Deborah Voigt: All the right notes

When: Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009 • Where: Ordway • Who: Deborah Voigt, soprano; Brian Zeger, piano. Part of the Schubert Club International Artist Series.

Confession: I don’t get the art songs, or recital songs, or whatever they call the music performed by classical/operatic/dramatic sopranos/mezzos/tenors/basses in programs like the one we heard last night at the Ordway. I’m not saying I don’t like them; I just don’t get them. It seems they’re either too short or too long, with too much drama, and I can’t make sense of the structure. I’ll take jazz almost any way it’s served, but give me a song with a verse and a chorus and a bridge, please.

That being said, I enjoyed every moment of Deborah Voigt. At 8:02, the doors opened, out she strode, and off she took on “The year’s at the spring,” an energetic setting of a sunny poem by Robert Browning (the one that ends “God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!”). She looked spectacular. This is the soprano who was fired in 2004 by the Royal Opera House for being too large for a costume she was supposed to wear in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos. Following gastric bypass surgery, she is considerably slimmer but hardly a stick. (And she treats the story with humor and wit; see her video “The Return of the Little Black Dress.”) At the Ordway, she wore beefsteak-tomato-red satin, lace, and sequins. Her matching shoes had beaded tassels. Just what a diva should wear.

Three Browning songs were followed by four Verdi songs, each with lots of rolled Rs. Then five by Richard Strauss. Reading the texts and translations, minding the printed instructions “Please wait for the end of the song to turn the page” (when everyone turned the page, Voigt mimed being fanned by a breeze), I fantasized someday writing a poem that would be set to music and sung by a famous soprano. Maybe I could start by selecting some of the lyrics from tonight’s program….

The wind has dropped, and the sky’s deranged.
Do not approach the urn that holds my ashes!
Have mercy, oh woman of grief. Pour me some wine!
The weather is bad. The alders and the willows weep.
Girls with streaming hair and bare breasts cry “Adonis! Adonis!”
A groan of the dead arises. The crows fly over the moors, grimly.

Intermission, then part two (the part where Voigt wore sequins). Four songs by Respighi (actually three; she skipped one), and four by living American composer (and painter) Ben Moore, a name new to me. His texts are poems by Elizabeth Bishop, James Joyce, and Robert Herrick (“To the Virgins, to make much of Time”). I liked them very much. The last six songs were by Leonard Bernstein, starting with the nonsense lyrics of “Piccola Serenata” and ending with “Somewhere” from West Side Story.

Throughout, Voigt was utterly charming. She made occasional comments to the audience, mugged a bit, and mentioned more than once that her mother was in the house. Her voice was sumptuous, resonant on the lower notes, wide-open on the highs. Her diction was crisp and clear. World-famous though she is, she seemed accessible and warm, and the entire evening had an intimate feel. It was everything I like about a Schubert Club concert.

We wouldn’t let Voigt and her superb pianist, Brian Zeger, go, so they returned for three encores: another Strauss (“Zueignung”), Irving Berlin’s “I Love a Piano,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Show Boat.

As always at a Schubert Club event with a piano, there was a third person on stage for much of the night: page-turner (and composer) David Evan Thomas, seated in a chair to the left of Zeger. Read more about him here. (Be sure to see the delightful rumination from AfroJet at the top of the page.) I wonder: Do page-turners ever get sleepy?

See and hear Voigt sing the suicide aria from La Gioconda. High notes and high drama.
Photo: www.deborahvoigt.com

Judi Donaghy's Tribute to the Vocal Legends of Swing

When: 6/10/08
Where: The Commodore
Who: Judi Donaghy (vocals), Doug Haining (saxophone), Rick Carlson (piano), Steve Pikal (bass), Dick Bortolussi (drums)

Donaghy's performance is part of the Schubert Club's Summer Song Festival, a week-long series of mostly classical evening performances. Billed as "Our Jazz Connection!" this night is the only one devoted to jazz. Appropriately, the event is held at the Commodore Hotel in St. Paul, former hangout and home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, voice of the Jazz Age.

It's an unusual venue—a small ballroom with a stage in one corner and multiple photographic challenges: striped wallpaper, a big window letting in natural light, a wall around the stage, foliage behind the wall, mirrors. But the sound is good and it's a sold-out crowd.



New Schubert Club director Kathleen van Bergen makes introductions, then Laura Caviani tells us about the band and what we'll hear.

This is the first time I've heard Donaghy sing. And she can really sing. Her bio on the McNally Smith College of Music Web site (she heads the voice department there) lists her areas of expertise: opera, musical theater, jazz, folk, country, gospel, pop, and R&B. She also writes songs, and she performs with Bobby McFerrin's Voicestra. I've been madly in love with McFerrin since I first heard him sing The Wizard of Oz—the whole movie—in just eight brilliant, manic minutes. If you have three minutes and forty-five seconds, listen to Kurt Andersen's interview of McFerrin (with Oz snippets).

Tonight Donaghy is singing songs recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Joe Williams. "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me," "You Go to My Head." The band looks as if it has stepped out of the 1940s, and the venue contributes to the overall Wayback Machine feel of the event.

Maryann Sullivan, host of Minnesota Public Radio's "The Jazz Connection" (and Haining's wife) is here; so is singer Maud Hixson (who's married to Carlson), who came with singer Rhonda Laurie. One thing that makes this community such a strong place for jazz is the support musicians give to each other.



I like Donaghy's version of Joe Williams's "Every Day I Have the Blues" very much. She has a big voice, she knows what to do with it, and she really swings. All around me, feet are tapping and heads are bobbing, even in a crowd one could describe as staid without overstating. (It is, after all, the Schubert Club.)

Donaghy's band is smooth and playful. Carlson tosses off quotes, Pikal grabs and slaps his bass, Haining wails, Bortolussi smiles. Donaghy sings "Please Send Me Someone to Love," a song she clearly enjoys and gives 110 percent. Then "Sentimental Star," a song she cowrote with Carlson. She introduces it as "an audition song...the first jazz song I ever wrote...thankfully it was fixed by Rick Carlson and I got the job." You can hear it on Sing or Swing, a CD she recorded with the Wolverines.

Donaghy credits the Wolverines for the jazz part of her career. "I was never all that interested in jazz as a youngster," she tells us. "I didn't grow up in the jazz world. The first jazz group I sang with—in Lincoln, Nebraska—was not very exciting. Then after living in Minneapolis for a few years, I stumbled on a concert with the Wolverines Big Band and [vocalist] Shirley Witherspoon. My jaw dropped and I said to myself, 'I have to sing this kind of music.' I started going to hear the Wolverines and just listened, and then I started singing. Now I can't get enough of it and I want to sing swing all the time."

I'm surprised when Donaghy announces a break. It's 8:30, the show started at 7, and I'm hungry. Also plenty satisfied with what I've heard. So we go to W.A. Frost and sit on the best restaurant patio in the Twin Cities, drinking martinis and eating crab cakes and coconut risotto.

The Commodore

I used to hang out at the Commodore Hotel in St. Paul, which has a fabulous Art Deco bar and a literary history: F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived there with his wife Zelda and their new baby girl Scottie, as did Sinclair Lewis. I thought drinking gin in such a setting might inspire me to write a novel but apparently that's not how it works.

Following a fire and gas explosion in 1978, the Commodore was remodeled into condos and offices. It is now owned by the University Club of St. Paul, which means no more public access except for special events. One of those happens on Tuesday, June 10. As part of the Schubert Club Summer Song Festival, singer Judi Donaghy will pay tribute to the vocal legends of swing. That concert is the topic of this week's MinnPost column.

Photo of the Fitzgerald Bar at the Commodore Hotel from the University Club's Web site.

Lang Lang

When: 3/13/08
Where: Ordway Center for the Performing Arts
Who: Lang Lang, piano

This was the second time in four years that young Chinese pianist Lang Lang appeared in the Schubert Club’s International Artist Series. We also saw him the first time, in October 2004. He was 22 years old.

That night, he played Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 10, a Chopin piano sonata, some Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Liszt, and three encores, including one accompanied by his father on the er-hu, a Chinese instrument. When he walked through the door leading offstage after his final encore, he leaped into the air.

Tonight he seemed more serious, less ebullient. Between then and now, he has performed before royalty and presidents, to crowds of tens of thousands, and to an audience of who knows how many millions during the most recent Grammys, where he and Herbie Hancock played Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” He’s the global brand ambassador for Audi and Montblanc, and Steinway has named pianos after him. He’s huge.

He opened with a Mozart piano sonata, this time No. 13. Thoughtful and beautiful. His reading of Schumann’s C-major Fantasy lost me. His performance of Chinese works transcribed for piano—he described them as “an impressionist Chinese piece,” “Chinese Bach,” “a Chinese tango,” “a very traditional tune,” and “Happy Holidays”—was lovely and warm. His soft notes are so soft it’s as if moths are landing on the keys, yet managing to sound them.

During Granados’s “Los Requiebros,” I kept thinking about how poor Granados had died: crossing the Atlantic during WWI, his ship the SS Sussex was torpedoed by a German U-boat. He was safe in a lifeboat when he saw his wife in the water. He tried to save her and both were lost.

Two Liszts followed, including the grand finale, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. (In 2004, it was Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.) This was the flashy, fiery Lang Lang I remembered from before.

But no Chopin. And no leap following his single encore, a classical piece I recognized but can’t name.

I enjoyed the concert—Lang Lang is an amazing artist, an alien creature born with a great gift to parents who sacrificed everything to it—but I also wondered how things were going at the Jazz is NOW! NOWnet preview performance, which was happening concurrently across the river. I wished I could be in two places at once.

Photo by John Whiting.

Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott

11/9/07, The Schubert Club, Ordway Center: For its 125th birthday, the Schubert Club invited Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott to play. We bought cheap seats and were astonished to find ourselves in the best possible place for the occasion, overlooking the stage and the piano keyboard. (Gallery Boxes Left, Box A, seats 1 and 3—the left leading edge of the topmost balcony.) Thanks to my new Nikon Trailblazer binoculars, which I brought because I was sure we'd be sitting somewhere in Wisconsin, I could see everything: the unruly cowlick at the back of Ma's head, the sparkles on Stott's shoes, and the back-and-forth between them as they played a beautiful program: Schubert's Sonata in A minor for Arpeggione and Piano, Shostakovich's Sonata in D minor, Piazzola's Le Grand Tango, a collaboration by Eberto Gismonti and Geraldo Carneiro ("Bodas de prata & Quatro cantos"), and Franck's Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano. At one point during the Schubert Adagio, Ma was reading over Stott's bare shoulder; she turned her head, they looked at each other, and it was a moment of breathtaking intimacy. We watched her graceful hands on the keys, and his on the long fretless road of the fingerboard. At times, Stott's hands seemed lighter than air, as if she was forcing them down to land delicately and skip over the keys and rise again.

Which cello was Ma playing? The 1733 Montagnana from Venice named Petunia, worth $2.5 million, which he once left in a New York City taxi? Or the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius, formerly owned by Jacqueline du Pre? (The Duport Stradivarius, built a year earlier, was owned by Mstislav Rostropovich. The scratch on its side supposedly came from a spur on Napoleon's boot.) Ma calls the Montagnana "my voice," so I'll guess that's the one he had at the Ordway.

When you sit close and/or have a decent pair of binoculars, you can see that making music takes sweat and breath and physical effort. Both Ma and Stott worked hard at the Ordway, playing for a sold-out crowd (oversold; we had to borrow a program from someone seated near us), cheerfully returning for four encores, raising oversized wine and martini glasses in a mock toast, and reappearing in the foyer, where the audience had been invited for champagne and birthday cake. The music there was provided by pianist Laura Caviani, tenor sax player Pete Whitman, and bassist Gary Raynor. A friend later told me that the always gracious Ma told the crowd he'd been the opening act for Laura and her trio.

Stealth photo by an anonymous photographer.

Eroica

The Schubert Club, Ordway Center, 10/2/07: The 125-year-old Schubert Club launched its annual International Artist Series with a performance by "the most sought-after trio in the world," the Eroica (not a word that's missing a t, eroica is Italian for heroic, and the name of Beethoven's Third Symphony). They played beautifully and looked fabulous, wearing the slinky gowns shown here and amazingly high heels. Pianist Erika Nickrenz is tall; her piano bench was perched on four little trapezoid-shaped columns for extra height (someone should tell jazz pianist Jon Weber about those). They played Jean-Baptiste Loeillet's Trio Sonata No. 2 in B minor; three tangos by Astor Piazzolla; Paul Schoenfield's "Cafe Music," commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and based on an idea Schoenfield had while sitting in for the pianist at Murray's Restaurant (home of the Original Silver Butterknife Steak); and Schubert's Trio No. 1 in B flat Major, Op. 99.

I loved the sensuous, smoky tangos and the witty Schoenfield. The Schubert happened after intermission, and by then we were at Kincaid's sipping martinis and ordering steaks. I'm sure the Schubert was exquisite but we were hungry and, as I looked at the program and pondered what to do (stay? leave?), what sealed it for me was realizing that the Eroica would bring their own stamp and flavor to the piece, but there would be no improvisation and I could listen to a recording later (the Beaux Arts Trio on iTunes, for example). Jazz may have spoiled me for written-down, played-by-the-note music. Listening to the Loeillet, my mind strayed and I wondered, "Why does the second i in violin change to an o in violoncello?"

Photo from the Eroica Trio Web site, Gallery section.