Dominique Hellsten | New York Concert Review, Inc.

The Ullmann Project-II

Dominique Hellsten, Artistic Director

Dominique Hellsten and Monique Niemi, sopranos; Jason Plourde and Will Robinson, baritones; Craig Ketter and Matthew Odell, pianists; Johannes Landgren, organist

Saint Peter’s Church-Citicorp Center, New York, NY

April 19, 2016

Dominique Hellsten continued her ardent advocacy for the music of Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) with the second installment of her Ullmann Project. In the series, she situates Ullmann’s music in context with other contemporaries, including teachers, friends, fellow prison-camp inmates, and Anthroposophists, composers (Petr Eben (1929-2007), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), and Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942)), and poets. Ms. Hellsten chose the unusual venue of a church in order to be able to include striking works by Petr Eben for voice and organ and organ solo. The venue in fact led to a decreased sense of enjoyment on my part, which I will outline briefly before proceeding to compliment the performers on their committed renditions.

First: The hall’s acoustic is not conducive to speech, and really not to singing either. In the previous concert of this series, there had been a pre-concert talk, separate from the music. There was too much barely intelligible talking on this occasion. The acoustic devoured consonants too.

Second: The lighting was dreadful. It created dark “eye pits” on all the singers’ faces. Second only to the voice, eyes are the most expressive tool a singer has. This was a great shame.

Third: The superb collaborative pianists, Craig Ketter and Matthew Odell, had to contend with a shabby, out-of-tune, small grand piano. Only the excellent Swedish organist, Johannes Landgren, escaped unscathed; he was playing the church’s good instrument in the space for which it was designed.

There is a regrettable sameness to much of the music presented, unavoidable in music created in nearly the same time period, with late-Romantic influences predominant. Eben actually emerged as the most progressive voice—he survived his concentration camp internment. As Mr. Landgren told us, Eben held hands with his brother (both stripped naked) in a delousing shower, not knowing whether water or poison gas would come out of the shower heads. This led him to a spiritual epiphany that lasted the rest of his life.

Ullmann’s music, when heard in such quantity, seems to proceed a fitfully, with interesting ideas that too often remain undeveloped fully. Zemlinsky is definitely old-fashioned by comparison, and Korngold has his customary prodigious “sheen” and refinement, while not really adding anything new to musical vocabulary.

The evening began with six Geistliche (Spiritual) Lieder, Op. 20 by Ullmann, sung by Monique Niemi and assisted by Mr. Odell. She seemed somewhat stiff, though her voice was well-suited. The most interesting of the songs was the fourth: Marienlied, which ended on an unresolved major seventh.

Mr. Landgren then played the Mystery of Creation from a cycle of organ pieces by Eben called Job. It was indeed mysterious and striking, sounding a bit like a central-European Messiaen. Mr. Landgren then accompanied Ms. Hellsten in the Lied der Ruth, which despite its German title was sung in English. It was very good as well.

The first half of the program returned to Ullmann and his Drei Sonnette aus dem Portugiesischen, Op. 29 (words by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, translated by Rilke). They were in high expressionist style, a bit overwrought, with rousing high climaxes of passion in each. Ms. Hellsten’s élan was good, but each song had an unsatisfying ending (not her fault, but the composer’s).

After intermission, two baritones, Jason Plourde and Will Robinson, divided the twelve aphoristic songs Der Mensch und sein Tag (Ullmann’s Op. 47, composed in Terezín (Theresienstadt)). Mr. Plourde’s rendition of his six was excellent (somehow he managed clear diction), as was the support from Mr. Ketter. The songs are not even sentences, but brief, enigmatic strings of words, so great was the fear of accidentally transmitting a subversive message that could be picked up by the guards. The words depict random passing events of a day, and must have meant a great deal to those who heard them behind barbed wire fences. Mr. Robinson seemed too unrelievedly somber, his tone overly darkened.

Zemlinsky was represented by his Wedding-Dance and Other Songs (Op. 10), performed by Ms. Niemi, who seemed much more relaxed and charming here. All the singers used their arms in ways I found somewhat distracting, and they looked too serious or sad most of the time. There is virtue in standing still (not stiff!) and using your vocal tone and face to convey emotion. And again, had one been able to see their eyes, the story may have been different.

Ms. Hellsten returned to as she put it lighten the mood with Korngold’s lovely Three Songs, Op. 22. She understands the idiom beautifully, but the material really needs a fresher voice, like the character of Sophie from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier.

The concert closed with more Eben: his Die Nomine Caecilie for organ and soprano (Mr. Landgren and Ms. Hellsten), a really good piece that worked for the performers and in the acoustic. Then Mr. Landgren played the Dance of Jephta’s Daughter from Four Biblical Dances by Eben. The storytelling was vivid: Jephta’s father had promised that if he was victorious in battle, he would kill the first person he saw upon his return—it was his own daughter, dancing to welcome him home.

These concerts are so valuable in presenting unusual and rarely-heard repertoire that I do not wish to discourage anyone involved. However, the choice of location is very important, and perhaps going “outside” the context for more variety would make for a more entertaining concert, one that doesn’t feel like a graduate school lecture-recital.

by Frank Daykin for New York Concert Review; New York, NY

The Ullmann Project-I

Dominique Hellsten, artistic director, soprano

Monica Niemi, soprano

Jason Plourde, Will Robinson, baritones

Craig Ketter, Matthew Odell, pianists

Paul Griffiths, musicologist, pre-concert speaker

Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Music Center, New York, NY

October 15, 2015

The Lieder (German art-song) recital is an endangered species. It depends on the enthusiasms of a small, hardy band of devotees: presenters, performers, and audiences. Happily, many of these devoted folk still exist, and they find each other somehow. That devotion was evident in this first concert (of three planned) of the Ullmann Project.

This recital was preceded by an intimate, informative talk by veteran critic Paul Griffiths, who neatly covered Ullmann’s biographical highlights with admirable coherence and concision. It’s a shame that only a handful of people chose to attend this crucial background informational talk.

Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) was one (unfortunately among many) of the creative artists to lose his life from the genocidal aktions of the Nazis during WWII. Ullmann’s parents were Jewish, but converted to Catholicism. Ullmann later converted from that to Protestantism, and then to his most meaningful attachment: Anthroposophy. Nevertheless, in the Nazi scheme of things, having Jewish parents (even just one), converted or not, was a one-way ticket to the extermination camps.

Ullmann was first transported to the infamous Terezín (which the Germans called Theresienstadt) “show-camp,” where the Germans used to parade through visiting humanitarian groups such as the Red Cross, as if to say “See? Look how WELL we treat our prisoners,” an irony that is as chilling now as ever. Theatricals, music, painting, all took place within the barbed-wire walls of the camp, supervised by the watchful eyes of the Nazi guards and officials, always on the lookout for subversive messages perhaps sneaked into the works. But who would such messages ever have reached anyway? In the late, defeatist days of the regime, Ullmann was moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he perished October 18, 1944.

My task as critic is 1) to evaluate the performances and 2) perhaps render some sort of comment on the material itself. The performances were uniformly committed, and in some cases very stylish. I’d venture to say (with due respect for Ullmann’s quite original “kaleidoscopic” compositional style) that perhaps some of the gems would have been better set off in a more varied program (whether language, or style-period), for there was quite a bit of sameness within the late-Romantic language(s) employed by the four composers on the program. I understand the desire, however, to contextualize Ullmann: mission accomplished.

The program began with six Lieder to poems by Albert Steffens. Steffens was an interesting figure who took over the Anthroposophic Society after the death of its founder Rudolf Steiner. As explained by Dominique Hellsten, Ullmann was insistent that his poets have some sort of “moral” core or sensibility. In these songs, soprano Monica Niemi sang with a clear bright sound, negotiating the often difficult wide-ranging vocal lines well, but with a diction that, while it may have been academically correct, sounded indistinct even in the smallish hall. These songs, as with most of them on this program, strain at the outer bounds of what might be considered true “Lieder” style, verging on an operatic mode of expression, not that that’s always bad (witness the songs of Richard Strauss).

Craig Ketter, her collaborative pianist, produced some of the most satisfying sounds I have heard in decades from a vocal accompanist. In fact, both pianists in the evening were superb, the other being Matthew Odell. Their lavish colorings and total mastery of the often-thick piano writing were marvels to behold.

Ms. Niemi continued with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Farewell Songs,” which contain a translation of Christina Rossetti’s “When I Am Dead, My Dear.” Korngold, a child prodigy, wound up in Hollywood, where he found his true calling as a master creator of film music. The ripe harmonic language sounded a bit overdone here, my limitation I’m sure.

Then came two of the five songs by Alexander Zemlinsky (Arnold Schoenberg’s and Korngold’s teacher) to poems by Richard Dehmel (the poet of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht). Will Robinson, baritone, accompanied by Mr. Odell, had fewer of the diction issues, but both he and Ms. Niemi could have benefitted from a greater variety of expression, less “seriousness” in the face, and more frontal placement of vowels for clarity.

Mr. Robinson continued with the six songs to Rilke poems by Petr Eben, who died only recently, in 2007. This was a very interesting group musically, and it was well done by both Robinson and Odell.

After intermission, things heated up with the Tanzlied of Pierrot from Korngold’s well-known opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), composed when he was twenty-three. Jason Plourde, baritone, had a lovely warm sonority that suited the material, and the best diction thus far of the evening. My only quibble was a peculiarity of his rendering of the “motto” of the aria, the four words “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen,” which lacked nostalgia, and resolution of the final, unaccented syllables of “Sehnen” and “Wähnen,” where the vowel was far too open.

Mr. Plourde followed with three more songs by Ullmann, to texts by Swiss poet and historian of the Italian medieval and renaissance periods Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, that were vividly characterized.

If I appear to be dwelling on diction, it is because it really is of the essence to the art of the song recital. Not that we ever want to suffer from “diction-face,” but there is a subtle art of creating the proper aural illusions that will reach the audience and create the result of a good rendering of the text, together with beautiful vocalization. It should never be just one “or” the other.

And so, we come to the motivating force behind this Ullmann Project: soprano Dominique Hellsten. She sang eleven songs to conclude the program: six by Zemlinsky and five by Ullmann. In Ms. Hellsten, we found exactly that quality of expression that had been only partially realized previously in the recital: a true idiomatic command of the German language not separated from her singing. Even when her voice was perhaps straining at some of the demands being put upon it by the material, we never doubted her conviction, and she had the most relaxed posture and wide range of expression. She explained, in a brief verbal program note, how much the Ullmann songs to Ricarda Huch’s poems mean to her, ever since she discovered them in London some years ago. She brought that deep understanding that comes from having lived with the material, and again Craig Ketter worked magic with the very busy piano parts, with never a chord out of place or unbalanced.

As Ullmann himself said: “By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon. Our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live.” We look forward to the second and third installments of this series.