Soprano Michelle Pérez and Pianist John Solari Give Memorable Concert at St. Paul's May 20

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night – Saturday, May 20 – I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral Church to hear a beautiful and spectacular vocal recital by soprano Michelle Pérez and pianist John Solari performing a wide variety of songs. Two weeks before (May 6) at the same venue I’d heard a complete performance by tenor Carlos Barraza Treviño and pianist Mackenzie Lyn Marr of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (“The Miller’s Beautiful Daughter”), a rare opportunity to hear all 20 songs in the cycle “live” and in one go. Pérez and Solari began their recital with three songs by Claude Debussy from his six-song cycle “Ariettes Oubliées” (“Forgotten Songs”) to texts by Paul Verlaine, and the juxtaposition of the two brought me in mind of the late comedienne Anna Russell’s joke that German Lieder are mediocre poetry set to great music, while French chansons are “great poetry set to rather wispy music.” Pérez and Solari phrased the three Debussy songs – “C’est l’extase languoreuse,” “Green” (“Aquarelle”) and “Spleen,” the last a bitter breakup song – magnificently, though the vaulted ceiling of St. Paul’s “Great Hall” (actually not the main church chapel but a side room with similar acoustics) tended to turn Pérez’s magnificently “floated” high notes louder and more shrill than she no doubt intended. The next work on her program was Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” a 15-minute ode to childhood and the innocence of same set to a “prose poem” by James Agee. Music critic B. H. Haggin ridiculed the text, especially the part in which the heroine names all the members of her immediate family and says they “are good to me,” but in Barber’s setting Agee’s poem projects the right sort of simplicity even though as poetry it’s hardly in the same league as the Verlaine texts Debussy set. Solari’s accompaniment was rich and full-bodied, though to hear what the song cycle sounds like with the orchestra Barber intended one should turn to the YouTube post by Eileen Farrell, for whom Barber wrote the piece, with Bernard Herrmann conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in a 1949 broadcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZG2MXeWrsY).

The Debussy songs made up Pérez’s first group (you’re only supposed to applaud between groups, not after each individual song), the Barber made up her second, and the third group consisted of three songs in Spanish: “Del cabello más sutil” (“Of the Most Subtle Hair”) by Fernando Obradors (1897-1945), “Oración de las Madres que tienen sus hijos en brazos” (“Prayer of the Mothers Who Have Their Children In Their Arms”) by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), and “Júrame” (“Promise Me”) by 20th century Mexican composer María Grever (1885-1951), born María Joaquina de la Portilla Torres in Guanajuato to a Spanish father and Mexican mother. Manuel de Falla is easily Spain’s best-known composer, and María Grever is one of those people whose music you know even if you’ve never heard of her. Her most famous composition is “Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado,” which you’ve undoubtedly heard in its English translation, “What a Difference a Day Made” – especially as recorded by the late Dinah Washington as “What a Difference a Day Makes.” She also wrote “Duerme,” which with its English title, “Time Was,” was recorded by Connee Boswell and John Coltrane (who took the Latin ballad and sped it up considerably for his first solo album). “Júrame” was Grever’s first international hit, written for star Mexican tenor José Mojica.

After “Júrame” Pérez and Solari took a break and then returned for another group of four: the aria “Donde lieta uscì” from Puccini’s standard-repertoire opera La Bohème and three songs from American musicals. One was “The Glamorous Life” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (a musical-theatre adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles on a Summer Night), whose dazzling wordplay was easily projected by Pérez. One was “A Stranger” by Michael John LaChiusa from a 2009 show called Giant: The Musical, which book writer Sybille Pearson adapted directly from Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel and ignored the changes made for the iconic (mainly because it’s James Dean’s last movie) 1956 film. The third was an unfamiliar song from a reasonably familiar show: “Before I Gaze at You Again” from composer Frederick Loewe’s and lyricist and book writer Alan Jay Lerner’s Arthurian musical Camelot. (It’s a lament sung by Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, at the end of Act I.) Pérez did a good job with the musical numbers and didn’t sound like she was “slumming” the way opera singers often do when they attempt to sing songs from musicals.

Then came the final song on the program, Anna’s aria from Otto Nicolai’s (1810-1849) The Merry Wives of Windsor, sung in the original German (the German title is Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor). The program notes state that Pérez is a master’s student in voice from Arizona State University, and among her roles at school is Marie, the title character in Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment. Marie is a fiendishly difficult coloratura role associated mostly with Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills, and though she was singing in German rather than Italian (or the language Donizetti wrote The Daughter of the Regiment in, French), this aria showed off her coloratura chops for the only time last night. Overall, it was a beautiful and exquisite concert, and it also served as an appetizer for the solo piano recital Solari is scheduled to give at the same venue (2728 Sixth Avenue, on the corner of Sixth and Nutmeg in Banker’s Hill) Saturday, June 10, again at 5 p.m. Given how well he phrased the accompaniments to Debussy’s songs, here’s hoping Solari plays some of Debussy’s solo piano music at his own recital!