Love at the Crossroads

Tuesday, November 13 and Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
Sari Gruber, soprano
Paula Murrihy, mezzo-soprano
Hal Cazalet, tenor
Matthew Worth, baritone
Steven Blier, piano

FIRST MOVEMENT: Head Over Heels

Chères fleurs, from Chansons des bois d’Amaranthe by Jules Massenet (The Ensemble)
Vénus, by Camille Saint-Saëns (Mr. Cazalet and Mr. Worth)
Réveil, by Ernest Chausson (Ms. Gruber and Ms. Murrihy)
Dans les ruines d’une abbaye, by Gabriel Fauré (Ms. Gruber and Mr. Cazalet)
Au fond des halliers, by Édouard Lalo (Ms. Murrihy and Mr. Worth)
Madrigal, by Fauré (The Ensemble)

SECOND MOVEMENT: The Honeymoon’s Over

Two Fairy Tales, written for A Little Night Music, by Stephen Sondheim (The Ensemble)
Country House, from Follies, by Sondheim (Ms. Gruber and Mr. Cazalet)
Just Like a Man, from Two’s Company, by Vernon Duke (Ms. Gruber)
A Miracle Would Happen, from The Last Five Years, by Jason Robert Brown (Mr. Worth)
I Will Walk With My Love, Traditional Irish ballad, arr. Gerald Moore (Ms. Murrihy)
Cherry Pies Ought to Be You, from Out of this World, by Cole Porter (The Ensemble)

Intermission

SCHERZO: Philandering

Underneath the Abject Willow , by Benjamin Britten (Ms. Gruber and Ms. Murrihy)
Do It Yourself, by Ed Kleban (The Ensemble)
Modest Maid, by Marc Blitzstein (Ms. Gruber and Ms. Murrihy)
The Tennis Song, from City of Angels, by Cy Coleman (Mr. Cazalet and Mr. Worth)

INTERLUDE

So Many People, from Saturday Night, by Sondheim

FINALE: Reconciliation

Licht und Liebe, by Franz Schubert (Ms. Gruber and Mr. Cazalet)
Es rauschet das Wasser, by Johannes Brahms )Ms. Murrihy and Mr. Worth)
Die Geselligkeit by Schubert (The Ensemble)

EPILOGUE

Eco, by Manuel Oltra (The Ensemble)

Notes on the Program by Steven Blier

There are only two ways I can think. One is in utter tranquility, which mostly occurs when I am having my daily swim. The other, apparently, is under pressure, when I am likely to blurt out something that even I didn’t know was in my head. To me, it feels like “The Three Faces of Steve,” as some alien personality kicks in and takes up the reins. During a production meeting last spring about this season’s programs, I confidently presented ideas for five of our six concerts. Then came the inevitable question. “And in November…?” In truth, I had no idea. Imagine my surprise as I heard Steve-Number-Two assert, “Oh, that’s no problem. You see, I’ve always wanted to do a recital where two couples hook up, quarrel, pair off with other people, and then come back together. It would be told entirely through duets and ensembles…like La Ronde.” (It’s possible that I blacked out afterwards.)

The mention of La Ronde sealed the deal. This scandalous play, written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1900 but not performed until 1921, eventually became a classic movie by Max Ophuls in 1950. It depicts ten sexual encounters. At the end of each coupling one of the partners meets his or her next bedmate, pushing the drama forward until it comes full circle, back to the prostitute from the first scene. But in truth, La Ronde’s decadence and world-weary, predatory characters were not what I had in mind for this concert. My inspiration actually came from my colleague Graham Johnson, who was the artistic director of The Songmakers' Almanac, a British thematic recital series that originally sparked the idea for NYFOS. More than twenty years ago, Graham told me about a program he’d devised called If Fiordiligi and Dorabella Sang Art Songs, in which he retold the entire plot of Mozart’s Così fan tutte using German Lieder. That project was very much in tune with Graham’s refined European ethos, but not quite right for my scrappier New York sensibility. Still, the germ of it seemed very interesting: to use songs to tell a love story, forming an ad hoc song cycle with a narrative arc. Some kind of narrative arc is always an element of NYFOS concerts, but this time, our story would come to the fore, tracking the love intrigues of four characters. Tonight, after mulling over the concept for twenty-two years, we’ll finally air Così-meets-La Ronde.

As I worked on this concert in tandem with the brilliant Ben Sosland, a plotline emerged that brought Mozart’s classic comedy into the twenty-first century. Two couples meet and innocently fall in love. But soon, the guys feel a little trapped, give in to their wanderlust, and try to get it on with their friend’s girlfriend. The women, of course, feel betrayed. In the second half, all hell breaks loose. Everyone gets even randier: the guys experiment with each other, while the girls drop all inhibitions and indulge their sexual whims. Wild oats sown, the four come back together with more experience, more wisdom, more doubts—and fuller hearts.

Intuition guided the musical choices, and each of the four sections began to gravitate to a single language and musical genre. The couples fall in love to French romantic art song, which evoked that wonderful moment of infatuation when life sparkles with promise, the spirit shimmers with sweet vibration, and the words lovers exchange are perhaps more beautiful for the way they sound than for what they actually mean. But when that moment wears off and reality sets in, things suddenly get more literal—“But you said . . .” “But I never meant . . .” “I just can’t stand…!” Suddenly we go from the wings of song to the language of negotiation, recrimination, and comedy. For a New York audience, that language would be English. English also seemed the best language for Act III, “Philandering.” After all, you don’t want to miss any of the juicy details. But German song seemed right for the closing section; it offers beautiful, complex examples of mature love tinged with memories of loneliness and betrayal. For a reflective coda, we bring you a Spanish song by the Catalan composer Manuel Oltra set to a Lorca poem—two minutes of heaven that I first encountered last March at a concert by Dennis Keene’s excellent chorus, Voices of Ascension.

Our concerts have always been freewheeling, embracing many genres that aren’t usually heard in the same evening. I initially had some misgivings about putting a noble work by Brahms and Goethe near a scurrilous comic song by A Chorus Line’s Ed Kleban. But programs have a way of asserting their own intentions, and once they get rolling you just have to get out of the way. Love is at once the highest expression of humanity and an unruly biological urge; a blissful merging and a litigious, daily negotiation. Brahms and Kleban are both telling the truth about love—as are Schubert and Sondheim, Fauré and Jason Robert Brown.

I worried that my genres, merged by the Blier dating service, might not sustain interest in each other. A session with my iPod set to “shuffle” finally put my mind at ease. I love when its microchips choose a recitative from Nicolai Gedda’s recording of William Tell and follow it with Elaine Stritch singing “Bongo Bongo Bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo.” But there are more startling juxtapositions. One day I went from a movement of Nights in the Garden of Spain, Manuel de Falla’s piano concerto, directly into Ruthie Henshall’s performance of “Words Without Music” from Vernon Duke’s Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. Because they were in the same key and had similar orchestrations, I experienced the Broadway song as a logical continuation of the Spanish concert piece. They went together seamlessly, as if they were intended to segue from one to the other.

I don’t expect—or even want—the songs on tonight’s concert to merge in that way. But I do think that they all have a lot to say to one another as they explore the vagaries of the mating game, from the agony to the ecstasy.

NYFOS program notes usually contain detailed historical background about every piece on the program. Tonight, however, many of our composers are familiar to music-lovers and theatergoers. Artists like Saint-Saëns, Brahms, and Schubert don’t require biographical sketches. Nevertheless, there are a few lesser-known pieces about which you may be curious. Here’s a quick guide to them.

The three Stephen Sondheim songs are comparative rarities from this often-sung composer. “So Many People” was written in 1954 for what was to be Sondheim’s first Broadway musical, Saturday Night. The piece was championed by Lemuel Ayers, the producer of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate and Out of This World. Ayers met Sondheim at a wedding where they were both serving as ushers, and that encounter led to an audition where Sondheim got to play some of his songs for the well-connected Broadway luminary. Sondheim passed the test, and Ayers invited him to write the score for a musical based on Front Porch in Flatbush. But tragedy struck. During the backers’ auditions Ayers died, suddenly and unexpectedly, and with him died Saturday Night. The songs, which also include the sublime “What More Do I Need,” have gradually been resurrected and published, and New York saw the first production of this lost work in 2000.

“Two Fairy Tales” was written for the two ingénues in A Little Night Music, Henrik and Anne. Its dry wit may have shed light on their characters, but it held up the storytelling at a crucial moment in Act II when the action needed the most velocity. Sondheim slyly recycled the tune of “Two Fairy Tales” as an instrumental piece; it became the piano exercise played by Desirée’s daughter Fredrika.

“Country House” comes from the 1987 London production of Follies. For this outing, Sondheim and his book writer William Goldman attempted to add more comedy to the musical that had originally dazzled and devastated audiences on Broadway in 1971. To that end they tweaked the libretto and added three new songs. The best of them was “Country House,” sung by the wealthy, unhappily married Phyllis and Ben. In the original script, these two characters had only dialogue scenes together. In London, they finally got a chance to reveal the misery of their relationship in song. But Sondheim and Goldman eventually withdrew the London version of Follies. They much preferred the darker original book and came to feel that the London venture was misguided. Still, this song is prime Sondheim. Smart, psychologically astute, and ultimately quite touching, “Country House” exposes both the vulnerabilities and the intransigence of Phyllis and Ben Stone. And only Hugo Wolf can match Sondheim for turning melody into perfectly inflected line-readings.

Vernon Duke’s brilliance as a songwriter was matched by his bad luck—and bad judgment—in the theater. The Gershwin brothers took him under their wing in the 1930s, and his early projects went well. “April in Paris” and “Autumn in New York” were instant classics, and his 1940 Broadway show Cabin in the Sky was a rousing success. But thereafter his luck turned, and he produced a string of failures. The fifth of them was Sweet Bye and Bye. Though it contained many fine songs and boasted the superb Dolores Gray in the leading female role, it was plagued by practically every illness a musical can have: book troubles, casting problems, and an orchestra that was in a state of revolt, apparently egged on by their contractor. This man had a vendetta against Duke, who had rejected him when he auditioned to be the show’s conductor. The guys in the pit took revenge by drowning out the singers and playing slews of wrong notes. Sweet Bye and Bye closed out of town, and Duke nearly left the theater for good. He eventually returned to Broadway in 1952 with Two’s Company, a revue starring Bette Davis and choreographed by the brilliant, tyrannical Jerome Robbins. Duke recycled two of the best songs from Sweet Bye and Bye, “Roundabout” and “Just Like a Man.” The latter possesses the hallmarks of Duke’s peerless musical chops; the song’s verse (what people often call the “intro”) has a surprisingly rich harmonic progression, and the refrain flows with Duke’s strange combination of grace and gravity. Duke’s music manages to evoke comedy and sadness simultaneously. And Ogden Nash—a lyricist whose verbal trickiness could sometimes be his downfall—hits the nail on the head this time.

Alas, Duke was defeated once again. The fly in the ointment was the show’s star, Bette Davis, a breathtakingly unmusical performer. Her grim, leaden rendition of the opening number, “Turn Me Loose on Broadway,” gives new meaning to the phrase “two left feet.” (Check it out on YouTube.) She claimed illness during the run of the show—her croaking rendition of “Just Like a Man” on the original cast album certainly doesn’t sound healthy. Good or bad, she was a huge box office draw, and when she left Two’s Company after three months, the show closed.

Marc Blitzstein is most famous for his left-wing agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock, and his classic translation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. One doesn’t usually associate this serious artist with froth like “Modest Maid.” The song was written during World War II, when Blitzstein was stationed in London working for the United States Army. His job was to promote cultural ties between Britain and the States; one of his odder hands-across-the-sea ideas was to write this bawdy song for the great English comedienne Beatrice Lillie. She never performed it, but twelve years later it became a showstopper for Charlotte Rae, who played Mrs. Peachum in Blitzstein’s adaptation of The Threepenny Opera at the Theater de Lys. Blitzstein’s lyrics were probably inspired by the opportunities for outdoor sex during the blackouts in wartime London—a boon not just for “modest maids” but gay men like Blitzstein.

Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years had only a short run off-Broadway in 2002, but it has become a beloved work for the current generation of music theater fans and performers. It tells the story of a failed marriage with a unique narrative twist: the heroine’s songs start at the end of the relationship and move backwards to their first date, while the leading man’s plot line starts at the beginning of their love and ends with his leaving his wife. The structure of the musical is a beautiful metaphor for the inability of this young couple to synchronize their lives. Brown’s songs—especially those for his hero, Jamie (a successful writer and clearly a stand-in for Brown himself)—often have startlingly vivid lyrics and a lively musical groove. For me, The Last Five Years is Jason Robert Brown at his very best—and “A Miracle Would Happen” is among the most fully realized of this show’s songs.

Everyone knows Ed Kleban’s work, even if they don’t know his name. He wrote the lyrics for the 1975 blockbuster A Chorus Line. He had a number of other musicals in the pipeline but they never came to fruition; Kleban died in 1987 at age forty-eight, leaving a scattering of songs and unfinished projects. One of them was a musical called Warhol, for which “Do It Yourself” was written. I heard this song at a benefit for the Manhattan Theater Club in 1974, when the now-venerable MTC had just finished its second season. I believe Bob Balaban (of Waiting for Guffman fame) was the lead singer, with Kleban and writer/producer Richard Maltby, Jr. filling in as backup chorus. I have waited thirty-three years to get a copy of the song; Ed promised to send me one but fate intervened. I am grateful to his sister, Linda Kline, who finally gave me the music for a piece that has haunted my memory for over three decades.

“Underneath the Abject Willow” received its premiere at London’s Wigmore Hall in December 1936. Its poet, W. H. Auden, and its composer, Benjamin Britten, had become artistic collaborators and close friends the year before, and they continued to work on films (through the G.P.O. Film Unit), song cycles (On This Island and Our Hunting Fathers), and operas (Paul Bunyan) for another six years before their paths diverged. Britten was initially somewhat cowed by Auden’s keen, articulate intelligence; it took him some time to feel that he was the intellectual equal of his friend. He was also less sexually adventurous and experienced than Auden, who wrote “Underneath the Abject Willow” as a way of encouraging the rather repressed Britten to enjoy his youth and accept himself as a gay man. Britten turns Auden’s poem into a breezy three-movement suite of dance tunes that lightly mock and taunt, and end with Britten’s musical equivalent of a kick in the pants.

The poem for Schubert’s “Licht und Liebe” comes from a play by Matthäus von Collin, The Death of Duke Frederick the Valiant (Der Tod Friedrichs des Streitbaren). As the title character thinks about happier times in his past, he hears this poem sung by two voices passing by in the forest. The music probably dates from 1822—no autograph survives—and is reminiscent of Schubert’s operatic works from that time in his life. He may have lacked the theatrical skills to create successful music drama, but few can match his ability to suggest subtle, shifting gradations of emotion, or portray the human heart in all its strength and vulnerability. In three minutes Schubert evokes love’s healing light and its ability to wound, simply by juxtaposing two contrasting rhythmic patterns, dipping suddenly into the minor mode, dropping briefly into recitative, and returning to the opening theme using overlapping vocal lines that allow the music to flower.

Manuel Oltra, born in Valencia in 1922, is probably the least familiar of tonight’s classical composers. He is our latest Catalan discovery, a musician in the lineage of NYFOS favorites Eduardo Toldrà, Frederic Mompou, and Narcís Bonet. Like his fellow Catalan composers, he prizes simplicity and lyricism, and shares with them a beautiful sense of musical space. Oltra casts a spell using refined, spare musical materials—a delicate watercolorist of sound. We’ll be back with more of his songs one day soon.

“Eco” was the first song I chose for tonight’s concert, even though at that point I really didn’t know exactly what story we would be telling. The music startled me with its beauty, and so did the brief poem by Federico García Lorca. Its nostalgia for a perfect shared moment, bathed in a combination of warmth and coldness, seemed the perfect conclusion to any story about love. The poem became even more resonant as I found out a bit more about the meaning of nardo, that mysterious “spikenard plant” mentioned by Lorca. Spikenard is known more commonly in this country as valerian, and is a traditional flower at Mexican weddings. It has large white buds shaped like spheres, which is why Lorca compares them to the moon. “Nard” is also mentioned in the Bible, where it figures in the Song of Solomon, and is used to anoint the head and feet of Jesus. “Nardo” carries with it the sense of deep reverence, and the holy consecration of marriage.

I admit it: Cy Coleman and Gabriel Fauré aren’t the kind of artists you’d expect to find sewn into the same musical quilt. Yet all the disparate, brilliant voices in tonight’s program understood the power of love, and each one advances the story in his own way. If Fiordiligi and Dorabella sang art songs, I doubt they’d let loose with “Modest Maid”; and I doubt that their swains Ferrando and Guglielmo would spar with the “Tennis Duet.” Let’s let our two modern couples duke it out with the full psychological and social artillery of the twenty-first century. And afterwards, we can discuss who went home with whom.

Several people went the extra mile to help me prepare Love at the Crossroads. I wanted to thank Dorothy Potter whose understanding of both Spanish poetry and botany gave Lorca’s “Eco” even more resonance; I anoint her feet with a spikenard plant. John Hargraves never met a German verb he couldn’t wrestle to its knees, which came in very handy a few times in the last couple of weeks. And Maestro Dennis Keene was both generous and amazingly expeditious in getting us the music for Manuel Oltra’s “Eco.” Tonight’s program is a true collaboration between me and Ben Sosland, my musical coordinator. He not only found some of the most beautiful pieces in the program, but he was a source of wise counsel, good ideas, and moral support throughout the entire process. To him I extend my warmest gratitude.

—Steve Blier