The Singer as Orchestrator: After the Salon

Those of us whose métier is the thirty-staff score page often think that we are the only orchestrators in opera. This thinking is understandable but incorrect.  Obviously J and I talked a bit about composing at this event, but what stayed with me were the performances: how an imaginative vocal artist can learn, choose, and embody a range of expressive colors it takes most of us composers sixty strings and as many pitches to suggest.

I’d first met Caroline Worra and Cherry Duke through Little Women, who had both sung the opera for the first time the same season (2002-2003) but in different productions: Cherry had introduced her first Jo to Virginia before singing the rôle at the Cabrillo Festival with Marin the following year, and Caroline had sang Amy for Glimmerglass that summer and for New York City Opera that spring.  Though we’d never worked together, I’d known Amy Burton socially though City Opera and through John Musto: and I sat in on a coaching or two when Amy was first learning John’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, the orchestral version of which she’s sung repeatedly around the country.

So I knew these women’s art, a little: and yet I didn’t.  That night at Symphony Space, Caroline sang, from Lysistrata, both the heroine’s second-act aria (which she knew, and recorded, six years ago) and the first-act cabaletta on which it’s based (which she’d never seen.)  Her voice, always full and bright, is even fuller and brighter now; but it was what she did with it that swept all before her in the aria.  One example: there’s a long middle D on the word “I” about three-quarters of the way through “I am not my own:” the soprano must sustain it over five slow bars while the orchestra proffers a fragment of a theme which, like the beloved it describes, can never return.  The immobility of the character is what’s important at this juncture: and so if you, the singer, simply sustain the pitch and observe the crescendo, you’ll have done enough to make the point.  Or you can do what Caroline did, which is to start the pitch with a flute-like shimmer, and not only build the volume but darken the color beat by beat until the pitch breaks off in baritonal anguish.

Comparably, Amy, in J’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was wrestling with vocal lines of two distinctly different characters: one a treading, low-register imprecation that took its color, if not its form, from the passacaglia underpinning it, and the second a fugitive, improvisatory cantilena that seems to evanesce into a cloudbank of bells.  The pivot point between the two is on the phrase “The answer,” and Amy, working one of those miracles of vocal technique that everyone can hear but no one can describe without resorting to far-fetched metaphors (see below,) made her assertive lyric soprano a slim filament of itself.  Her voice lost neither aural presence nor verbal clarity, but its texture seemed to thin from satin to gauze: a perfect choice when singing, as the lyric demands, an answer that’s no answer at all.

Cherry Duke, of the three singers that night, had in many ways the trickiest assignment: singing a lyric (“Dodecaphonia, or They Call Her Twelve-Tone Rose”) written for the wry attitude and offhand delivery of an amplified theatre singer while simultaneously negotiating a twelve-tone jazz setting extending from low G to almost two octaves higher.  Cherry was in great, rich voice: but here, too, the success of the performance owed not just to her astutely judged decisions—when to let just the plain pitched word carry the meaning, when to let the voice bloom—but her technique in making them audible.  And that technique isn’t just timbral.  Nothing reminds you so much that comedy is timing—is rhythm—than than hearing Cherry land a musical joke by the mere adjustment of an eighth-rest, or turn a subito piano after a robust forte into the aural equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

I don’t mean to sentimentalize here.  Vocal artists in 2011 are supposed to have these timbral—these interpretive—resources.  But these performances underlined for me a point that I try to impress on the composers I work with: that however precise and unambiguous we think we make our scores, the opera doesn’t happen until its singers embody, not merely mime, those scores’ intentions.  You don’t want piannissimo, you want heartbreak, but you can only notate the former: and there’s no notation devised that can specify intelligence.  I remember vividly the first time I ever heard the term “create” applied to a singer participating in a world première, as in, “Annie Krull created the rôle of Elektra,” and bristling ever-so-slightly: surely Strauss and von Hoffmansthal were the creators, no?  And yet any of us who have ever suffered through (or inflicted on patient friends) a poor MIDI realization of a vocal score have to revise that hoariest of clichés about this art we practice.  Forget about when it’s over: the opera doesn’t begin until that lady sings.