Summery song summary

It's strange to be back in NYC for this short visit after having been away for over two months. The apartment looks so small.

Tomorrow night's recital (tonight , actually) with Reiko should be fun. As I said before, it's an assortment of songs that have been in our rep for the past year or two that we particularly enjoyed and felt like revisiting. There is no overt theme, but there are threads that run through the program and recurring patterns.

The Schubert songs are all kind of wistful, and they share a certain 'motor' quality in the accompaniment--i.e., a simple rhythm that keeps repeating and evolving throughout the song, tempting monotony but never succumbing to it--that always appeals to me. I wondered at one point if I should maybe toss in an angst-ridden song or two to the Schubert group for the sake of variety, but I often find that as both a listener and performer, I enjoy groups of songs more if they're either all happy or all sad or perhaps gradually progress from one to the other. Too much sudden contrast is jarring to me, and the moods can easily bleed over from one song into another, muddying the overall effect. And although Schubert wrote many great songs of unmitigated anguish, the songs that really put a lump in my throat are the ones in which the pain is partially concealed beneath a layer of charm and good cheer. The smiling-through-tears or whatever songs.

The Debussy and Fauré songs are mostly settings of Paul Verlaine, with two of the poems (Mandoline and En sourdine) set by both composers, making for a fun opportunity to compare and contrast: Debussy responds to the texts with extreme detail and specificity. The Fauré settings seem be more about capturing the general mood, but have such stupendously good tunes that they would sound good even played on kazoo.

The American songs...they can speak for themselves. I need to go to bed.