From Russia to Riverside Drive:
Rachmaninoff & Friends

Concert

This concert, performed in one well swoop without intermission, was a delightful sandwich with romantic Rachmaninoff songs enclosing a group of more popular songs inspired by or related to Rachmaninoff in some way.

Apparently, Rach, as NYFOS music director Steven Blier fondly referred to him in his animated accompanying commentary, never composed a song after he arrived in the United States. He had composed many in Russia, and in Russian, and one imagines that the great composer simply did not feel he could be inspired to do that in his new venue.

This program ingeniously offered, then, in addition to the trove of Rachmaninoff songs themselves, a lovely tribute to that space left by what Rach was not inspired to compose and filled it with additional wonderful tunes that he might have heard and found inspirational in another way.

One thing I learned from Blier’s knowledgeable but spicy commentary was that Rachmaninoff was in the audience the night in 1924 that George Gershwin, with The Paul Whiteman Band, premiered Rhapsody in Blue in New York. In lieu of performing all of Rhapsody in Blue, NYFOS included here Gershwin’s more compact Little Jazz Bird.

The Rachmaninoff songs themselves are devastatingly romantic – richly embroidered and full of subtle quotations and suggestions layered into thick swaths of color and feeling. In his commentaries on each one, Blier gave a sense of the particular texture evoked, adding considerably to the appreciation of their unique traits.

I was looking forward to the Rachmaninoff song Were You Hiccupping, Natasha? strictly on the basis of the title and learned, again from Blier’s commentary, that it was the only funny song that Rachmaninoff composed. It was pretty funny, included actual hiccups, and featured an especially significant one at the end.

The final Vocalise, arranged by Blier, featured the full cast of participants in a fabulous give and take of all voices, sung, keyed, and zapped. The addition of the theremin to the mix throughout the concert was an inspired idea and added an interplanetary dimension to the vision of the Russian steppes, wonderfully weird and ethereally stimulating.

Blier and co-artistic director and pianist Michael Barrett traded off on piano responsibilities while Dina Kuznetsova, soprano, and Shea Owens, baritone, sashayed on and off the stage in alternating numbers. Both Kuznetsova and Owens have, in addition to great voices, real style and panache, and they gave, with their simple but elegant flourishes, a subtle drama to the event.

Dalit Warshaw got a lot of musicality out of that very first of the electronic instruments, the theremin. I don’t know much about the virtuoso theremin, but Warshaw drew a lot of eerie but quite carefully executed melody out of hers.

To watch Blier and Barrett, both masterful pianists, work together is both touching and inspiring. They have produced the New York Festival of Song for twenty-eight years and the vital spirit and warmth of their collaboration is evident throughout.

After a rousing and enthusiastic standing ovation, the entire gang played Blier’s arrangement of the 1945 tune Full Moon and Empty Arms by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman, based on Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. It was, along with the rest of the concert, a great feat of musical adventure, with voices, pianos and theremin rising together into the vast vertical heaven of the new, elegant, astonishingly vertical Calderwood Concert Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.

– BADMan