Seattle is known for, among other things, a rainy climate and an opera company that habitually presents a work by Wagner during the one gloriously sunny month of August.  Recent summers have included the Seattle Opera’s International Wagner Competition, giving visiting and home-grown Wagnerians another opportunity to feed their passion, particularly in those Augusts when the operatic offering is a single opera rather than a full Ring cycle.   

But this year’s August opera is Verdi’s Aida, which, to a Wagnerian, is not the same thing at all.  The Company needed something to fill out the week for those who were coming to hear the Competition.  Ben Heppner, last heard here as Tristan in 1998, would be a  Competition judge; why not have the heldentenor present a song recital, accompanied on piano by Seattle Opera’s Principal Guest Conductor Ascher Fisch, who conducted the company’s recent productions of Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Der Fliegende Hollander. 

Since song recitals by international stars are rare here in Seattle, I grabbed tickets to this one as soon as I could.  It wasn’t until I was sitting in 2900-seat McCaw Hall to watch Aida  that I started to wonder how this space would adapt for the intimacy of a song recital.  Would they remove the elaborate set pieces, with side walls and ceilings painted like an Egyptian tomb, or would they have the artists perform on the set or even in front of the curtain?  Would they sell the whole house in hopes that Heppner’s large voice and star power would have sufficient presence to satisfy music-lovers in the distant galleries?  And the ruder artistic question: would an active operatic tenor and a conductor with international careers have the time to prepare for the kind of intimate, detailed, expressive collaboration that make for a truly great vocal recital?

So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  What I got was a very interesting demonstration of just how  a recital’s impact depends upon communication between the artists and the audience. 

There were formidable physical obstacles.  While the only occupied seats were on the orchestra level and in the Dress Circle (probably about 1200 in all), the hall itself was still the same size.  The artists performed on a raised platform in the middle of the busily painted Aida set.  I believe they were as close to the front of the stage as they could get, but they were still separated from the first row of seats by the cavernous orchestra pit, putting my fourth-row seat at a noticeable distance from them, and the back of the orchestra even further away.

What Heppner had going for him was his experience as a heldentenor, enabling him to project his voice above a large orchestra to fill a hall this size, so he could certainly be heard over the Steinway grand that Ascher Fisch commanded on this occasion.  But what had to be sacrificed was intimacy.  A very useful distinction, drawn by opera workshop director Richard Crittenden, is that the opera singer projects huge energy out to inspire and move the audience, while the recitalist invites the audience into his or her soul to explore the details of poetry set to music.   What we got was poetry set to music, projected with huge energy to fill the space.

The first half of the program was not too difficult to adapt to this style.  It opened with “Dem Unendlichen,” an operatic-style recitative and praise song written by that most iconic of lieder composers, Franz Schubert.  This was followed by two songs by the über-Romantic Franz Liszt: “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome” and ”O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst!” (better known in its pure piano version as “Liebestraum”).  After a short break, the artists presented Wagner’s best-known set of songs, the Wesendonck Lieder.

I enjoyed this half, although I could not exactly say I was moved by it.  In addition to the physical problems of the hall, Heppner was hindered by his own reliance upon the scores throughout.  I imagine that, in the demands of his career, his time is consumed by travel, rehearsal, and preparation of operatic roles, and for a one-off recital like this one, he just couldn’t take the time to carefully memorize, much less analyze the details of the songs. 

So this half of the program relied for its impact upon Heppner’s world-class voice and the ability that great Wagnerian singers have to shape musical phrases from lines that may or may not be deeply melodic.  In that, we were for the most part not disappointed, although it sounded to me like Heppner was having some trouble in one area of his voice and had to navigate some passages very carefully (temporarily hitting the rocks at one point in the Wagner).  I was also quite pleased with Ascher Fisch’s accompaniment, as he brought a beautiful liquidity to the Liszt in particular.

After a 25-minute intermission, the second half opened with five songs of Henri Duparc, admittedly one of the more Wagnerian of the French mélodie composers, but nevertheless a more intimate set of songs than the German pieces from the first half.  I wouldn’t say that Heppner ever created a magical hush, but there was an audible sigh of satisfaction from the audience after the opening “Soupir”, and  the closing “Phydilé” achieved some softness at the beginning, so there was a noticeable contrast with the concluding verse.

Up until this point the recital had been respectable, if not memorable.  A great professional singer was overcoming the limitations of an unsuitable hall and some amount of vocal difficulty to please an audience with some fine music.  I found it interesting that the final section, which was originally scheduled to be Neapolitan songs, would instead consist of American parlor songs.

The immediately noticeable difference with the opening song (Ernest Charles’s waltz-time “Let My Song Fill Your Heart”) was that Heppner pushed the music stand aside and was no longer relying upon the score, although he continued to wear his reading glasses.  During the applause that followed the song (it seemed totally appropriate, since this was hardly a serious set), Heppner startled us by ripping off his necktie and tossing it into the piano, from which he picked up a microphone and began to tell us personal stories connected with these parlor songs.  They closed with a somewhat jazzy arrangement of Nicholas Brodszky’s “Be My Love”, during which Heppner invited us to applaud Ascher Fisch during a skillfully executed piano interlude, and invitation that the audience enthusiastically accepted.

Suddenly the evening had gone from a respectable but distant performance to a time of good-spirited sharing (including an admission by Hepper that he was getting over a case of “laryngitis”, accounting for the “moment” earlier on).  Would the warmth of the reception overcome the wear on a recovering voice to elicit encores?

Of course it would.  After all, there had to be Wagnerians out there, still yearning.  So we got “Wintersturm” from Die Walkyrie, followed by Walter’s Prize Song from Die Meistersinger, both sung from memory with full operatic presence and vocal ring, followed by Lehar’s “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”.   I thought for sure that would be it, but he surprised me yet again by showing that, indeed, his voice was capable of singing softly and langorously that evening, as he launched into the World War I song “Roses of Picardy”, finally removing his glasses as he began the refrain.  The heldentenor was at last inviting us into his soul.