2019 Recital Tour with Kathleen Kelly

Wigmore Hall

“Jamie Barton is a star – still rising, but already a proper, bona fide star. Audiences hold her in fierce affection, partly inspired by her glowingly defiant stage presence, something everyone got to see during her Pride flag-waving performance at this summer’s Last Night of the Proms. More than that, though, there’s her voice, the kind of sumptuous velvet-and-steel mezzo-soprano that fills an auditorium seemingly as easily as opening the mouth, used with sharp intelligence.

This programme of songs, featuring more female composers than male, turned up some gems, starting with Elinor Remick Warren’s piece Heather, Barton’s voice tracing smooth, easy sweeps over Kathleen Kelly’s rippling piano. Framing some slightly overwrought works by Amy Beach were one song each from the Boulanger sisters, Lili and Nadia. The muted colours and French vowels of Lili’s Attente drew a darker tone from Barton, who crowned the piece with a high note that sounded aptly vulnerable, yet absolutely controlled.

In Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, the most substantial and serious work, Barton scaled back in a way that made her haunting cries after Theseus stand out more, not to mention the accusations she hurled at the end. [Kelly’s] virtuosity in Libby Larsen’s Love After 1950, taking in boogie-woogie, blues and Spanish habanera, left no doubts.

Barton and Kelly really sold us these five songs, tracing a woman’s journey towards self-acceptance in a sardonic, entertaining cycle that plays with profundity but doesn’t commit. There was a cheeky drinking song by Ravel and a moment of intensity from Henri Duparc, before Barton finally unleashed the full radiance of her unfettered high notes in Richard Strauss’s Cäcilie. That there was only one encore would have been disappointing had it not been Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which Barton owned: rapt, focused, and singing with just the right amount of rhythmic leeway for her kind of voice. Most singers spend a whole career trying to hit this balance of vocal poise and easy confidence with their audience, and reach it only when the voice is going off the boil. But not Barton.”
–Erica Jeal, The Guardian

”Last time Jamie Barton was in London, she was headlining the Last Night of the Proms and transforming the Royal Albert Hall into a joyful, drag-fabulous celebration of queerness. For her recital at Wigmore Hall, joined by pianist Kathleen Kelly, Barton may have toned down her outfit but retained her commitment to exploring queer themes, offering a thought-provoking programme centred around women composers, poets and muses.

Barton and Kelly’s programme shifted the balance in favour of female composers, including some lesser-known works from American composers. Barton’s plush, velvety mezzo soared through the neo-Romantic yearning of Elinor Remick Warren’s Heather and Amy Beach’s Ah, love, but a day, all the while retaining absolute clarity in text which held the audience rapt. Songs by the Boulanger sisters found Barton on slightly less comfortable form, though Lili’s Attente featured one of the most remarkable diminuendo high notes I’ve encountered. A laugh-out-loud rendition of Ravel’s Chanson à boire found Barton in far more comfortable form, showing off both a cavernous chest voice and insouciant ease with the text. Barton’s true French home, though, was in Duparc’s Phidylé, sung with rapt intensity that bloomed into a glorious column of sound. Here, as well, found Kelly in peak form, tracing Duparc’s Wagner-influenced chromaticisms with finesse.

Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, a dramatic cantata for voice and piano, found Barton slightly outside of her comfort zone. Barton’s Wagnerian mezzo sounded tentative in opening recitative, surely one of the most inspired depictions of sunrise in the Classical era, though it was impressive to hear a voice of that size navigate the presto finale with such ease. It was a delight, though, to hear Kelly’s expressive, idiomatic playing, conjuring up the colours of a full orchestra even though Haydn never got around to orchestrating the cantata. The other substantial work on the programme was Libby Larsen’s Love after 1950, a song cycle setting text by Rita Dove, Julie Kane, Kathryn Daniels, Liz Lochhead and Muriel Rukeyser. These texts, a sort of Frauenliebe und -leben for the contemporary woman, explore topics ranging from blond men to tweezing eyebrows, achieving surprising depth and pathos in their exploration of the pressures of a patriarchal society. Larsen interprets these texts as a dance suite and Barton and Kelly clearly relish the opportunity to dig into the blues, honky-tonk and tango rhythms.

If the Larsen set established Barton as a top-notch recitalist, with her expressive coloration and easy camaraderie, Strauss’ Cäcilie reinforced her operatic abilities. Ably supported by Kelly’s rich arpeggios, Barton’s sumptuous mezzo, radiant across all registers, filled the hall and looked forward to future appearances at Covent Garden. It was the single encore, though, of Arlen’s Over the Rainbow that truly reinforced what a special artist Barton is, combining impeccable singing, utter simplicity and unashamed social advocacy – truly an artist for the 21st century.”
–Kevin Ng, Bachtrack

“A voice in a million, full, flexible and even throughout the range, rich in colours and needle-sharp in projection. Beyond that, she has the gift of communicating music simply and directly, without phoniness or hauteur. Even though her fan club was clearly out in force at the Wigmore Hall, applauding every number, she never pandered to them or played to the gallery. She sings sincerely, from the heart; she’s got the joy.”
–Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph

”On Saturday the American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton brought her “queer, fat, femme energy” to a Wigmore Hall audience who whooped and roared before she had sung a note. She also brought Kathleen Kelly, a pianist with a voice and imagination as distinctive, versatile and capacious as hers, and a programme that combined grandeur, fantasy and relatability — that much-mocked ability to cut through the perceived limitations of art song and touch a kind of folk memory.

In Libby Larsen’s song cycle Love After 1950 the nods of recognition were almost audible. Here was the humid, unhurried eroticism of an imagined first kiss; piano figures like the clink of ice in a cocktail glass; the feared and desired counterpoint of a blond head on a dark blue bed; the fierce, lacquered fingerwork of a boogie-woogie introduction to the labour of tweezers, rollers, razors and eyelash curlers; a lament for a lost lover in habanera rhythm; every word and gesture exquisitely clear and confidently delivered.

The female voice was everywhere: in silk-velvet songs by Lili Boulanger, Amy Beach and Elinor Remick Warren, and in the iridescent urgency of Nadia Boulanger’s S’il arrive jamais. Even Ravel’s Chanson à boire from Don Quichotte à Dulcinée was made over as a womanly seduction, hiccups and all.

What Barton and Kelly do is to occupy the space that they have, stretching the voluptuous silence in Duparc’s dazzled Phidylé, then flooding the hall with brilliant sound. Both musicians think big and presented Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos with an almost Straussian weight and pace. This was a moment as significant in its way as Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s debut with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra: uninhibited and fully focused. As one member of the audience said at the end of Barton and Kelly’s encore of Over the Rainbow, thank you.”
–Anna Picard, The Times

Herbst Theatre

“Barton clearly knew how to shape a unique ironic platform for each of the songs. The result was thoroughly entertaining on the surface, but Barton never neglected any of the dark undercurrents. The beginning of Barton’s program was a matter of getting to know the text and then getting to know how the music informed that process of knowing the text. Barton could not have done better in facilitating that process. Her text delivery was consistently crystal clear, as was her awareness of the rhetorical connotations of the music. Nothing would please me more than to encounter any of these four songs in future recital programs. At the other end of the program, Barton knew how to present the selections by Ravel, Duparc, and Strauss as if they were old friends, which they probably were to those in the audience that regularly attend vocal recitals. However, those old friends had to yield to the new century in Barton’s encore selection. She sang “In the beginning …,” the first of the two poems by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard set by Jake Heggie in Of Gods and Cats, composed in 2000. “In the beginning …” is the “cat poem” of the pair; and Barton knew exactly how to play every feline gesture to the hilt. The playful sense of wit in both words and music provided the perfect complement to the more sardonic texts that Larsen had set.”
–Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio

“As a singer Jamie Barton can pretty much do anything. The mezzo-soprano excels in such diverse music as Wagner (as Fricka in the Ring), Gluck (the title role in Orfeo ed Erudice), and Verdi (as Eboli in Don Carlo). And oh, speaking of diversity, she can use her recitals to make a strong case for neglected women composers. The glory of the concert was Barton’s rich, supple, and disarmingly natural sound. It is lushly textured from top to bottom, with gleaming high notes and resonant lows. And, no matter what the style required, the voice was consistently placed in service of the text. Especially striking was how easily Barton segued from emotionally specific recitative to heart-breaking lyricism in the aria [in Arianna a Naxos], yet still was able to finish (despite the remnant of a cold that saw her cough discreetly between lines) with dazzlingly precise and fast coloratura. The final set comprised songs by composers better known for writing for the soprano voice. Barton launched the set with a slightly inebriated take on Ravel’s ‘Chanson à boire’, floated gorgeous tone for the ‘repose’ refrains in Duparc’s ‘Phidylé’, and crescendoed to a powerful climax in Richard Strauss’s ‘Cäcilie’. For an encore, Barton offered a warm gesture to Jake Heggie, the San Francisco-based composer enjoying the recital from the third row. ‘In the beginning…’ — from his tongue-in-cheek Of Gods and Cats — found Barton back in a wry mood, ending on a pitch-perfect ‘meow’. As they did with the rest of the evening, the audience lapped it up.”
–Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International

“Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton was the flame that lit a rainy night in San Francisco this past week. With Kathleen Kelly at the piano, she sang an eclectic concert on the subject of love, her powerful and sumptuous voice bringing pleasure and beauty to her entire audience. It was glorious. This is music that has weight as well as wit, not at all hard to relate to in either category. And with Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “I Make My Magic” Barton/Kelly/Larsen gave us simply gorgeous tones, fully inhabited, with not one syllable skipped over.”
–Lois Silverstein, OperaWire

“Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and pianist Kathleen Kelly combined forces for a magnificent vocal recital on Wednesday, Dec. 11, in Herbst Theatre. It was just like any other vocal recital. It was nothing like any other vocal recital.

The external trappings of this event, presented by San Francisco Performances, would have been entirely familiar to aficionados of the art song. Barton delivered a series of superbly shaped songs — some familiar, some less so. It was a mixture of contemporary music with material from the 19th and 18th centuries.

And Barton — who has quickly established herself as a singer of extraordinary dramatic, technical and expressive gifts — sang it all beautifully, with a combination of intimacy, wit and clarity. We’ll come back to that.

But first, let’s take another look at the program, in which the composers represented were evenly divided between men and women. Have you encountered something like that before? Of course not, because it simply hasn’t happened, not until now.

So Barton was playing a canny double game here, in which the very normalcy of the event forced us to reckon with the absurdity of the all-male programs we’ve always been asked to accept as the standard. But what if — and hear Barton out on this, as they say — we kept everything about vocal recitals the same but also allowed female creative voices into the mix on an equal footing?

Well, it would mean getting to hear the lush, rippling textures and heartfelt emotionalism of Elinor Remick Warren’s “Heather,” which opened Wednesday’s program on a note of fervent nostalgia and exultation. It would mean music by both the Boulanger sisters — the elegant subtleties of “Attente” by the doomed young teenage genius Lili alongside the stormier and more forceful writing of her older sister, Nadia. Amy Beach, still under-recognized as one of the powerfully individual voices of turn-of-the-century American music, would get a chance to shine with her “Ah, Love But a Day,” which teeters on the edge of homespun sentiment without succumbing.

By including these pieces — and by singing them with such ardency and interpretive splendor — Barton was making a simple and irrefutable point, which is that there’s no excuse for silencing these and other women’s voices. There’s only an explanation, and it’s a bad one.

After intermission, Barton launched into Libby Larsen’s “Love After 1950,” an ingratiating and imaginative collection of five songs written in popular style. She caressed the insinuating blues melodies of “Boy’s Lips” and shimmied inexhaustibly through the honky-tonk explosions of “Big Sister Says,” a comic ditty about the pains of a beauty regimen. Most touching of all were the melancholy tango strains of “The Empty Song,” which measures heartbreak by the gradual disappearance of shampoo.

Barton was announced as recovering from a cold, which prompted a few sudden coughs in mid-performance but otherwise seemed to have no impact on the majesty of her singing. She soared high into the vocal stratosphere, unleashing volleys of perfectly placed notes, then dived deep into her chest register without missing a beat. Her phrasing was at once regal and casual, direct and artful. Kelly’s playing was crisp and forceful throughout.

And the men? Their music holds up well too, including a probing account of Haydn’s dramatic scene “Arianna a Naxos,” and a witty, high-octane rendition of the “Drinking Song” from Ravel’s “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.” As an encore, Barton serenaded composer Jake Heggie (in the audience) with a slinky account of “In the Beginning” from his feline cosmology “Of Gods and Cats.”

What was so powerful, in the end, was the spectacle of all these composers holding the stage together under Barton’s wise and eloquent guidance. Capping a year when women have provided the bulk of the musical delights in the Bay Area, why on earth shouldn’t this become the new normal?”
–Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle