Sopranos Daitong Li and Ingrid Stromberg Give Free Recital September 13 at St. Paul's Cathedral

Concert Was Lovely Except for Barbara Strozzi’s Interminable Cantata

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

LYesterday afternoon (Saturday, September 13) I went to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for a free vocal concert featuring sopranos Daitong Li and Ingrid Stromberg, which was scheduled for the church’s “Great Hall” (actually a second-story room off the main chapel) and was supposed to run from 4 to 5 p.m. It actually started around 4:10 and ended at 5:15, though there was a mid-concert intermission (unusual in these presentations). Li and Stromberg met in 2024 when they were both studying voice at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). They both have professional careers outside music, Li as a data scientist in financial services and Stromberg as a campus planner. Li grew up playing the erhu, a two-stringed version of a violin which George Gershwin rather cattily remarked always sounded out of tune. Their accompanist was Dr. Kyle Adam Blair, who got his doctorate in contemporary music performance at UCSD in 2018 and was accomplished enough I’d love to hear him play a solo piano recital some day. The concert was called “Fall Recital (songs we love),” though of the seven items on the program only three were true duets. The program opened with the two women together singing “Let Us Wander” from The Indian Queen by Henry Purcell and his brother Daniel, a quasi-opera completed in 1695, the year Henry Purcell died, about a war between the Aztecs and the Incas that allegedly happened before the Spanish invaded and conquered both. Then Daitong Li soloed on three songs by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924): “Clair de Lune” (“Moonlight”), “Spleen,” and “Mandoline,” which were quite lovely.

After that Stromberg took the stage for an interminable 12-minute piece called “Che Si Purò Fare” by Italian Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). I’ve never heard anything by Barbara Strozzi other than this piece, a solo cantata about a woman being targeted for vengeance by the gods (like most vocal music from the Italian Baroque, this reached back to Greek or Roman mythology or history for its text). If this is representative, I’m not in any great hurry to hear any more. It just droned on and on and on with self-pitying verbiage by librettist Gaudenzio Brunacci (1631-1667), and Stromberg did herself no favors by singing it in a key at least a half-tone too high for her. Her voice screeched and whined throughout the piece, especially on the high notes, which she made but seemed all too effortful. I suspect Barbara Strozzi is one of those women composers whose works are being revived just because she’s a woman, and while the current interest in women composers has unearthed some spectacular 19th and 20th century talents like Louise Farrenc, Amy Beach, and Florence Price (the last of whom faced the double whammy of being female and being Black), Strozzi (on the basis of this piece) was one who could have stayed undiscovered. Afterwards the two singers got back together for an excerpt from an acknowledged masterpiece: the duet “Sull’aria” from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. Count Almaviva has the hots for his wife’s maid, Susanna, and she and the Countess hatch a plot to embarrass him through which the Countess will disguise herself as Susanna and meet her husband for a tryst, then surprise him with the revelation that the woman he was meeting for extra-relational activity is in fact his wife. The duet features the two women drafting the letter they will give to the Count inviting him to the alleged affair.

The second half of the concert opened with Li singing three of the “Hermit Songs” by Samuel Barber (1910-1981): “The Crucifixion” (set to a 12th century text from a collection called The Speckled Book), “The Monk and His Cat,” and “The Desire for Hermitage.” The last two were based on texts from the 9th century, though “The Monk and His Cat” dealt with issues that will be familiar to anyone who has a pet cat today: “You rejoice when your claws entrap a mouse/I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem.” Afterwards Stromberg sang four of the folk-song settings by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): “The Nurse’s Song” from A Charm of Lullabies (1947); “The Proud Songsters (Thrushes, Finches, and Nightingales)” from Winter Words (1953); “Sonetto XXX” from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940), one of Britten’s many vocal works composed for his partner, tenor Peter Pears; and his adaptation of the imperishably beautiful “The Last Rose of Summer” by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), also used by German composer Friedrich von Flotow in his opera Martha (1847). “The Proud Songsters” was especially compelling since Britten was known as an amateur ornithologist. Stromberg came off much better in the Britten settings than she had in Strozzi’s work, mainly because the keys were far more congenial for her.

The last selection was a duet called “Pur ti miro” from L’Incoronazione di Poppea (“The Coronation of Poppea”), the last opera by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), about the sexual relationship between the Roman Emperor Nero and Poppea, a prostitute whom Nero made his mistress and eventually his queen. In Monteverdi’s original production Nero was played by a soprano castrato named Stefano Costa. Castrati (male singers who were castrated before puberty so they’d retain their high voices as they aged) were commonplace in 17th and 18th century opera, though public revulsion at the practice drove them from the stage. But the Roman Catholic Church continued to use castrated male singers until the early 20th century, and the one castrato who actually recorded, Alessandro Moreschi, was a soloist with the Sistine Chapel Choir until 1903, when Pope Pius X ended the use of castrati and pensioned off Moreschi. (An earlier pope, Leo XIII, had banned the hiring of new castrati in 1878 but allowed the castrati already employed by the church to keep working.) All that is by way of explanation that this male-female love duet was performed by two women, one playing a woman and one playing a man. It brought the concert to a quite beautiful and exalting end.