Mark Crayton at the Phillips

By way of explaining the following review, the Phillips Collection described its most recent Sunday recital as featuring countertenor Mark Crayton with James Janssen at the harpsichord. Expecting a nice selection of Baroque arias, and perhaps something from Mozart's Idomeneo for the dreaded Mozart Year, I went. Much to my chagrin, Mr. Janssen was sitting at a piano, not a harpsichord, and the earliest music on the program was composed around 1890. Mr. Crayton, a countertenor with a strong and pleasant alto voice, calls the program Native Tongue and cited as inspiration his mother's plea that he sing something in English. The first half was a selection of songs with connections to folk music and Shakespeare, beginning with three poems by William Blake -- an Ionarts favorite poet -- in a saccharine setting by Roger Quilter. I admit that I have never liked what I've heard of Quilter's music, which is retrogressive without the earthiness that saves the music of a composer like Ralph Vaughan Williams.

I enjoyed the three songs by American shyster composer John Jacob Niles, who famously passed off some of his own compositions as folk tunes supposedly collected in Appalachia. He did actually collect folk tunes, but sometimes it is difficult not to want to make folk music sound more how we think folk music should sound. I am not sure how people on a Kentucky mountain in the early 20th century would have reacted to Mr. Crayton singing "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," but it would have been fun to watch. The high point of the first half was the Shakespeare songs (the song texts found in Shakespeare's plays and other poems), three by Vaughan Williams and five by Gerald Finzi, the latter of which finally challenged my ear with something other than sweet, tooth-rotting Romantic harmonies. The tempo of the third Finzi song (Fear no more the heat o' the sun, from the fourth act of Cymbeline) was so slow that all energy was sapped from the performance, although the slow recitative section ("No exorciser harm thee!") was nicely done, hushed and reverent. The fourth song (O mistress mine, where are you roaming?, from Twelfth Night) had a genial Andante tempo that was quite lovely.

In the second half, the duo presented new music by living composers, in an attempt to bring some fresh repertory to countertenors everywhere. Three songs by David W. Solomons combined poetry of questionable value -- haiku in English by the composer's friend, a poorly translated Kurdish poem penned by a prisoner, and the composer's own poem -- with music that was just as facile -- pentatonic scales sound Japanese, augmented seconds sound Middle-Eastern -- if sometimes entertaining. Two songs by Ronald William Hill, a scientologist office manager in Chicago, sounded essentially like Broadway or pop songs. Last, there was a set of three songs, Humanities, by Gregory Peebles, otherwise known in Blogville as MezzoGregory or Il Supremo, blogging at Counter/Point 3.0. Peebles also used his own poetry, with mixed results. The advantage of using your own words is that a composer can create an idiomatic song with deep personal meaning -- and these songs clearly mean a lot to their composer and performers -- but the disadvantage is that poets tend to write better poems than composers. Musically, too, these songs only added to my impression of a monochromatic harmonic palate in this recital, something like Broadway meets the Shenandoah.

I did not enjoy this recital overall, but Mark Crayton's voice was certainly not the issue. Nor was his accompanist, James Janssen, who played capably, if with a few barely noticeable slips. This program is just not my cup of tea. For much more interesting examples of English-language, albeit all American song, the recital of Thomas Hampson is a good model. I know that at least a couple Ionarts readers were at the Phillips, too. Please use the comments section to share your opinion.