Photograph by Courtney Ruckman
Generally known as a preeminent Verdi baritone, Kelsey took an alternate method with this program, which featured completely American and British composers setting textual content in English. Kelsey has a strong instrument, which this recital revealed at its greatest. Just like the comfortably worn-in leather-based of a favourite chair, his pliable baritone deftly dealt with the emotional vary of the chosen artwork songs and capably dealt with transitions between fortissimo and pianissimo moments. Kelsey is a charismatic performer who totally inhabited the audio system of every of the songs.
Fittingly for the US semiquincentennial this yr, this system opened with 4 alternatives from Aaron Copland’s first Outdated American Songs assortment. Copland’s songs evoking scenes of American life supplied an acceptable template for Kelsey’s quicksilver baritone, which nimbly navigated the composer’s oscillations in tone and tempo, similar to in “The Boatman’s Dance.” The push and pull of this tune showcased the efficient collaboration between Kelsey and Ketter. In “Easy Items,” one among Copland’s well-known melodies, Kelsey sounded stately and poised. This system’s inclusion of Copland’s “The Dodger,” which begins with questionable guarantees made by politicians (earlier than transferring onto hypocritical preachers and untrue lovers), was maybe a sly nod to the recital’s location in Washington, DC. Kelsey’s seamless transition from backside to high vary was evident in these alternatives and his clean legato properly characterised Copland’s pastoral themes, notably his solemn supply of “Lengthy Time In the past.”
This system continued with settings of Langston Hughes poems by three American composers: Florence Value, John Alden Carpenter, and Margaret Bonds. Written within the Twenties, the Hughes poems featured have been influenced by jazz and speech; the musical settings helped them come alive off the web page.
Kelsey gave an impassioned efficiency of Value’s “Track to The Darkish Virgin,” enhanced by fiery resonant vibrato in his backside vary. His rendition of her setting of “My Dream” was a tour de power inflected with craving and defiance. Ketter and Kelsey gamely conveyed the jazzy melodies of Carpenter’s artwork songs with quick-footed rhythm and limber pacing, and Ketter successfully set a brisk temper on the piano. Kelsey’s instrument lends itself to quite a lot of colours in conveying emotion and the tone shifts from joyous to solemn of “Shake Your Brown Toes, Honey” confirmed him at his greatest. Kelsey can be adept at taking strains and even particular person phrases and wringing emotional affect out of them, as within the expressive exhaustion of his “Hey!…Hey!” in Carpenter’s “The Cryin’ Blues.” In “Jazz-Boys,” Kelsey brightened his baritone, adopting a magnanimous cabaret fashion that earned a number of the largest applause of the night. This system rounded out the Hughes portion of the night with three settings by Bonds, a scholar of Value, together with her personal variation on “My Dream.” Kelsey sang a superb interpretation of Bonds’s “The Minstrel,” a range that delivered to thoughts his signature function of Rigoletto (Mid-Atlantic audiences can have the prospect to see him within the function with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in June). He sang a fierce, defiant rendition of Bonds’s setting of “I, Too,” one among Hughes’s best-known poems.
Kelsey then transitioned to the British half of the night, which started with Let Us Garlands Carry, Gerald Finzi’s five-song cycle of settings of songs from performs by William Shakespeare. Kelsey opened the cycle with a contemporary, lovelorn tackle “Come Away, Come Away Dying” from Twelfth Evening, ending the tune with a stunning melisma on “weep.” The cycle’s second tune “O Mistress Mine,” concludes with “Youth’s a stuff is not going to endure,” an applicable nod to Kelsey’s historical past with Vocal Arts DC. This recital marked his return to the Vocal Arts stage following his debut with the group, underneath the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Basis practically 20 years in the past—a interval that encompassed his evolution from younger artist to internationally identified singer. The spotlight of the Finzi tune cycle was “Worry No Extra the Warmth o’ the Solar,” a tune taken from Cymbeline. (Sung by a misplaced son of the titular king, the tune mourns his good friend, who is definitely his sister disguised as a person, and who just isn’t truly useless however took a sleeping potion—it’s one among Shakespeare’s extra convoluted plots). Kelsey’s stately chest voice made the tune an affecting elegy. Kelsey sang two of the extra light-hearted songs of the cycle with bounding exuberance, “Who’s Sylvia?” from The Two Gents of Verona, and “It Was a Lover and His Lass” from As You Like It, notably excelling with the colourful onomatopoeia within the latter tune.
The recital wrapped up with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Journey, a nine-song cycle set to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. In “The Vagabond,” Kelsey successfully expressed a way of wanderlust, accentuated by Ketter’s ostinato rhythm on the piano paying homage to a mountaineering tempo. In “Let Magnificence Awake,” “The Roadside Fireplace,” and “Youth and Love,” Kelsey’s plush baritone made for a young supply of meditations on magnificence, love, and the fleeting nature of youth. Kelsey mined the riches of his voice for an opulent and complicated tackle “In Desires,” a spotlight of this part of this system. He continued the Vaughan Williams portion with a pensive efficiency of “The Infinite Shining Heavens” and a nourishing rendition of “Whither Should I Wander,” a paean to residence, which probed the softened depths of his decrease register. This system wrapped up with “Vivid Is the Ring of Phrases,” which showcased Kelsey’s clean transition from chest to move voice and extra vibrato well-suited to the reflective tenor of Vaughan Williams’s music, and the gleaming pint-sized tune “I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope.”
Kelsey handled audiences to 2 encores. After sharing some transferring remarks on vulnerability as a singer, Kelsey gave an emotionally uncooked and trustworthy efficiency of William Arms Fisher’s tune “Goin’ House,” based mostly on the English horn solo from the largo motion of Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, famously recorded by Paul Robeson at a 1958 Carnegie Corridor live performance. He adopted it with a golden rendition of “Heat because the Autumn Gentle” from Douglas Moore’s opera The Ballad of Child Doe, persevering with this system’s English-language focus with the one opera aria of the night.
Andrew Lokay
Andrew Lokay started his profession as an opera fan on the San Francisco Opera, the place the primary efficiency he noticed was Madama Butterfly. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford College with a Bachelor of Arts in worldwide relations and French with honors in worldwide safety research. He now lives in Washington, DC and is a frequent viewers member for opera and theatre within the nation’s capital.
