In Review > Concerts and Recitals
Jamie Barton & Kathleen Kelly
NEW YORK CITY
Weill Recital Hall
3/5/10
Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton presented a solo recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on March 5, with Kathleen Kelly at the piano. Barton is a warm, smiling, effervescent presence with a uniquely colored instrument that seems to live on the higher edge of mezzo. She has a quick, bright vibrato that is often soprano-like, but she can also tap into dusky, French-horn-like tones. It's a quirky, fascinating voice, and for me, at least, Barton was at her most persuasive and distinctive on the second half of the program, in Libby Larsen's Love After 1950 and one cabaret song each by Satie, Schönberg and Bolcom. Barton's voice really came to life here; she was more consistent technically, and she delivered the songs with unerring style and self-aware humor. To characterize these selections as lighter fare does them a disservice, but they did provide a happier marriage of vocal weight and color to material than the Mahler and Rachmaninoff selections she offered before and after.
Barton is a gifted comedienne who knows just how to land a clever lyric and how much (or how little) to physicalize it. In Satie's "La Diva de l'Empire," she was saucy and sexy, illustrating the phrase "Elle danse presque automatiquement" with the daintiest hip-wiggle. Schönberg's "Mahnung" was playful, and her timbre took on a fuller, darker color that didn't impede easy high notes. In Bolcom's "Love in the Thirties," Barton layered in the serious overtones effortlessly and genuinely, distinguishing between the questioning boy and his patient, loving father without resorting to caricature. She hit her vocal stride in the Larsen songs, and her personality, directness and clean diction made her performance of the cycle's patter centerpiece, "Big Sister Says, 1967," a category-killer. No less convincing were her languid and sardonic "The Empty Song" and her easily confident "Blonde Men."
Barton opened with two Baroque pieces, Purcell's oft-performed "Music for a While" and Croft's "A Hymn on Divine Musick," skillfully investing each textual repeat with a different meaning, painting the images deliciously. Her voice flowered in the ornamented sections in the Croft, and she never lost her clear point of view and sensitive musicianship. Still, in these, and to a greater extent in Mahler's Rückert Lieder, one got the feeling that Barton's voice wasn't responding in quite the way she wanted. This resulted in an occasionally breathy, ashy tone and some quavering high notes. True, she cast an ethereal spell in the floating "Ich atmet' einen linden Duft," and she built "Um Mitternacht" from doleful abandonment to the release of deliverance, letting loose with a radiant sound in the final verse. But elsewhere in the Mahler cycle, and also in three songs of Rachmaninoff, her vocal presence couldn't quite match her dramatic sense. In the latter, her high notes became shrill. She played to her strengths again in her encore, Zina Goldrich and Marcy Heisler's hilarious "Alto's Lament," which Barton could easily make her calling card. Pianist Kelly played divinely, as if she were hearing the music in orchestral colors, and acquitted herself in each musical style with convincing authority. 
JOANNE SYDNEY LESSNER
