(Dear Reader: If you’re looking specifically for a review of Anika Kildegaard’s musically extraordinary, theatrically baffling program at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, jump directly to paragraph five. Otherwise, please indulge me briefly in some personal context.) 

Growing up in Los Angeles in the days before there was a home-based opera company, my chief exposure to classical singers in live performance came through recitals. It’s a form I loved then, and I love it now—so intimate, so focused, so minimalist. I connected to the structure from the start and never thought much about it. But I have a powerful memory of taking a good friend to his first recital that made me think about it anew.

The singer was Renata Scotto, and the venue the now long gone and mourned Ambassador Auditorium. My friend, like me, had largely come to appreciate classical music through records, and had become something of a Scotto fan (as I was—and am). Her singing that night was superb.

But my friend was bewildered by the oddness of the form—breaking the program into short bits, with singer and pianist leaving and coming back at regular intervals. At each re-entrance, Scotto adorably feigned grateful surprise, as if she expected the house to have emptied in the minutes she was gone. She wore two contrasting gowns, each of which seemed to get its own rounds of appreciative applause. (From then on, I concluded that a “two dress recital” was the mark of a particular kind of event.)

Anyway, my point here is mostly that if you haven’t ever seen a vocal recital, it’s a pretty strange kind of theater.

I wonder what my friend would have made of Anika Kildegard and Daniel Schreiner’s program, which seemed simultaneously to satirize the conventions of the form, and to take them deeply seriously. 

The seriousness was very much in the musical programming, which was about as intellectually rigorous and demanding as you can get. It began with a hauntingly lovely Arne Dorumsgaard arrangement of a Renaissance song by Spanish composer Juan de Anchieta.

But this served mostly as a frame, and quite deliberately different from what followed. From there, the focus was three composers: Olivier Messiaen, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Claude Debussy. If this seems predominantly French (Messiaen and Debussy, of course), the general mood felt more exotically Southern hemisphere.

Texts were particularly multi-cultural: French for Debussy, of course, and for some of the Messiaen. But the latter’s songs also set lyrics in Quechua (a South American language) as well as some invented “sound-words.” Frank also sets Quechua texts, along with Spanish, which predominates.

During the concert and since, I’ve pored over the texts, looking for unifying themes. A key ingredient is emotionality—different as the poems are, they dwell in vivid, openly “felt” experiences – love (often frustrated) and nature central among them. Elemental images of shadow, blood, stars, birdsongs and similar abound. And love, of course—in various moods.

The program was clearly assembled to showcase these two prodigiously gifted artists. Schreiner’s pianism was ideally supportive throughout, and sensationally fiery when needed (especially in the fiendishly difficult Messiaen songs that call for real virtuosity).

Kildegaard’s career includes affiliation with The Crossing, the Philadelphia based (and internationally-celebrated) choral group, but she is equally prominent as a solo and chamber artist. She has the near-perfect pitching and ease at navigating difficult musical intervals that we associate with an interpreter of modern music, but her soprano also has real tonal beauty and amplitude—less common in this repertoire, but certainly welcome! 

It’s a voice for “classical” music—rich in color and evenly produced from top to bottom. I can imagine her in more conventional repertoire: Handel or Bach oratorios, for example, or in Lieder by Schubert or Mahler. But it doesn’t sound to me like an “operatic” voice—vibrato is very light, and there’s a plaintive, almost folk-like timbre at times, which ideally suits her repertoire here.

She was at her best in the most angular and dramatic of the Messiaen and Frank songs, some of which include passages that are more declaimed than sung. She acquitted herself well in the Debussy, but here I missed a more classically silvery–and centrally French– style. Heard here, the Debussy material impressed mostly for its modernity, seeming very much in the line that leads to Messiaen and Frank.

In all, in musical terms this was a highly ambitious, intellectually rigorous, superbly delivered recital.

Normally, I would stop there—or maybe, given Parterre’s, um, bent—with a brief description of the gown(s) involved. But this recital needs more, because (to my mind inexplicably) it seems to have been conceived as some kind of theater piece.

So even before it began, we had a tableau that found Schreiner seated at the piano… wearing a bathrobe. Kildegaard had some kind of bed jacket on over what did ultimately turn out to be a gown (sparkly green, lovely). She was seated on the side of the stage in some vignette meant (I think) to suggest a living room. Soprano and pianist would look at each other across the space, often smiling as if sharing a secret reaction.

Once the music began, bathrobes were shed, and for the most part Kildegaard stood by the piano in the familiar way singers in recitals almost always do. At least once, though, she returned to the “living room” chair to sing. 

What any of this was supposed to add is a mystery to me. I found it annoying and distracting—the most so because the music-making was so fine. It’s that—rather than the silly and pretentious frame—that I’ll remember with pleasure.