Singing out

Soprano Jessye Norman, at Symphony Hall for the Bank of Boston Celebrity Series, was the bigger star with the wider audience. She could probably fill Symphony Hall singing the phone book, though the program she chose was not especially better designed to bring people in. More famous for opera than for lieder, she sang no opera, which must have disappointed the numerous members of the audience who didn't seem familiar with the etiquette of lieder recitals and applauded every song rather than, as is customary, after each set (at one point in John La Montaine's Songs of the Rose of Sharon, his Song of Solomon Cycle, Norman had to raise her hand to stop the interruption). Even during the encores, people were still hoping for an aria, but she was evidently determined to be consistent.

She began with five chronologically unrelated Brahms songs (selections ranging from Opus 47 to Opus 106) that had all had to do with nature. Norman succumbed to the problem most opera singers have with lieder -- she scaled back in a most self-conscious way ("Look, I can sing quietly, too"). And indeed, a high-arching pianissimo on the word "Himmelsbläue" ("the sky's blueness") in "Feldeinsamkeit" ("Lonely Fields") was the most sublime moment of the entire set, though the song itself emerged as less an expression of the soul's solitude than a demonstration of impeccable diction.

Elsewhere in the Brahms, she conveyed -- as she often does -- the sense that she likes to sing, that she revels in her God-given instrument, but that she isn't singing from inside the song. Emotion remains generic -- and static. Her voice doesn't move with the nuances of the poetry. And she didn't get much help from her accompanist, Mark Markham, in this respect either. Digitally dexterous, he nevertheless remained in the background, an underling, not a partner. After each song, no matter what the mood, the mile-wide smile lit up her face, the gasping intake of air, the sense of wonderment that anything could be so beautiful.

In fact, the singing was technically variable. Some of the notes didn't quite "sound." The last of the Brahms songs, "Botschaft" ("A Message"), was considerably louder than the others, and the tone production extremely uneven -- she couldn't quite get her dynamics under control. She's also started to pose and move her arms in rather irrelevant ways (a neighbor of mine compared her to Diana Ross -- an image, given her broadly extended hairdo and considerable slimming down, that's not as farfetched as it might have seemed a couple of years ago.

Hugo Wolf songs require an even more mercurial sensibility, and Norman is not a natural Wolf singer. She didn't overcome the familiar impulse to turn Wolf's delicate ironies into mere cuteness. Yet in some ways, these were more successful than the Brahms. She seemed more inside them, more aware of shifting tone and nuance. She caught the real irony of the gushing and cooing romantic overstatement in "Nimmersatte Liebe" ("Insatiable Love"). I was interested to find that she herself was credited with the translations in the program.

If the best music was in the first half, Norman's best singing was in the second. La Montaine's Songs of the Rose of Sharon, written for Leontyne Price (and orchestra), is in a thickly erotic, Samuel Barber vein but spiked with Middle Eastern melismas. Markham's rhapsodic piano became more outgoingly "orchestral" here, with percussive pounding and flutey twittering. And Norman herself finally poured out that burgundy voice of hers. As she did again in John Carter's Cantata, which is formatted like Bach, but out of spirituals. In these, she was far more in touch with the center of the music. From the inward "Recitative" section ("Sometimes I feel like a motherless child"), with her eloquent humming, to the exuberant "Toccata," ("Ride on King Jesus"), Norman let loose. Her careful circumnavigation of some of the high notes was more obvious than it had been earlier in the program (her Berlioz aria on the seven-hour James Levine Gala from the Metropolitan Opera last week suffered from continuing pitch problems). That high-powered, well-oiled vocal machine of hers is showing signs of wear.

The 90-minute program left room for lots of encores, which were revealing. In Aaron Copland's setting of Emily Dickinson's "Why do they shut me out of heaven," Norman's voice boomed out the second phrase, "Did I sing too L-O-U-D?" She seemed to love the self-referential joke. She turned Richard Strauss's "Zueignung" ("Dedication"), an intimate love song with the refrain "Habe Dank," into her own personal thank-you to the entire audience. Poulenc's cabaret tune "Chemin d'amour" was a stitch in her deliberately swoony excess. This is the nature -- and the limitation -- of the celebrity recital: it's more about the performer than the music. Although with the final encore, a gloriously uninhibited, everyone-clap-hands "He's got the whole world in his hands," that didn't matter at all.

Baritone Sanford Sylvan's only local vocal recital with pianist David Breitman, celebrating Emmanuel Music's 25th anniversary (and postponed from earlier this season), was another matter. Not that Sylvan didn't get personal. He talked about cancellation as an "operatically tragic moment in a singer's life." He talked about moving to Boston in 1978 (because of Emmanuel's Craig Smith) and joining Emmanuel Church in 1981 as central acts in his musical and spiritual life. He was real.

Sylvan's singing has grown more self-effacing. I've always liked his way with the French repertoire because cycles like Ravel's seven Histoires naturelles are essentially, sometimes wittily, self-conscious (the opening poem, Jules Renard's description of "The Peacock," is a hilarious satirical portrait of prima donna self-absorption). But Sylvan has now developed a refined simplicity in his Schubert. The beautifully organized songs included such familiar pieces as the shimmering "Auf dem Wasser zu singen" ("To sing on the waters") and the infinitely touching self-comparison "Der Wanderer an den Mond" ("The Traveler Addresses the Moon"), as well as such lesser-known songs as the menacing nightmare ballad "Der Zwerg" ("The Dwarf") and the profound, uneasily comforting "Die Mutter Erde" ("Mother Earth").

The generous recital ended with six Wolf songs, including more evocations of the supernatural. Here, Sylvan could show more intricate moodshifts than in the Schubert, but the same honesty. And Breitman, as throughout the program, was with him all the way, a full partner. Rather than merely present a bunch of songs about nature, human nature, and the soul, Sylvan and Breitman gave us a kind of spiritual autobiography -- a mulling over, through art, of life's largest, most personal, and most dangerous questions.

At the center of Sylvan's recital was the premiere of a new song cycle written for him and Breitman by John Harbison: Flashes and Dedications, a setting of six compelling 20th-century poems, including translations of Montale (by Harbison himself, whose first and perhaps greatest series of songs was the Mottetti di Montale, in the original Italian) and Czeslaw Milosz (by Milosz with poet laureate Robert Hass), as well as poems by William Carlos Williams, Michael Fried, and Harbison's first go at poems by Elizabeth Bishop.

Harbison here combines traditional musical styles -- a syncopated blues song for Bishop's ballad-like "Chemin de fer" (" `Love should be put into action!'/screamed the old hermit./Across the pond an echo/tried and tried to confirm it."), a fast waltz for Fried's "Winds of Dawn" -- with the kind of eloquent melodic recitative he deployed in the last cycle he wrote for Sylvan, Words from Paterson, in which music of a very American flexibility reflects an idiomatic American language. Harbison says the cycle's title comes from a Montale poem, in which "the `flash' is nature bringing illumination, indelible memory, sudden glimpses beneath the surface." Harbison's music certainly gets under the skin of these poems (perhaps Bishop's poignant "Cirque d'Hiver" most of all). I need to hear the cycle more before I can see how all the pieces go together -- and I can't wait.

I'd heard good things about the New York City Opera's production of Verdi's Attila and was lucky to get a ticket for its last performance of the season. Attila is middle Early Verdi, halfway through his decade "in the galley" that flowered into Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata. It's as lusciously tuneful and swaggering as anything before those big three, starting with the brooding, broadly melodic overture, and has juicy roles for a vocal quartet of soprano, tenor, baritone, and bass. The music is so lively and infectious, you wonder why it didn't stay in the repertory.

The plot itself -- no sillier than most 19th-century operas -- may be a major problem. None of the characters is particularly admirable. The heroine (the bloodthirsty Odabella) is a liar who betrays the one character with some noble impulse, Attila the Hun (she actually stops a plot against him so she can murder him herself). Loud Soprano (a vocal category) Inma Egido didn't exactly make her endearing. Bolshoi bass Mikhail Krutikov's Hun, on the other hand, was an attractive, athletic personage with a vibrantly colorful voice. Any bass who can sing Italian opera should cherish this role.

Conductor Guido Ajmone-Marsan led a spirited and soaring performance. Lotfi Mansouri, general director of the San Francisco Opera, staged a production that might have struck me as neatly parodic (heroic poses, V-shaped line-ups of the lead singers, copper-red backdrops with garish lighting) had I not some years ago appeared as a supernumerary in a Santa Fe Opera production of Don Carlo (quite a different kettle of opera from Attila) that he approached in a similarly stilted and mindless way.

Still, given Ajmone-Marsan and Krutikov, Attila was one of the most entertaining opera experiences I've had in a long time. And where in Boston is one likely to get any early Verdi?