JOHN TERAUDS
TORONTO STAR
You know you’ve witnessed great music when the artists make you forget when and where you are.
Music is something you cannot see, cannot touch and cannot stash away in your pocket, so the spell needs to be powerful and immediate.
In this regard, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian was the best kind of sorceress yesterday at Roy Thomson Hall, as she made her solo mainstage recital debut in her home town. By her side was husband Serouj Kradjian on the piano.
One can only hope their personal relationship is as magical as the music they made together. Even though Bayrakdarian has often sung in Toronto before and has been increasingly active on the world’s opera stages — including recent performances as Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Met — the intense intimacy of a voice-and-piano recital was the best possible way to confirm that we have a future international star in our midst.
The program was interesting, as well.
Most classical singers follow a familiar formula of picking works from two or three different eras, often mixing a bit of art song in with some opera arias. The glue that holds these programs together is more often than not a combination of tradition and the artist’s personal preferences.
Bayrakdarian crafted a much tighter program by two composers who were contemporaries of each other in the 19th century, while managing to find enough variety to show off her impressive dramatic and vocal ranges.
We heard 14 art songs by French composer Pauline Viardot, whose works we don’t hear often enough. Best known in her day (1821-1910) as a singer, Viardot also managed to write an opera of her own (Cendrillon, in 1904) and more than 200 songs.
Bayrakdarian grouped these songs into French and Spanish, German and Italian, highlighting the composer’s ability to mimic art-song styles from each of those countries.
German songs tend to have shorter phrases with less legato, while French songs usually rely on extra-long, very legato phrases for their effect.
One interesting crossover between the two styles came in “L’Enfant et la mère” (the child and mother), which tells a similar story to Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” in which a father loses his son. The feminine influence softens Viardot’s telling, and Bayrakdarian sang the tragedy gorgeously yet without excess drama.
Even though it’s unfair to single one song out from the 14 well-crafted ones Bayrakdarian had chosen, “La Fête” (the festival) was notable for its extended vocal cadenza just before the last verse, allowing the singer to display her vocal flexibility and remarkable breath control.
Viardot sang in several Rossini operas, so it seemed appropriate that Bayrakdarian had chosen music from the Italian composer to round out the program.
Even though Rossini had laid down his operatic quill at age 36 in 1828 (after completing Guillaume Tell), he continued writing vocal and instrumental music until his death in 1868. Bayrakdarian chose four songs from a great collection called Les Soirées musicales, which dates from the 1830s. The best known is the boisterous tarantella “La danza,” which the soprano delivered with all the necessary verve.
Implored (unsuccessfully) to hold its applause between songs, the audience heard the three-song La regata veneziana (the Venetian regatta), from a prolific later period in Rossini’s life. Having remarried after his first wife died, he spent his last 13 years living outside Paris and referred to the music he wrote then as the sins of his old age.
We’re talking about sin as rich chocolate, nothing more serious. And Bayrakdarian served this confection beautifully, concluding with a bravura aria from Rossini’s 1815 opera Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra.
There was a lot of emotional and stylistic variety in this program, and all the music was sung with tremendous attention to phrasing, diction and emotional content. Often, it’s a singer with an imperfect voice who makes these extra efforts to compensate, but Bayrakdarian has a remarkable instrument, too. Easily filling Roy Thomson Hall’s cavernous space, this is a large voice, but one the singer wields with lightness and ease.
Kradjian’s playing was every bit as elegant and virtuosic, but one could argue that he was a bit too discreet. The 19th-century art song is a partnership between the piano and voice, and Kradjian too often yielded to the singer, allowing Viardot’s enchanting accompaniments to fade into the background.
Yet Bayrakdarian’s and Kradjian’s is a musical partnership that is only just beginning (since 2002), and the artistic magic between the two has plenty of time for development.
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