On November 6, at Merkin Hall, the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), with Artistic Director Steven Blier, returned to live performance, with vaccinated and masked audience, with a varied program of song, entitled “And … We’re Back!,” both celebration and sobering reminder of the stressful time we’ve all just been through. The company consisted of Blier at the Steinway; five fine singers, the familiar and the new, mezzo-sopranos Amanda Lynn Bottoms, Rebecca Jo Loeb, and Maggie Reneé, tenor Paul Applebee, and baritone Johnathan McCullough; and additional instrumentalists Rupert Boyd on guitar and Leonardo Granados, on percussion.
Bottoms began with a dulcet, dusky-toned, and understated “We’ll Be Together Again,” by Carl T. Fischer and Frankie Laine, with a contrastingly fuller-voiced reprise of the final verse. Loeb picked herself up out of the doldrums to find herself cheerfully “Ready to Begin Again,” in Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s song, with a sense of almost reluctance and obligation. Making his NYFOS debut, McCullough, accompanying himself on guitar, lent an attractive lyric baritone to Glen Hansard’s folk tune-like “Song of Good Hope.”
Loeb offered a seductively pulsating “Chega de saudade” (Enough of Longing, or No More Blues), by Antonio Carlos Jobim, assisted by Boyd and Granados. Bottoms and Blier embraced Errollyn Wallen’s “My feet may take a little while,” a song of returning slowly, gradually, followed by a rousing “Lamento esclavo,” with Granados, a Cuban song, by Eliso Grenet and Aurelio G. Riancho, 90 years old, but very much in keeping with today’s Black Lives Matter. McCullough infused with strong feeling John Musto’s “Litany,” the composer’s setting of a Langton Hughes poem that echoes, in its “Gather up, gather up/In the arms of your pity/The sick, the depraved,/ The desperate, the tired,/All the scum/Of our weary city,” Emma Lazarus’ invitation to the “tired,” “poor,” and “huddled masses,” in “The New Colossus.” In Joni Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree,” Loeb, assisted by Applebee, on guitar and back-up vocals, touched us, as she sang of the lady who avoids suitors who’d like to settle down with her, “While she’s so busy being free.” Brad Mehldau’s “combination of smartness and sexiness” attracted Blier to the Meldau’s setting of Fleurine’s words, in “Love Sublime,” a gentle dance, thanks to Applebee and our maestro, which is the finale of a song cycle written for Renée Fleming. Another dance, Cole Porter’s “Dream Dancing,” upbeat, romantic, and zesty, came from McCullough.
Unusually for NYFOS, three German Lieder were next: Johannes Brahms and Felix Schumann’s “Meine Liebe ist grün,” which flowed out of Reneé, and which, to Blier was a tribute to Riverside Park, in his neighborhood; Franz Schubert and August von Schlegel’s “Abendlied für die Entfernte,” a lilting serenade, in which Applebee looked ahead to life and love; and Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Rückert’s pandemic-pertinent “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” in which the tenor sang resolutely of renunciation of the world of the living. Reneé, on the other hand, sang optimistically about life and Nature, in Hebrew, in “At telchi basade” (You will walk in the field), Chaim Barkani’s early 1970s setting of Leah Goldberg’s World War Two-era poem.
Coming into the home stretch, Bottoms and McCullough, and Loeb and Appleby, made a merry quartet, promising each other, “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow/Love Will See Us Through,” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies;” the quintet of singers closed with Robert Wadsworth Lowry’s “How Can I Keep From Singing,” with a still-timely, anti-totalitarian verse added by Pete Seeger, as arranged by David Krane, which NYFOS has also recorded; and Blier gave us as an encore, David Raksin’s “Love Is for the Very Young,” the theme from the film “The Bad and the Beautiful,” which he played every day of the pandemic because it cheered him up.
NYFOS returns to Merkin Hall on December 6 at 7 p.m. for “A Goyische Christmas to You!,” with Donna and Cantor Joshua Breitzer, Joshua Jeremiah, Rebecca Jo Loeb, Alex Mansoori, Lauren Worsham, and Blier. Tickets, at $40, are available at www.nyfos.org .