United States Various: Erin Morley (soprano), Gerald Martin Moore (piano). Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory, New York, 11.4.2025. (RP)
The weather did not cooperate on a cold, wet evening. Still, a beautiful bouquet of songs was coaxed into bloom by soprano Erin Morley and pianist Gerald Martin Moore at the Park Avenue Armory. Flowers – and bird songs too – have always inspired poets and composers. This enchanting recital featured some of the most enticing such creations ever imagined.
The Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory is an intimate yet impressive space with its mahogany interior and rich, late-nineteenth-century decor. Morley conquered it instantly, seeming to step out of a Winterhalter painting in her floral gown. With mood established, Morley displayed the full warmth and richness of her voice in a diverse program of songs in five languages. She would turn up the heat in the second half of the recital in a red, flower-patterned dress.
Morley and Moore crafted the program around Huit Chansons de Fleur, Ricky Ian Gordon’s song cycle that uses flowers as a metaphor for life’s big moments – love and loss, life and death, rebirth and regrowth. In the cycle, Gordon set poems from Wordsworth to Dorothy Parker and contemporary poets, including one of his own. He acknowledges a French touch to the songs, immediately discernible by their lyricism, sentiments and lightness.
Morley and Moore performed five of the cycle’s eight songs. The wittiest was Gordon’s setting of Dorothy Parker’s ‘One Perfect Rose’, in which Morley captured the nonchalance of a woman who poses the question of why she regularly receives a single perfect rose from her admirers, rather than the far more practical gift of a limousine.
The most poignant of the songs was Donald Hall’s ‘Her Garden’ which he wrote after his wife Jane Kenyon’s death from leukemia at the age of 45. Gordon captured the bittersweetness of a once carefully tendered garden now neglected, with music that summoned love, grieving and release. In ‘Afterlife with Lilacs’, Telmo Dos Santos pondered the question of what one thing he would take to the afterlife. The poet’s choice was a bouquet of lilacs, the scent of which Gordon captured in an ascending vocal line that Morley sang with effortless grace.
Songs by French, German and Russian composers followed. The energy of a Spanish bolero offered a respite from Gordon’s reflective mood in Bizet’s ‘Ouvre ton coeur’, and singer and pianist offered a lovely rendition of Rachmaninoff’s ‘Lilacs’. The poignancy that Morley expressed in Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘The Nightingale’ was displaced by an early, recently discovered song by Debussy, ‘Les papillons’, enriched and enlivened by Moore’s playing.
The selections of Lieder ranged from a rapturous ‘Meine Liebe ist grün’ by Brahms to an exceptionally transparent and lyrical ‘Die Nachtigall’ from Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder. The finest, however, was Zemlinsky’s ‘Vöglein Schwermut’, with Morley’s crystalline voice etching the song’s chromaticism exquisitely.
The concert’s other theme was songs associated with glorious soprano songbirds of the past, and Moore was enthusiastic in discussing them. The first was the American soprano Sibyl Sanderson, whose voice ‘amazed, bedazzled, overwhelmed’ Jules Massenet. It and the beautiful singer’s other charms also captivated Saint-Saëns and inspired the coloratura showpiece ‘La Libellule’ (‘The Dragonfly’), which Morley sang with lightness and brilliance.
Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, was brought to the US by the American showman P. T. Barnum. Her admirers included composers such as Chopin, Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, but Lind favored simple songs in her recitals. One was the sentimental favorite, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, which Morley sang with a soothing combination of warmth and sincerity.
The Italian-American soprano Amelita Galli-Curci dazzled audiences with the sweetness and agility of her voice. Julius Benedict, who was Jenny Lind’s accompanist on her American tour, composed ‘La Capinera’ (‘The Wren’), a Galli-Curci showpiece that she recorded in 1917. Morley proved that a twenty-first-century soprano could similarly amaze with her technical brilliance as she sang of youth and love to conclude the recital.
It took no coaxing from the audience for Morley and Moore to perform an encore, Ivor Novello’s ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, which has been recorded by artists such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Julie Andrews. Moore played a sweeping, lush interlude in this sentimental favorite. The most magical moment, however, was Morley sending the final words, ‘‘Til you are home once more’, heavenward in silvery, shimmering tones.
There was one more encore, which Morley said needed no introduction, Olympia’s aria, ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’, from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Morley tossed off its vocal pyrotechnics complete with all the movements of the wound-up doll to the audience’s delight, just as she had done at the Metropolitan Opera to open the current season.
Rick Perdian
Featured Image: Erin Morley (soprano) and Gerald Martin Moore (piano) © Da Ping Luo
Ricky Ian Gordon – Selections from Huit Chansons de Fleur
Bizet – ‘Ouvre ton coeur’
Rachmaninoff – ‘Lilacs’
Rimsky-Korsakov – ‘The Rose Enslaves the Nightingale’
Debussy – ‘Les papillons’
Saint-Saëns – ‘La libellule’, ‘La rossignol et la rose’
Brahms – ‘Meine Liebe ist grün’
R. Schumann – ‘Der Nussbaum’
Zemlinsky – ‘Vöglein Schwermut’
Berg – ‘Die Nachtigall’ (from Sieben frühe Lieder)
Traditional Irish – ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ (arr. Julius Benedict)
Julius Benedict – ‘La Capinera’