Harolyn Blackwell
More opera singers ought to "cross over," to spend some time on the Broadway musical stage learning to sing directly to an audience and to communicate personally as powerfully as they have been trained to communicate musically. Soprano Harolyn Blackwell, brought up and trained here in the District, has gone that route, and her recital Sunday at the National Academy of Sciences reflected both a sophisticated musical imagination and an engaging musical personality.
She offered a lovely, if standard, program -- some Purcell to "warm up," a group of Schubert, Schumann and Strauss lieder, the Rachmaninoff "Vocalise" and, after intermission, a splendid 10-song cycle, written for Blackwell by Ricky Ian Gordon, and a Donizetti aria. What was non-standard about all this was her ability to project the sense of the text directly but without obvious gestures. She is no more reluctant to explore the intimate possibilities of her voice than she is to let go with the most dramatic. She did a convincing job at both ends of the artistic spectrum.
Harolyn Blackwell, shown at an earlier concert, presented an engaging recital Sunday at the National Academy of Sciences.
(Rich Lipski -- The Washington Post)
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Her best singing came in the Gordon cycle "Genius Child" on wonderful texts by Langston Hughes, where she took more time to reflect on each phrase and where she was able to temper the broad vibrato that colored her other readings. It is worrisome to hear a singer, in mid-career, with such a pervasive vibrato, a vocal quality that ought to be under control and used, as needed, to warm up the sound. It can be a sign that a voice is not in good shape. But Blackwell used it so intelligently in the Gordon cycle that it made me wish that she had chosen to leash it in more frequently, particularly in the German set.
Pianist J.J. Penna was an assured and elegant collaborator.
-- Joan Reinthaler
Kennedy Center Chamber Players
The Kennedy Center Chamber Players normally include the principal string players of the National Symphony Orchestra plus the orchestra's pianist, Lambert Orkis. On Sunday afternoon in the Terrace Theater, however, their usual timbral palette broadened, as NSO principal trumpeter Steven Hendrickson joined with Orkis to play Paul Hindemith's trumpet sonata.
The outbreak of hostilities in World War II inspired the sonata, giving rise to its bleak martial quality, with strenuous, empty orations in the first movement and a weirdly ambiguous march in the second. The funeral music and chorale of the third movement never quite came together as an emotional statement, though Hendrickson and Orkis played fastidiously.
To begin the program, NSO concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef and principal cellist David Hardy joined Orkis for a performance of Beethoven's first published piano trio that made you realize how much of his style was formed right from the beginning; they emphasized the motives that drove the development of the first and last movements, highlighted the trio's mercurial dynamic contrasts and harmonic shifts, and brought out the noble lyricism of its slow movement.
Four more NSO players -- principal second violinist Marissa Regni, principal violist Daniel Foster, violist Eric deWaardt and assistant principal cellist Glenn Garlick -- joined Bar-Josef and Hardy to play Brahms's first string sextet after intermission. The sheer warmth and easy charm of this sextet (yes, Brahms wrote it!) can sometimes obscure the complexity and scale of its invention, but the Chamber Players kept their textures clear and incisive so that every note could be heard and appreciated, with the second movement's gradual evolution from sternness to tenderness particularly winning.
-- Andrew Lindemann Malone
