The Tucson Desert Song Festival wrapped up its first weekend Sunday with two performances right across the plaza from one another at the Tucson Convention Center campus.
In the intimate Leo Rich Theatre, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music hosted the esteemed Ravina’s Steans Music Institute featuring pianist and Steans vocal program director Kevin Murphy with a trio of emerging vocalists: soprano Simone Osborne, mezzo-soprano Catherine Martin and tenor Michael Brandenburg.
The Tucson Symphony Orchestra featured another trio of rising vocalists — sopranos Katie van Kooten and Hye Jung Lee and mezzo Angela Brower — performing three scenes including the “Presentation of the Rose” and the final trio from Strauss’s opera “Der Rosenkavalier. The orchestra also shined a light on the TSO Chorus in the concert’s first half, performing Poulenc’s “Gloria,” featuring Hye Jung as the soloist.
Two very different concerts — a recital of art songs and a major choral showcase — vying for one specific audience — fans of classical voice. Unfortunately, the concerts coincided with one another; TSO took the stage at 2 p.m.; Arizona Friends went on at 3, giving no real wiggle room to catch both.
And frankly there was an argument to see both of them. I snuck into Leo Rich Theatre during the TSO’s intermission and listened from the lobby as Simone Osborne sang songs by 20th century French composer Gabriel Fauré. I was tempted to sneak into the hall, which I’m told was about half full, but I didn’t want to be the one responsible for disturbing the magic coming from that stage and filtering into the lobby. Wow, Osborne has an amazing soprano, rich and colorful, with emotional layers that came through even from the lobby speakers. It was a hard pulling myself away and going back to the Music Hall across the plaza.
If only there was a way to refigure the schedules, maybe play with the starting times so that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Arguably, “Rosenkavalier” is one of the highlights of the third annual Desert Song Festival. And the TSO was blessed with three spectacular soloists, including Arizona native Brower making her home state debut. To miss them would’ve been a shame.
TSO Conductor George Hanson, in his second to last program with the orchestra, opened the concert with the same piece that opened his Tucson career: Richard Strauss’s “Don Juan.” It’s a flirty work and Hanson and the orchestra sure had fun with it, bringing out vibrant colors and textures that brought Don Juan the ladies’ man to life.
Hye Jung in the Poulenc was pretty terrific. She has a wonderfully subtle coloratura that grew richer and took on warmer hues as she got into the piece. There were a few passages that she sang a little quieter than others, which might have been because she just learned the piece in the past couple weeks — she was called in as a last-minute replacement for soprano Heidi Grant Murphy — and hadn’t committed it fully to muscle memory.
Her approach, though, played well with Poulenc’s very bright and delightful arrangement of the Mass. There are flashes of reflection and sacred solemnity, but Hanson chose to stick with the French composer’s lighter tone, treating the Mass as more of a celebration than a revelation.
“Der Rosenkavalier” in the second half, though, was likely the reason for many of the nearly 1,400 people in the audience to be at Tucson Music Hall rather than Leo Rich — or perhaps a sports bar watching the NFC Championship game with Green Bay and Seattle. (Seattle won in OT, by the way.) And they were rewarded generously by the performances of the three wonderful soloists who did not merely sing but acted out their roles. Brower was the most expressive, showing off wonderful acting chops in the pants role of Octavian, the much younger lover of Princess Marie Therese von Werdenberg (von Kooten). Brower has a powerful voice that resonates at the higher range and sparkles in her comfort zone. She easily projected above von Kooten in the opening scene where both confess their love while nervously waiting to be exposed by the princess’s husband. Brower affected a schoolboy bravado with a few simple facial expressions, then paced about nervously — hiding behind von Kooten at one point — to make you feel like she and the affair were indeed about to be discovered.
Von Kooten took a bit to find her rhythm, getting lost early on beneath the orchestra. The TSO performed the work wonderfully, but it seemed at times they were playing louder than the soloists.
At times, Sunday’s performance felt more like watching the full opera — sans the supertitles which would have come in handy since they were singing in German — than listening to a concert of the opera. You can expect a similar experience with Tucson Chamber Artists performance of Carl Off’s “Carmina Burana.”
“I think it’s that sort of piece. It’s opera without costumes,” said baritone Hugh Russell, who has made a name for himself with “Carmina Burana” and will sing it with TCA three times this weekend. “I think it needs that drama all the time. … It’s that intensely dramatic piece.”
Hye Jung also will perform with the TCA, making her “Carmina Burana” debut.
One last interesting tidbit: The TSO performances — the concert opened Friday night — reunited Brower with Hye Jung, with whom she appeared in spring 2013 in San Francisco Opera’s production of Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann.” Ironically for that performance, Brower was the one called in as a last-minute replacement for another singer.
