Lawrence Brownlee
Posted in Classical Music
Jan 30, 2015
by Wayne Lee Gay
Vocal music of Franz Liszt—yes, you read that correctly—provided the
highest of several high points in the recital by tenor Lawrence Brownlee
and pianist Kevin Murphy at the Kimbell Art Museum’s Rienzo Piano
Pavilion Thursday night. Liszt is, of course, remembered primarily for
his solo piano music, and secondarily for orchestral music and a bit of
organ music. So, maybe it’s appropriate that the Cliburn Foundation, an
organization principally associated with the piano, would be the sponsor
of an event in which the hero of the piano was revealed to be a great
composer of vocal music as well.
Tenor Brownlee’s muscular, always stunningly accurate artistry proved ideal for Liszt’s Tre Sonneti del Petrarca
(Three Sonnets of Petrarch). Although infrequently performed in the
original version for voice and piano—but a part of the standard piano
repertoire in Liszt’s own transcriptions for piano solo—this monumental
triptych ranks among the greatest masterworks of music for voice with
piano. The huge demands on both the pianist and singer are largely
responsible for the relatively neglect of the original version; these
demands extend far beyond the merely technical, for these three settings
require an intellectual empathy with both fourteenth-century Italy,
from whence the text, and nineteenth-century romanticism, which produced
the music. Brownlee and Murphy clearly demonstrated the ability to
discover and draw together both of those elements.
Brownlee and Murphy navigated readily form Liszt to twentieth-century Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s Five Popular Argentinean Songs, providing an impressively different direction with succinct images of love and life, ranging from the boisterous Chacarera to the delightful illogic of Gato (“Cat”).
A set of five traditional African-American spirituals arranged for
voice and piano by contemporary American composer Damien Sneed provided
the third high point in the concert.
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