Stephen Powell, baritone and piano. (Acis APL51200; 74:57) Puccini: "Morire?," "Terra e Mare." Ravel: "Chanson à Boire." de Falla: "El Paño Moruno." Wolf: "Auch kleine Dinge." Rachmaninoff: "Vesenniye Vody," "Oikyublla Ya Ba Pechal Syoyu." Zhao: "Jiao Wo Rúhé Bùxlang Ta." Britten: "The Brisk Young Widow," "Every Night and Every Morn." Verdi: "La Seduzione," "Il Poveretto." Barber: "I Hear an Army." Strauss: "Ich trage meine Minne." Fauré: "Mandoline." Taki: "Kojo no Tsuki." Obradors: "Corozón Porqué Pasáis?" Head: "Money, O!" Schubert: "Die Forelle." Copland: "Zion's Walls." Dong: "Gagopa." Paladilhe: "Petits enfants." Tchaikovsky: "Nochi Bezumnyye, Nochi Bessonyye." Brahms: "Meine Liebe ist grün." Santoro: "Meu Amor Me Disse Adeus." Montsalvatge: "Cancion De Cuna Para Domir Un Negritto." "Ives: "Majority." Most singers can only dream of the kind of success that baritone Stephen Powell attained with his debut recording, American Composers at Play. That collection of songs by William Bolcom, Ricky Ian Gordon, Lori Laitman, and John Musto, released in 2020, was a critical sensation and earned Powell a richly deserved Grammy nomination. It was quite a thrilling breakthrough for a 56 year old singer in the fourth decade of a solidly successful career. The vexing challenge that confronted Powell was how to follow up that triumphant studio debut with a second recording that wouldn't seem redundant or anticlimactic. Amazingly, Powell's second recording is in some ways even more remarkable than his first. Why do the Nations is a collection of twenty-seven songs from eleven countries and encompassing ten different languages. It is a boldly ambitious project purely in terms of its repertoire, but what truly sets it apart is that Stephen Powell serves as his own pianist. His liner notes tell us that he had actually pondered the possibility of creating some sort of self-accompanied performance project for many years. What he characterizes as nothing more than a "hazy notion" became a clearer goal when the COVID-19 pandemic brought all standard musical performance to a standstill and made normal in-person collaboration all but impossible. In the midst of such an unhappy situation, Powell resolved to make his fanciful notion a reality. This disk is the result, and it is a recording that people likely will be talking about for many years to come. In the biography on his website, Powell talks about how for many years he dreamt of following in the footsteps of Billy Joel, one of countless examples of self-accompanied singers in the world of pop music. In that arena, such a thing scarcely merits mention; in the realm of classical music, such a thing is, of course, quite rare. What Powell's otherwise thorough liner notes fail to say is that there is a surprisingly extensive history of self-accompanied classical singers. There are accounts of both Jacobo Peri and Giulio Caccini performing as self-accompanied singers. Several castrati are known to have occasionally accompanied themselves for the sake of demonstrating their prowess. There are letters by Mozart in which he talks about students of his who were expected to accompany themselves in their voice lessons with him. In the nineteenth century, such luminaries as Maria Malibran, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Adelina Patti, and Jenny Lind were known to accompany themselves in recital, although almost always in encores. One must remember too the legendary George Henschel, a close friend of Brahms and someone who helped to popularize the lieder recital, and who came out of retirement to make recordings and perform over the radio. The vast majority of his recitals, including performances of Die Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin, were performed with him at the piano. The practice of classical singers accompanying themselves in performance fell out of favor in the twentieth century, with the exception of such composer-singers as Reynaldo Hahn, Samuel Barber, and Michael Head. Of course, one would sometimes encounter self-accompanied classical singing in certain settings and scenarios such as salon programs or lecture-recitals. Your writer, for instance, has played for himself in all of his faculty lecturevoice recitals over the last ten years. As mentioned earlier, the forced...