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Singing in Warm, Focused Baritone, Herman Helps Celebrate 'Dutch Days' |
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by Bruce-Michael Gelbert | >> see bio |
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photo courtesy of Hans Pieter Herman
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| Hans Pieter Herman |
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As part of a "Five Dutch Days" festival, ranging throughout the city formerly called Nieuw Amsterdam this month, Dutch baritone Hans Pieter Herman, a protégé of Ira Siff, gave a recital, on November 14, in the intimacy of Park Slope's historic Vechte-Cortelyou or Old Stone House, under the auspices of the New York Opera Society. Liora Maurer, at the upright piano, ably assisted.
Herman began by seamlessly singing, in warm, focused tone, the classical line of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Mit einem gemalten Band" (With a beautiful ribbon), to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words, articulating an ornate figure, on the word "bindet" (binds), fluently and, in a lyrical "Adelaide," with text by Friedrich von Matthisson, fully conveyed the intoxication of the smitten lover.
Herman gracefully illuminated the romanticism of Joseph Guy Marie Ropartz's "Quatre poèmes d'après l'intermezzo d'Heinrich Heine," sometimes delicate, as in "Tendrement enlacés, ma chère bien-aimée" (Tenderly entwined, my dear beloved), sometimes unbridled, as in "Pourquoi vois-je pâlir la rose parfumée?" (Why do I see the perfumed rose pale?). He mined "Ceux qui, parmi les morts d'amour" (Among those who died of love) and "Depuis que nul rayon de tes yeux bien-aimés" (Since no ray from your beloved eyes) for the full measure of their bleak beauty, punctuated, in Maurer's pianistic postlude, by the tolling of a funeral knell.
In the spirit of the festival, Herman treated us to five songs by Dutch composers to poetry in French, German, English, Spanish and Dutch. He approached Henri'tte Bosman's "Aurore" ("Claire petite perle d'eau claire"-clear little pearl of clear water), to a poem by André Verdet, like the gossamer of a Claude Debussy chanson, without ever losing sight of the dark core of his voice, no matter how quiet his sound, and proceeded to Anna Cramer's more generously romantic "Flieder" ("Stille träumende Frühlingsnacht"-silent, dreamy spring night), with text by Otto Julius Bierbaum. The singer probed the melancholy, exotic neo-romanticism of Bertha Frensel Wegener-Koopman's "Day after Day," using Rabindranath Tagore's words; the colorfully tragic "Romanza del Prisionero," by Juriaan Andriessen; and the sunlit "Lievelingskind," by Willem Andriessen, to poetry of Felix Rutten, impressively sustaining notes at the end of its third and fourth verses.
In Maurice Ravel's settings of Jules Renard's "Histoires Naturelles," evanescent and evocative, Herman suitably communicated childlike wonder regarding "Le cygne" (swan), "Le martin-pêcheur" (kingfisher), and "Le paon" (peacock), striking an apt proud attitude for the last.
Amsterdam was the common thread through Herman's three encores, clearly, in a lilting, affectionate paean to old "Amsterdam, my city so fair," in Dutch, then in English, and less obviously, but convincingly, in a gently voluptuous "L'invitation au voyage," of Henri Duparc and Charles Baudelaire, still never neglecting the core of his instrument, and in "Rosemonde," Francis Poulenc and Guillaume Apollinaire's song of the search for the elusive love, sounding like a page out of "Dialogues des Carmélites."
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