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| Photo: B. Ealovega |
James Reel - Tucson Desert Song Festival
Susan Graham is on the road this
season with Berlioz. Graham’s schedule features his Roméo et Juliette in Los
Angeles, Les Troyens in San Francisco, Les Nuits d’été in London and Mexico
City, La Mort de Cléopatre in Brussels, and La Mort d’Ophélie nearly everywhere
else—including in Tucson Arizona, during her Tucson Desert Song Festival recital for UA
presents in January (01/29/2015).
Graham is hardly a one-composer mezzo—she’s taking time out
this season for Mahler and The Merry Widow, and dots her song recitals with
plenty of other material—but she is very closely associated with Berlioz and
other French opera and art song composers. French is not the first language
you’d expect a woman born in Roswell, N.M. and educated as an undergraduate in
Texas to wrap her mouth around, but it seems to come naturally to Graham, who
thinks it stands up perfectly well as a sung language to Italian, German or
English. “French is my favorite language to sing in,” she declares. “It
has a fluidity and capacity for expression, and is very liquid and romantic. As
a little kid I used to dream about far-away, elegant, exotic places, and those
dreams were always French-themed. French is my vocal happy place. Plus, the
tessitura of most French music is comfortable for me, because it tends to fall
into a high lyric mezzo range. Berlioz is my touchstone in that repertoire,
because his heroines are written exactly for my voice.” As a Berlioz
heroine, Shakespeare’s Ophelia may not be the first tragic figure who comes to
mind, but she is the character with whom Graham enters her Tucson recital. “We
chose La Mort d’Ophélie because the theme of the first half of the program is
innocents and naives; Ophelia was the poor, sort of innocent, deranged girl who
drowns. So we thought she fit in the first half as a sympathetic character. The
text talks about Ophelia wandering along the riverside, singing, and she falls
into the river but continues to sing, and ultimately her song is silenced.”
Graham does not sing in character, but as narrator of the sad events. “It’s
rather lyrical storytelling for Berlioz, without a lot of his usual dramatic
orchestral outbursts, so it’s more about setting the tone for the death of this
innocent young girl.” Graham devotes another part of her recital to music
by a substantially different French composer: Francis Poulenc’s Fiançailles
pour rire. Here, the texts mainly have to do with reflection and mood—the
singer is thinking, rather than doing, but for Graham, her approach is the
same. “Always, I am telling a story,” she says. “Each of those Poulenc songs is
a little opera to me. The whole second half of the program is a reflection on a
lot of the different kinds of love a woman can experience or observe and
everything related to it, from sarcasm to drunken revelry to death, and most of
that is right there in the Poulenc songs.” Returning to the subject of the
concert’s first half—innocents and naives—Graham points out that she will offer
a group of songs by six composers in three languages, all settings of texts
about Mignon, the character in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship who is
rescued from a brutal abductor and languishes with unrequited love for her
rescuer. Mignon’s “songs“—poems scattered throughout the novel—have been set by
several composers, most prominently Franz Schubert. Says Graham, “Those
six songs concerned with one character make a fascinating mini-opera with a beginning,
middle and end, and like any opera it’s taxing dramatically, psychologically
and vocally. And that’s just the end of the first half.” What leads off
the second half—what Graham calls “the bad girls portion of the concert“—is the
scena Lady Macbeth written in 1970 by the British composer Joseph Horovitz, who
wrote hardly anything else for voice; his catalog is dominated by ballet
scores, orchestral and band pieces, chamber works, and music for a Tarzan
movie. “Lady Macbeth is a riveting piece that encompasses three different
scenes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” Graham says. “There’s the letter scene, and
the part where she orders her husband him to go and kill the king, and her
descent into madness. It’s dramatic and gripping and spooky and creepy.” The
rest of the second half is lighter fare, including songs by the likes of Cole
Porter and Vernon Duke—composers not really so different from Poulenc. Graham
certainly doesn’t think she’s slumming by riffling through the Anglo-American
pop songbook. “The only difference in my approach is that I put my comedy hat
on; there’s not much comedy in Schubert,” she laughs. “I relax a little bit and
tell the story more pointedly, and take more liberties with the rhythms. I can
interact with the audience more directly. With the Mignon songs I’m inviting
the audience into my world, but in the English and American songs it’s more
like I’m coming out into the audience and sitting with them—figuratively—with a
lot of winking and gossiping. Vocally, it’s more talky, there’s less vibrato,
more of a pop style.” Graham began this season following a long stint in
The King and I, and ends it with The Merry Widow. It might seem like more
frivolous fare than Berlioz and Schubert, but it’s hardly a vacation for the
mezzo. “The King and I is 10 times harder than any opera I’ve ever done,
physically,” Graham declares. For her, musical theater and operetta is
something she has long enjoyed, and she anticipates continuing to enjoy it long
after her heavier classical repertoire is behind her. “The Merry Widow is
something that could accompany me into the golden years of my career, along
with things like [Offenbach’s] Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, when I’m not
jumping on the furniture as Cherubino and Octavian anymore.” That said,
Graham is not easing off anytime soon; this season includes Les Troyens, “which
is Mount Everest for me,” she says, as well as touring with her Tucson
recital. “It’s such a great program to sing,” she says. “It has
everything: vocal challenges, and wonderful characters. And the characters who
aren’t so well-defined, I make them up in my head, and I have very clear images
of who they are and what each one is singing about. Each one is a different
person with a different goal and message.” Graham herself approaches the
material—and her career—with just one goal: “It’s all about communication,
communicating an idea or a feeling not just vocally but any way I can. If I
have to tap-dance to get the message across, I’ll do that, too.”
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