Founded in 1988 by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, The New York Festival of Song’s concerts, recordings, and commissioned projects embrace the widest range of song, from classical and modern to popular genres. They also have provided a showcase for emerging and established singers alike. The performances gathered for what hopefully will be the first of many volumes in a series exemplify NYFOS’s all-inclusive mission.
The collection’s overall excellence, consistency, and well-contrasted running order makes it difficult to single out highlights. Hearing the dark-hued lyricism of Bernarda Fink’s mezzo-soprano in Fauré’s En Sourdine and baritone Kurt Ollmann’s tart timbre and perfect diction in Chabrier’s scintillating Lied amounts to a pleasant shock.
Émile Paladilhe’s Psyché is a moving reminder of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s gorgeous legato and expressive economy, while she appropriately lightens up for Kurt Weill’s One Life to Live. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke’s impressive agility and sense of projection informs jazz pianist Brad Mehldau’s non-jazzy and serious-minded Love Sublime. And in Frederick Hollander’s Black Market, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey intelligently toes a fine line between lieder and musical theater.
However, the glue that holds everything together rests within pianist Steven Blier’s versatile hands. He is one of the few collaborative pianists (or any kind of pianist, for that matter) who is at home in seemingly every style imaginable. He dispatches the rapid repeated chords in Schubert’s Auf der Bruck with shapely accuracy, brings stylish transparency to the French song accompaniments, and an unambiguously idiomatic sense of swing to jazz numbers like Paul Denniker’s What Harlem Is to Me and Bessie Smith’s It Makes My Love Come Down.
Given the disparate venues from which the recordings stem, the sonics vary from track to track, but that matters little. If you love singers and songs, you’ll want these gems from the NYFOS archives. NYFOS Records can be found by visiting nyfosrecords.limitedrun.com.
