Senter, Pearce
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
This courageously off-the-beaten-path,
American-themed song recital owed its provenance to well-known
RTÉ conductor Colman Pearce, who was musical director of the
Mississippi Symphony Orchestra for 12 years.
On this occasion he provided piano accompaniment to Mississippi-based mezzo-soprano Lester Senter, whose previous work with Pearce includes commissioning and premiering his 1998 Robinson the Cat.They opened with six settings of Emily Dickinson. Two by Aaron Copland - The world feels dusty and Sleep is supposed to be - achieved a deeper and subtler connection with the verse than the pleasant but otherwise unremarkable settings by Ernst Bacon and Vincent Persichetti.
Altogether more interesting was Augusta Read Thomas's setting of Among Dawn Flowers by the 17th-century poet Basho Matsuo, Japan's first great master of the haiku. Thomas creates a fragile stillness by combining single plucked piano strings and long sung notes which conjure up the perfumed air of a garden at night-time.
The piece best suited to Senter's controlled and experience-rich voice was Berenice Sadie Brown, from a set receiving its world premiere called Southern Voices by Wisconsin-born Lee Hoiby. Hoiby, who turned 80 last year, studied with Menotti, whose influence comes across in Berenice's operatic recounting of the death of her husband.
The final item was Judith Zaimont's 2002 Virgey Rainey: Two Narratives, based on stories by the Southern writer Eudora Welty (1909-2001). Although the eponymous Virgey is a colourful character who skinny-dips and refuses to use a metronome, here for once the musical setting seemed to labour the prose rather than enhance or complement it.
Joining Senter on the platform was soprano and fellow Mississippi-resident Cheryl Coker, who was vivid in her role but matched the other two in a tendency to produce too much volume for the venue.
Preceding the Zaimont was the one non-American work, Pearce's own Contemplations, which Senter commissioned and which sets a selection of writings by the intriguing Mississippi artist Walter Anderson (1903-1965). The chosen tales involved animals and nature, and Pearce's affectionate and pictorial settings - which required both pianist and singer to play hand-held percussion instruments - were accompanied by projections of Anderson's colourful and representative wildlife paintings. It was the highlight.
