Baritone Eugene Brancoveneau

TWENTY FOUR PLUS ONE AT THE 222 JUNE 1

The 2024 season has already produced three notable Sonoma County song recitals - Renée Fleming at Weill, Magdalena Kuzmà at Schroeder, and Carol Menke at the Church of the Roses - three wonderful and very different singers and programs.

June 1 a fourth was added to this list as baritone Eugene Brancoveanu and pianist Kevin Korth presented at Healdsburg’s 222 Gallery a recital of astonishing proportions to a tiny but adoring audience.

The 222 Gallery is an inspiring and welcoming small venue. Provocative art adorns the walls, the platform stage is well-lit and houses a concert Yamaha, and the bright acoustics of the space complement both voice and piano. This intimate venue places the audience at cafe tables rather than in rows, which encourages the “salon” mode of performing chamber music and art songs in one’s living room, and it works well. Guests can easily chat, and the bar provides wine and other beverages. It was quite a warm evening, but overhead fans kept things comfortable.

Mr. Brancoveanu is currently artist-in-residence at Opera San Jose, with many European and American performances, and a former Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera. Mr. Korth is a formidable pianist with
spectacular musicality with the added plus of telepathic communication with the singer.

Both artists were casually attired in shirts and slacks, with Mr. Brancoveanu changing his long sleeves for short sleeves at intermission.

The first half was given to two well-known standards for baritone: Vaughan Williams’ heroic nine-song cycle Songs of Travel and Ravel’s delightful three-song piece Don Quichote à Dulcinée. The second half continued with the less familiar but the lovely six-song Finzi cycle Let Us Garlands Bring, proceeding to three marvelous songs by the prolific but also obscure 19th century German composer Carl Löwe (nicknamed “The Schubert of North Germany”), and concluding with two of Schubert’s most tragic and explosively challenging songs, “Der Zwerg” (the Dwarf) and the daunting “Erlkönig”, infamous for its fiendish piano part featuring a difficult to execute rapid ostinato, and they took it at breakneck speed. The encore was Mozart’s entertaining concert aria "Rivolgete a lui lo sguardo..." originally written for the character of Guglielmo in Così Fan Tutte but ultimately replaced by another of smaller scale.

This was already an impressive feat, twenty-four very big songs for both singer and pianist. But the duo also created an exceptionally memorable artistic experience, pacing the program like marathon runners, never flagging in energy or intensity, going from one strength to the next with a freshness of interpretation and physical stamina awesome to witness.

Mr. Brancoveanu’s voice is rangy and big, with a brilliant timbre, resonance and overtones, powerful in both extremes. It is also a very beautiful, well-trained and controlled instrument. He is able to modulate with absolute ease the extremes of emotions and dynamics while preserving disciplined musical and technical specifics. A gifted and charismatic singing actor, he is a talented linguist as well, segueing easily from English to French, to German, to Italian, as though each were his native tongue. His iPad was used discreetly only as an occasional prompt for the Vaughan Williams and Finzi sets.

No written translations were provided for the German or French alas, but engaging and colorful descriptions were given by the singer from the stage.

Art songs are not so rarified or inaccessible as a novice might assume. In the right hands, such as these artists, they burst out with life and relevance, and deserve to be heard by a wider audience.