SPARKLING ART SONG AND PIANO SOLO RECITAL AT THE 222 GALLERY

The 222 Gallery in Healdsburg just launched its 2024-25 marvelously diverse and extensive concert season, and Sept. 28’s opera program featured a powerful duo, baritone Daniel Cilli with pianist Temirzhan Yerzhanov. It was a seamless 70-minute recital of compelling art songs and piano solos showcasing the 19th century romantic theme of “Sturm und Drang” (storm and stress), and nothing could have been more appropriate for our current turbulent times.

The well-constructed event opened with seven “stormy” songs from Schumann’s cycle Zwölf Gedichte (Twelve Poems, by the German poet Justinus Kerner), followed by his early Allegro, Op. 8 for piano.

Next were four of the lovely, richly harmonic Six Mélodies by the revered 20th century French composition teacher, salonist, and sometime composer Nadia Boulanger, on poetry by Camille Mauclaire and Jean François Bourguinon. These were followed by Trois Novelettes (Three Little Novels) for piano by the irrepressible and lover of word play Francis Poulenc.

The last song sets highlighted the work of two lesser known African American neo-romantic composers, whose works are now coming belatedly into the spotlight—four of Margaret Bonds’ delightful Six Songs on Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Owens’ brooding, powerful Mortal Storm (Op. 29), the settings of five Langston Hughes poems.

Mr. Cilli’s operatic baritone was the perfect vehicle for these songs, whether in intimate or stentorian projection of what are often dense poetic texts. His expressively chiseled visage works to great effect together with a highly focused temperament and quiet charisma. Patient skill and devotion is also displayed in the memorization of many, many hundreds of lines of poetry and music (comparable to the work of Shakespearean actors), plus achieving native-speaker fluency in several languages. Like other great recitalists of the last century, he commands a warm, powerful, deeply resonant, extremely beautiful, easily produced and controlled lyric baritone. But what makes his singing extraordinary is a particular, unique personal quality of understanding and vulnerability, and his ability to project and communicate those qualities with utter transparency of voice, word and vision. His very still presence belies the emotional heat within and concentrates the emotional content to wonderful effect.

Likewise, collaborative pianists, regardless of genre, are a special subset of keyboard artists, and the ability to join perfectly with a singer is a skill not all pianists cultivate, and a talent not all possess to begin with. Like Mr. Cilli, Mr. Yerzhanov is a transparently passionate artist, totally involved with the songs being sung, his lips often moving with the words. A master technician, the gigantic pounding demands of Schumann’s B Minor Allegro were dispatched with familiar grace and a sense of fun alongside the “stormy” content. Poulenc’s tweaky neo-classicism was on full display in the Novelettes, written in 1928, which sparkled lightly with the sweeping flourishes, quirky harmonies, modulations and unexpected cadences that mark his style. Swanky jazzy lyricism alternated with explosive outbursts and abrupt turns, and Mr. Yerzhanov was the master of it all. It is also well to note that he played the entire program straight through, with no intermission or hint of fatigue.

The concert piano is almost overwhelming in that small space so thankfully the lid was down for the songs. Opera series host Caroline Altman gave a warm welcome to the tiny but enthralled cafe-table-seated, wine-sipping, chocolate-munching audience (a yummy idea but the sometimes insensitive scrunching of wrappers being removed, as if in a movie theater, was not appreciated). No encore was offered, but none was needed. The recital was already complete.