United States Various – ‘Crossing Borders’: Megan Moore (mezzo-soprano), Francesco Barfoed (piano). Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 6.4.2025. (DS)
Barbara Strozzi – ‘L’Eraclito amoroso’
Rossini – ‘La regata veneziana’
Prokofiev – 5 Poems, Op.27 (words by Anna Akhmatova)
Rachmaninoff – ‘The Dream’, ‘A-oo’ from 6 Romances
Mahler – Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Jake Heggie – Crossing Borders
In this recent Music at the Morgan program, mezzo-soprano Megan Moore expressed the hope that her concert would make us ‘think and smile’. It certainly did. But, even more, her interpretations called up a variety of emotions that touched upon the unhindered experiences of being human – all in about sixty minutes.
Moore and pianist Francesco Barfoed were presented by the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers, an organization dedicated to the nurturing of great musicians and the creation of distinctive concerts. In six sumptuous pieces, Moore and Barfoed covered 400 years of musical styles with the ease of two magic-carpet travelers.
Fittingly, given the range of exhibits regularly offered at the Morgan Library, the works came from the Baroque, Romantic and Modernist eras and included a contemporary world premiere. Beginning with ‘L’Eraclito amoroso’ written by the seventeenth-century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi, Moore revealed a talent for expressing both melancholy and pleasure in one phrase. With juxtapositions of grief and delight in a lover’s sorrowful lament, Moore set the text to timbres of yearning tones that resonated across this complex, jarring song.
Shifting into the Romantic, but sticking with a Venetian theme, Moore sustained a playful tone in Rossini’s ‘La regata veneziana’, a three-movement work. With charm and technical ease, both Moore and Barfoed surrendered delightfully to the whims of the song cycle. Their swirling, leaping expressions around the character Angelina’s excited mention of her lover, the ferry boatman Momolo, were memorable. Barfoed’s pianistic phrases effectively evoked the waves of the water while Moore buoyed (literally) her voice up over the top with operatic clarity. As they closed the third song of the work, their ability to complement each other’s craft and energy was evident.
As the recital moved into the fin de siècle, Moore shifted to singing in Russian. In Prokofiev’s 5 Poems, the words by Anna Akhmatova began to align with Moore’s talents. Her unique touch in juxtaposing anxiety and warmth reached its zenith, and encapsulated how song can manifest complex emotions. The tonal range of the piece showcased the exquisite texture Moore pulls from the lower registers – creating a timbre of smooth, mellow tautness that caresses and hypnotizes. To her credit, she tapped into the texture when the composition called for it and not simply to showcase her own technical prowess – confirming a true commitment to artistry.
In two of Rachmaninoff’s songs from 6 Romances, Barfoed’s silky movement across the keys encapsulated the grandiosity of these works. For Moore, the opportunity to display power which Rachmaninoff invariably offers to a musician fell comfortably on her. She carried her volume to greater heights yet still had a poignant gentleness – clearly a signature sound audiences will be clamoring to hear.
Singing in German touched upon Moore’s deepest mastery. In Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer – with its thematic connections with Symphony No.1 – Moore’s phrasing matched text and music perfectly, and the effect was a mesmerizing invitation to get lost in time. The duo’s thoughtful approach to juxtaposed emotions in earlier works on the program came to a peak in Mahler’s expression of bittersweet ironies alongside the angst-ridden holiness of life’s beauty. Moore and Barfoed captured this meaning, and the palette of colors at Moore’s vocal disposal gleamed as clearly as Mahler’s knife in ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’ (‘I have a gleaming knife’).
The concert closed with a world premiere by Jake Heggie, based on diary entries by Nora London, co-founder of the Foundation for Singers. Crossing Borders is not only the piece’s title, it also describes the entire recital in its journey across languages and time periods. As a teenager, Nora London had escaped the Nazis through various countries and kept her thoughts on paper in earnest, poetic script. Heggie set the texts to chanson-style songs that created a nostalgic yet hopeful tone, capturing feelings of both loss and love. Moore proved her mastery in contemporary work, a special interest of hers, and sang the part with her operatic talent of characterization along with equal comfort in harnessing the vast inner spaces that intimate song cycles make possible. Of note were the humming moments between texts which transported one into this young refugee’s world.
As an encore, Moore and Barfoed performed a wonderful rendition of Sibelius’s ‘Var det en dröm’. Moore is in the early days of her career and has already marked her place in the opera and concert circuit. With so many styles easily in her reach, I am eager to see where she will choose to focus her talents. A gifted storyteller with a breadth of technical expertise, she is at home on the grand stage as well as in the small, colorful moments that create her connection with an audience.
Daniele Sahr
Featured Image: Megan Moore (mezzo-soprano) and Francesco Barfoed (pianist) © Beth Bergman