On the Ides of March, not at all ominously, though, the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) treated us to a lyrical romantic program, at Merkin Hall, billed as “Love Songs in 176 Keys—4 Hands, 4 Voices, 4 Cultures,” taking us to various lands and generally featuring two pianists at a time. The four fine singers, representing Caramoor’s 2022 Vocal Rising Stars, were high soprano Meredith Wohlgemuth, rich-toned mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis, sweet-voiced tenor César Andrés Parreño, and lyric baritone Seonho Yu. The pianists, at the Steinways, were Artistic Director Steven Blier, new Associate Director Bénédicte Jourdois, and apprentice Francesco Barfoed. As is usual with NYFOS’ programming, the evening left us with smiles on our faces.
As Reinhold Glière was born in Kiev, the songs were preceded by the Ukrainian composer’s “Valse Triste,” which certainly, and appropriately, had that Eastern European melancholic sound, as played by Blier and Barfoed. Then the vocal quartet gave us four of Johannes Brahms’ truly Romantic, and romantic, “Liebeslieder-Walzer,” to poems by Georg Friedrich Daumer, with Blier and Barfoed.
The French music group began with Jourdois and Barfoed’s crisp, rapid-fire “Le Bal,” from Georges Bizet’s “Jeux d’enfants.” Wohlgemuth and Jourdois offered a dulcet “Sarabande,” by Albert Roussel and René Chalupt, a love song to a woman, “nue/Sous son manteau,” written for soprano Lucy Vuillemin. Parreño, with Blier, caressingly sang Serge Gainsbourg’s “La javanaise,” to a dance rhythm, addressed to a still-treasured ex. In songs by Francis Poulenc, Yu and Wohlgemuth, with Barfoed, limned the sad ending of a relationship gone bad, to Paul Valéry’s poetry, in “Colloque,” and Lewis, with Jourdois, evoked a mysterious, elusive woman, to Paul Eluard’s worldly words, in “Tu vois le feu du soir,” with a melody that somehow sounded, paradoxically, like it could be intoned by a Carmelite nun. Completing this section was Darius Milhaud’s “Caramel mou,” for the ensemble, with Blier and Barfoed, with a Dadaist text, by Jean Cocteau, involving “une androgyne,” “le roi des animaux”—presumably a lion, a telephone operator, and “les nocturnes de Chopin” played “sur le tambour,” sung to a beguiling New Orleans jazz rhythm.
Jourdois and Blier took us to Spain with Enrique Granados’ haunting “Andaluza,” from “Danzas Españolas.” Granados, we remembered, perished during World War One in 1916, on his way home from one of the world premiere performances of his opera “Goyescas,” at the Metropolitan Opera, when his ship, the Lusitania, was torpedoed by a German submarine. Wohlgemuth and Blier’s account of Xavier Montsalvatge and Pere Ribot I Sunyer’s “Paisatge del Montseny” was serenity itself. With Jourdois, Parreño’s “Al val de Fuente Ovejuna,” from “Homenaje a Lope de Vega,” proved a dashing song of a knight to his lady. Lewis, with Barfoed, made of Eduardo Toldrà and Francesco de Quevedo’s “Después que te conoci” a bit of 20th century bel canto. Yu and Jourdois made Jesús Guridi’s “Cómo quieres que adivine,” an endearing serenade, and Wohlgemuth and Parreño, with Barfoed, made of “Caballero del alto plumero,” from Federico Moreno Torroba and librettists Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw’s zarzuela “Luisa Fernanda,” a serious flirtation developing into a full-fledged love duet, concluding with a high note for both singers.
Blier and Barfoed returned us to America with the Australia-born Percy Grainger’s arrangement of George Gershwin’s music for “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” from “Porgy and Bess,” a familiar operatic duet as an unfamiliar and engaging instrumental. We then went north to White Plains and east to Connecticut in Gabriel Kahane’s “Merritt Pkwy,” sung by Yu, with Barfoed, about a couple, well—star-crossed lovers they’re not, she both abused and abusive and he rudderless, perhaps homeless. A three-part music drama, with no pause between numbers, followed and consisted of Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy Fields’ “[I must] Make the Man Love Me,” from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” with Lewis, assisted by Blier, tackling the low tessitura with no strain, and convincing us that the object of her affection was worth the effort; “Pretty Women,” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” so gorgeously sung by Parreño and Yu, with Blier, that they belied that the characters singing are, originally, a vengeful, murderous barber and his heinous enemy, the judge; and Wohlgemuth and Lewis’ sassy “What You Don’t Know about Women,” with Barfoed and Blier, from Cy Coleman and David Zippel’s “City of Angels,” addressed to guys who are definitely not worth it, and ending with some tongue-twisting patter. For the finale, the singers, with Barfoed and Jourdois, varied the tone and recipient of their sentiment “I Love You,” in the song by John Corigliano, the tenor’s lavished on his own mirrored image and the baritone’s, to each of the other singers in succession. The company’s lilting encore, with Blier and Barfoed, was Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” for the Miracles, and famously covered by the Beatles.
NYFOS will be back at Merkin, 129 West 67th Street, on April 13 for “The Wider View: Songs by Black Composers,” including Hale Smith, Margaret Bonds, Adolphus C. Hailstork, and H. Leslie Adams, sung by Kearstin Piper Brown (“Intimate Apparel”), Lucia Bradford, and Jorell Williams, with Blier, and at the Racquet and Tennis Club, 370 Park Avenue, for the gala “Still in Love,” music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, hosted by Blier and Denyce Graves, with Justin Austin (“Intimate Apparel”) and Shereen Pimentel. Visit www.nyfos.org for information about the former and email info@nyfos.org for tickets to the latter, which includes cocktails before the concert and dinner afterwards.