Recital contains election overtones

Recital contains election overtones

By Kenneth LaFave
The Arizona Republic

On an election night when propositions included a referendum on cockfighting, a proposal to buy open land and another to build a new jail, a bass-baritone from the Metropolitan Opera stopped by to sing songs about ... cockfighting, open spaces and jail.

Of course, there was more to Samuel Ramey's superlative recital Tuesday night at Symphony Hall, but somehow those three subjects stuck out.

Even Ramey announced, after singing Don't Bet Your Money on de Shanghai, Stephen Foster's comical song about cockfighting (yes, "comical song about cockfighting"), "We programmed this song months before hearing about Proposition 201."

"We" were Ramey and pianist Warren Jones. The two men performed an exemplary program of song in a benefit for the Arizona Opera. A first half of mostly French repertoire and a second, all-American half, showed that American musicians have mastered European repertoire and are now comfortable enough to focus on the homegrown.

Ramey was at the top of his form as a vocal artist, bringing a powerful technique to bear on expressive content, buoyed by his hand-in-glove collaboration with Jones.

A very early Verdi scena from his nearly unknown opera Jerusalem, to a French text, dramatically culminated a first half that was long on the dark and demonic. It and such songs as Duparc's eerie La vague et la Cloche fit the devilish image cultivated by Ramey's signature roles as both Gounod's and Boito's Mephistopheles.

The American second half contained some wonderful surprises, especially in the set by Paul Bowles, the 88-year-old composer turned author turned composer again. They Cannot Stop Death set the words of a prison inmate to the effect that we are all inmates on death row, and the starlit Blue Mountain Ballads, to poems of Tennessee Williams, painted a crazy picture of loving loneliness.

"Don't Fence Me In," sang Ramey, apropos of Prop. 303, thus beginning a Cole Porter set that made a case for singing Mr. Carnation-in-the-Lapel as the would-be classical composer he sometimes was. I've Got You Under My Skin was sensitively felt, and if Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye was a little slower than the harmonies could usually support, Ramey's marvelous spinning sound made it work anyway.

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Recital contains election overtones