Judith Lynn Stillman and Will Liverman / Picture: Cat Laine
We don’t get lots of classical voice round right here in Rhode Island. Nor, till just a few days in the past, did we appear to get lots of snow. However lower than every week after the already legendary blizzard of ’26 unloaded 37.9 inches of heavy, moist powder on the Ocean State, the Portraits in Tune collection at Rhode Island School (RIC), organized by the ebullient Judith Lynn Stillman, offered Will Liverman and Keira Duffy in a day of various songs and arias within the School’s Nazarian Middle for the Performing Arts.
The Juilliard-trained Stillman, who’s each an Artist-in-Residence and Professor of Music at RIC, is a drive. A composer and impresario along with being a collaborative pianist, at Saturday’s live performance — the place she accompanied the singers, affably offered explainers earlier than each bit, and managed a slideshow with translations and a few evocative photos — she was fittingly billed as not “accompanist,” however “Host.” Maybe the presence of town’s Mayor, Brett Smiley, and our RI-1 congressman, Gabe Amo, each of whom offered remarks earlier than the live performance, did one thing to focus on Stillman as the toughest working individual within the room.
Stillman’s involvement with Will Liverman goes again to a 2020 pandemic-era collaboration. Since, they’ve carried out collectively quite a few instances together with his Rhode Island debut in 2024. Sunday’s efficiency was additionally the Rhode Island debut for Keira Duffy.
Judith Lynn Stillman and Will Liverman / Picture: Cat Laine
The pair began with a number of Mozart choices, together with an “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” from Liverman that had Stillman accompanying him from each the piano and an digital celesta. Duffy introduced persona to “In uomini, in Soldati,” although the set ended with a “La ci darem” that had all of the allure and frisson of a kid abduction.
“Now, Harry,” you is likely to be saying, “However that scene is a baby abduction,” to which I say, “possibly for you, sourpuss, however on a Sunday afternoon in a university recital corridor after three toes of snow, I need to be wooed.” Duffy can’t take the flack for this one; she’s acquired a glassy, considerably monochromatic voice that constricts towards the highest, however she’s enjoyable onstage. It’s Liverman who appears fairly unable to totally chill out. And whereas his vowels can bloom with beguiling shadings, consonants appear to unsettle him to the purpose that his default setting for delivering textual content appears to persistently be overly severe or mad. I left considering ,“I’d like to listen to him do both vocalises or Wagner.”
His plain spotlight was two songs by H. Leslie Adams, his agency, marbled baritone and uncanny sense of pitch characterizing Adams’s setting of Langston Hughes’s “Prayer whereas he introduced a haunting mixte adopted by a sudden veering right into a close to cry in a setting of James Weldon Johnson’s “Sence You Went Away.” Ken Medema’s “Moses,” which I heard him carry out in an eerie pandemic-era recital on the Kennedy Middle in 2020, with its gospel inflections and hokey textual content, got here off effectively sufficient although Liverman nonetheless appeared slightly stiff for Medema’s stuttering prophet.
Alexander Fiterstein, Judith Lynn Stillman, and Keira Duffy / Picture: Cat Laine
Duffy’s spotlight was Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, carried out in a gracious duet with clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein. The 2 had a simple correspondence between the shepherd’s sung passages and the clarinet’s doubling of them and Duffy attacked the piece’s yodel-y grace notes with precision. In three Fauré songs earlier on, she was much less descript, however his setting of “Clair de lune” confirmed some helpful dynamic controls.
Whereas a pair of musical theater duets – “Something you are able to do, I can do higher,” in a key too low for non-belter Duffy, and “Folks will say we’re in love” – felt a bit wood, the concluding piece, “‘Tis you which are the music,” a considerate brief duet composed for the event by Stillman to poetry by Amy Lowell, had Duffy and Liverman overlapping arching phrases and was the strongest ensemble work of the afternoon. It was a beautiful afternoon and I hope that Stillman’s moxie can convey some classical voice again to Roger Williams’s metropolis, hopefully sooner relatively than later.
Harry Rose
Harry Rose, based mostly in Windfall, Rhode Island, is at the moment pursuing a PhD in Italian Research at Brown College. Beginning out running a blog independently as Opera Teen in 2013, he holds the auspicious distinction of being the youngest author to ever contribute to parterre field (at age 14) and has had the pleasure and problem of writing for the rigorously discerning cher public since 2012. More and more area of interest hobbies and pursuits embody opera, ballet, theatrical goings-on of the fin-de-siècle, and gatekeeping Camp.
