With its Louis Consolation Tiffany glass and blue ceramic décor, carved woodwork and Romanesque ivory friezes, the Veterans’ Room of the Park Avenue Armory is among the most stunning rooms in New York for the efficiency of music. Probably the most succinct method to describe Karim Sulayman’s recital there, with guitarist Sean Shibe, final Thursday (repeating an earlier equally sold-out efficiency on Tuesday) is to say that the music-making was worthy of the matchless venue.
However the musical beauties of this system entitled “Damaged Branches” (which Sulayman and Shibe have recorded and have been touring) have been subtler than the beautiful Beaux Arts mishmash of the room.
Sulayman, a Lebanese-American tenor with an astonishing command of types and of languages—and flawless diction in every of them—effectively, in English, Italian, Ladino, Arabic, and Spanish on this event—which included English translations from Arabic and Chinese language.
“Damaged Branches” refers back to the sophisticated family tree of melody, the hyperlinks throughout the Mediterranean from Sephardic Spain to Mameluke Syria, and so forth, by means of time and house in all instructions. This system notes have the temerity to hyperlink Italian madrigals to Sumerian chants—speculative to say the least—and the songs chosen present a taste of cultural combination.
The message of those two performers, who met as college students on the Marlboro Competition in 2007, is a nationality-defying curiosity that they became a commentary on many civilizations. At Marlboro, for instance, they have been first assigned to work collectively on a bit unknown to them and, I believe, to just about all of immediately’s viewers: Benjamin Britten’s setting of Arthur Waley’s translations, “Songs from the Chinese language.”
Sulayman’s intentions are to display hyperlinks and roots, in themes musical and poetic, crossing each boundary of tradition, faith, nationality, style. Are the hyperlinks he detects so exact, so traceable as he insists they’re? I don’t discover the hyperlink from Aleppo to Venice or Sumer to Zaragoza fairly so clear—however he’s the artist; he can opine no matter he likes, since his vocal arguments are so ravishing.
This noble ambition, astonishingly achieved, jogged my memory of the work of Jordi Savall and of the present mashups of baroque and folkloric and standard music from Germany to Mexico to Crete, from Philadelphia to Williamsburg and Little Island, and people are simply those I’ve heard about. For singers educated in opera however discovering it troublesome—or just boring—to earn a dwelling the old style means, such ambitions absolutely foreshadow a livelier future.
On a extra conventional stage, Sulayman possesses the 2 abilities required from a singer of artwork tune, as soon as the vocal items have been educated: he is a superb storyteller and a pure actor. He jogged my memory not solely of such artwork singers as Herman Prey and Thomas Quastoff, however of these standard singers—I considered Judy Garland, however different names might happen to you—who inhabit the lyrics of a tune, who enact the principal determine within the verse set to music, who counsel their deepest emotions.
The tenor’s voice is relatively grainy than clean, able to descending to a baritonal somberness for mourning or deep reflection, then of rising effortlessly (with no audible break) to lyrical tenor phrases, spreading its wings to heaven when an amorous effusion (or a rooster’s crow) calls for it. From time to time (occasionally on this program) a clarion outburst will be heard, the type one would possibly count on of a Verdi or Puccini hero in army cost, for instance some determine of speech or lover’s craving. His ornaments are appropriate, in flip, to the fashion of Monteverdi’s madrigals or to up to date Arab Beirut or, in an encore, the outcries of a proverbial Mexico.
His accompanist/companion, guitarist Sabe (a half-Japanese Scot), admits to being delighted when his barely pop method annoys skilled lutenists. He loved giving Sulayman a relaxation from time to time by offering a guitar interlude from the repertory being carried out, main by a pure segue again to tune as quickly as we have been in the precise temper and key.
Two of the fathers of opera have been represented: Giulio Caccini’s “Dalla porta d’oriente” (From the gateway to the east), a lover’s admiration of his woman within the hues of dawn, apparently sung from the opposite aspect of their mattress at daybreak. Determine of speech piles on determine of speech, as if the person is telling a witty story at a drinks social gathering, however Sulayman’s gracious restraint stored inside poetic bounds.
This was adopted by two Monteverdi songs: “Si dolce è il tormento,” the lament of a lover held at bay, set beside “La mia turca che d’amor” (My Turkish woman), the same state of affairs declaimed to such overblown impact—every verse wobbling on the phrases “doppio mio martoro,” my struggling doubled, because the suitor wallows in frustration. “Languendo, moro” –languishing, I die. In fact he doesn’t. He’ll sleep it off someplace. For this foolish caricature, Sulayman’s voice appeared to develop in dimension, virtually to lose management, as he babbled of his distress. The man is a pure comic.
Distinction adopted without delay within the temporary Sephardic tune, “La prima vez,” during which Sulayman turned an epigrammatic and real lover: “Come nearer, beloved, uncover your self, and inform me secrets and techniques of your life.”
From the Ladino songs that mingle Andalusian traditions, medieval Jewish ones and a contact of troubadour Provence, Sulayman moved to trendy Lebanon, his personal ancestral land, one other place the place many traditions mingle. “El helwa di” (The attractive one) is a poem set by Sayed Darwish, a flip of the century musician, preceded by a guitar interlude that mimicked Syriac drums, and tells the story of lovers (female and male? Male and male? Unclear, and who cares?) who awake at cockcrow (Sulayman had enjoyable blaring cockcrow 3 times, ever louder and extra insistent), who stroll, penniless, to work, united by the fingers held every within the different. It’s a vignette—a scenic image of straightforward life, but additionally of a nation.
“Li Beirut” (For Beirut) by Fairuz, is the melancholy anthem of a beloved, ruined, unforgotten homeland. Fairuz, who refused to desert Lebanon or to carry out in public through the civil conflict, opened the temporary, hopeful interval of the Nineties by singing this tune in public, emphasizing town as a mom and refuge, and it has been town’s anthem throughout all of the hopeless years since. A Maronite Christian, she has refused to establish with any aspect through the conflict. Sulayman performs it with melancholy suggesting a dedication to outlive.
Fairuz has been accused of borrowing the melody from Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”—however isn’t that how folkloric melodies have at all times traveled? A couple of notes recalled as the brand new melody is devised? And are usually not the roots of war-torn Lebanon much like these of the medieval Spain, whose Muslim and Jewish refugees typically carried little however their songs once they fled? Hasn’t this form of cross-cultural artwork been the theme of your entire live performance?
Paris-born Lebanese Layale Chaker’s “A Butterfly in New York” is a tune of remorse for the passing of time, of recollecting thirty years later, a life begun in Baghdad by a toddler chasing butterflies. It concludes “I stay like a damaged department,” and on the repeat, that line breaks off, as if a tune was damaged, the way in which a household tree may be damaged, or a practice.
The ultimate set of this system was Britten’s “Songs from the Chinese language,” crammed with the form of caressing phrase Britten designed to use the actual voice of Peter Pears. Pears’s ghost appeared to hang-out the very totally different Sulayman instrument. They have been all pessimistic songs, autumnal regrets on the hopelessness of effort (“The Massive Chariot”) or the change of vogue (“The Outdated Lute”).
I liked the way in which Sulayman’s voice, in “The Herd Boy,” caressed the phrase of the “darkish smoke oozes by means of the thatched roof,” the timbre itself oozing within the notes by means of a real life. After which “Dance Music” builds rhythm on the hectic tragedy of a bloodthirsty crowd unaware of the marvel of capturing a unicorn.
There was one encore, Tomás Méndes’ “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” a ballad of a mourning dove which allowed the singer to launch nice keening “Ayayaye’s with a lot gusto, leaping from tenor to a triumphant near-falsetto. Such methods add to his arsenal of storytelling, however by no means intrude together with his fantastically educated musicality.
Pictures: Da Ping Luo
