American Songbook
February 15, 2005
MUSIC REVIEW | REBECCA LUKER
Songs With a Highish Brow
Find a Sympathetic Voice
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
With a lustrous soprano that sheds late-afternoon sunlight on everything she sings, Rebecca Luker is one of the best friends a certain kind of theater composer could hope to have. With enunciation that's precise but not prissy, and
a warm but never mawkish emotional presence, Ms. Luker is ideally matched to what has been called the New Art Song, a semipopular, semiclassical genre inspired in part by Stephen Sondheim's impressionistic music for "Sunday in the Park With George." But like that of many of the songs in that genre, herimpeccable craft often suppresses defining personality.
Performing 20 songs developed by contributors to the New Voices Collective, a group that presents new theater music at the Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, Ms. Luker's concert on Saturday at the Allen Room of Frederick P. Rose Hall, came as close to highbrow as Lincoln Center's pop-oriented American Songbook, series can get without sneaking over the line.
Resplendent in a black gown, her blond hair tumbling to her shoulders, Ms. Luker made a glamorous muse who suggested a combination of Renée Fleming and Diane Sawyer. Her accompaniment - by Joseph Thalken on piano and Dorothy Lawson on cello, with Ed Matthew filling in sparingly on clarinet and saxophone - had the decorum of a classical recital. The absence of drums, keyboard and bass and electric guitar signaled that this was a rarefied genre: salon music, often overly refined and lacking in humor and spontaneity, composed for boutique shows
with no aspirations to follow contemporary Broadway's lunge into karaoke hell.
In committing herself to new music by mostly younger composers, Ms. Luker is following in the footsteps of Audra
McDonald, whose first Nonesuch album, "Way Back to Paradise," put this hothouse genre on the map and established Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael John LaChiusa as its marquee names.
Although it's impossible after one listen to offer more than a superficial assessment of individual selections in a concert of carefully chiseled songs, here is a short list of my spur-of-the-moment favorites:
"Ohio 1904," by Paul Loesel and Scott Burkell, an arching ballad sung by a small-town girl observing the Wright Brothers;
Jeff Blumenkranz's "Moving Right Along," the show's peppiest number, in which Ms. Luker and her singing guest,
Sally Wilfert, scrutinized and dismissed the men in a singles bar with witty one-liners;
"Love Is Not All," Mr. Blumenkranz's sad, stately setting of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a favorite poet of New Art Song composers;
and Mr. Thalken's and Barry Kleinbort's ballad "Time," which ended the concert.
Find a Sympathetic Voice
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
With a lustrous soprano that sheds late-afternoon sunlight on everything she sings, Rebecca Luker is one of the best friends a certain kind of theater composer could hope to have. With enunciation that's precise but not prissy, and
a warm but never mawkish emotional presence, Ms. Luker is ideally matched to what has been called the New Art Song, a semipopular, semiclassical genre inspired in part by Stephen Sondheim's impressionistic music for "Sunday in the Park With George." But like that of many of the songs in that genre, herimpeccable craft often suppresses defining personality.
Performing 20 songs developed by contributors to the New Voices Collective, a group that presents new theater music at the Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, Ms. Luker's concert on Saturday at the Allen Room of Frederick P. Rose Hall, came as close to highbrow as Lincoln Center's pop-oriented American Songbook, series can get without sneaking over the line.
Resplendent in a black gown, her blond hair tumbling to her shoulders, Ms. Luker made a glamorous muse who suggested a combination of Renée Fleming and Diane Sawyer. Her accompaniment - by Joseph Thalken on piano and Dorothy Lawson on cello, with Ed Matthew filling in sparingly on clarinet and saxophone - had the decorum of a classical recital. The absence of drums, keyboard and bass and electric guitar signaled that this was a rarefied genre: salon music, often overly refined and lacking in humor and spontaneity, composed for boutique shows
with no aspirations to follow contemporary Broadway's lunge into karaoke hell.
In committing herself to new music by mostly younger composers, Ms. Luker is following in the footsteps of Audra
McDonald, whose first Nonesuch album, "Way Back to Paradise," put this hothouse genre on the map and established Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael John LaChiusa as its marquee names.
Although it's impossible after one listen to offer more than a superficial assessment of individual selections in a concert of carefully chiseled songs, here is a short list of my spur-of-the-moment favorites:
"Ohio 1904," by Paul Loesel and Scott Burkell, an arching ballad sung by a small-town girl observing the Wright Brothers;
Jeff Blumenkranz's "Moving Right Along," the show's peppiest number, in which Ms. Luker and her singing guest,
Sally Wilfert, scrutinized and dismissed the men in a singles bar with witty one-liners;
"Love Is Not All," Mr. Blumenkranz's sad, stately setting of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a favorite poet of New Art Song composers;
and Mr. Thalken's and Barry Kleinbort's ballad "Time," which ended the concert.
