United States Various: Ryan Speedo Green (bass-baritone), Adam Nielsen (piano). Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York, 22.1.2025. (RP)
Wolf – Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo
Mussorgsky – Songs and Dances of Death
Traditional – ‘Deep River’
Mahler – ‘Urlicht’ (from Das Knaben Wunderhorn)
Schubert – ‘Der Doppelgänger’, D.957, No.13
Howard Swanson – ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’
Wagner – ‘Die Frist ist um’ (from Der fliegende Holländer)
Ryan Speedo Green’s eagerly anticipated Carnegie Hall recital debut was impressive. In recent years, the bass-baritone has had breakthrough performances in New York in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the role of the young boxer Emile Griffith in Terence Blanchard’s Champion at the Metropolitan Opera and other lead roles at the Met. This recital was another triumph for this remarkable singer.
Pianist Adam Nielsen was Green’s partner for the evening. They are a formidable team musically and in the personality department. Each took turns introducing the pieces on the program. Nielsen’s comments were short and to the point. Green’s remarks were generally longer and touched upon his personal story and the importance of performing pieces that tell the story of the African-American experience in America.
Green took a traditional approach to this recital, focusing on the German Romantic repertoire. His command of the language is undoubtedly due to the years he spent in Vienna as a member of the Wiener Staatsoper. Although power is one of his vocal attributes, he scaled it down to suit the more intimate sphere of a song recital. Not every singer with a voice as sizeable can achieve a similar level of intimacy or can paint a word or phrase so subtly.
Describing the program as an arc depicting death to salvation, Green opened with Wolf’s Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo. These settings of three sonnets by the great Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor and poet were the last songs Wolf composed before he slipped into syphilitic insanity. Set for bass or low baritone, the songs are intensely serious with their themes of resignation and human futility. Green and Nielsen took a classical approach, paying attention to musical detail and fine textural shadings. The ability of both singer and pianist to delve deep into the emotional complexities of the poetry and music made this performance extremely personal and emotional.
Moving from the bleak to the macabre, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death followed the Wolf. Mussorgsky’s songs depict humans in the four stages of life – infancy, youth, adult and old age – in their fatal encounters with Death. Green gave chilling accounts of Death lulling a child to die with his horrible song, and his snarl as he sang the final repetition of the word ‘lullaby’ was terrifying. In the guise of a knight, Green basked in triumph as he boasted of the success of Death’s serenade on a young woman.
In ‘Trepak’, Nielsen’s playing propelled the drunkard stumbling towards his snowy death, with Green singing almost gleefully of summer as the man dies in the cold. In ‘Field Marshall’, Green summoned the realities of war and the inevitability of death with horror in his voice. Death’s triumphant boast that the dead soldiers will be forgotten and never rise again was bone chilling.
After the intermission, Green was alone on stage to sing ‘Deep River’. He told the audience that the African-American spiritual summoned the tragedy of people ripped from their homes and all that was familiar to face the unknown and debasement. Green expressed the misery and hopes of the generations of enslaved people who suffered such a fate with nobility and profound emotion.
Green returned to this theme with Howard Swanson’s ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. It is a setting of one of Langston Hughes’s best-known poems, which he wrote when he was 17. Swanson, who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, is particularly known for his settings of Hughes’s poems.
Green conceives the song as a paean to Africans and their triumphs and travails, as symbolized by rivers ranging from the Euphrates to the Mississippi. Enriched by Nielsen’s playing of the bluesy accompaniment, the song found Green at his most forthright – loud and proud – especially in the closing measures.
In between ‘Deep River’ and ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, came masterful, moving accounts of Mahler’s ‘Urlicht’ and Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’. The Mahler was notable for the depth and resonance of Green’s voice mirrored in Nielsen’s playing, while in the Schubert, Green’s expression of horror when the man realized that he was the person in the scene he observed was underscored by the smooth legato and phrasing the singer employed.
Wagner is looming large for Green, with upcoming appearances as Klingsor in Parsifal at the Glyndebourne Festival and Wotan in Die Walküre at Santa Fe. For the recital, he sang ‘Der Frist ist Um’ from Der fliegende Holländer’, unleashing the full power of his voice. The Dutchman’s cries of despair and desperation were harrowing. Green’s top blazed as he sang of the futility of ever finding the release from his fate and then, with even greater power and intensity, as he sang of the longed-for Day of Judgment.
Green sang ‘Peculiar Grace’ from Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones for his first encore. In the aria, Green expressed the young man’s hopes for the future with tenderness and hope, after ruing a childhood in the South where a boy like him had no future. ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music brought the evening to a close. It is a song that he sings to his two sons as a lullaby, but not in his operatic voice, which they don’t like. This audience, however, got to savor the warmth and emotion that Green brings to the song when singing in full voice.
Rick Perdian
Featured Image: Pianist Adam Nielsen and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green © Richard Termine