Washington Classical Review

Tenor Ben Bliss and pianist Christopher Allen opened the season for Vocal Arts DC with a recital Sunday afternoon. Photo: Caitlin Oldham

Musicians should take risks, because sometimes the big swing yields a home run. 

Unfortunately, for Ben Bliss’s return to Vocal Arts DC on Sunday evening, what may have seemed like a promising idea on paper turned out to be a series of mostly embarrassing whiffs. 

The American tenor’s Vocal Arts DC debut, back in 2016, ended with a few Broadway pieces, but an entire recital of such lightweight fare fell flat in this scantily attended outing at Live! At 10th & G.

Bliss described the programming concept as a survey of American song, timed to coincide with the country’s semiquincentennial this year. A cabaret opening of strained banter between Bliss and pianist Christopher Allen prefaced songs by Stephen Sondheim and Gene Paul that, while in good hands with Bliss’s comic timing, hardly seemed like the cream of the American songbook. There was plenty more in this vein to come, performed in a cheesy cocktail lounge style.

In between the dreck, Bliss and Allen dotted some worthier selections, beginning with “The Things Our Father Loved” by Charles Ives, which Bliss gave a tender nostalgic air as he sang of the patriotic fervor of a past age. Another American original, the neo-romantic composer Lowell Liebermann, lent a roiling sweep to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Arrow and the Song,” in which Allen matched Bliss in fervent power. Samuel Barber’s excellent song “Nocturne” gave the heroic side of Bliss’s tenor some room to stretch as well.

The best discovery of the evening was two unpublished songs on e.e. cummings poems by John Gruen, who followed his early forays in song composition with a career as an art and music critic in New York. Bliss obtained the scores from the late composer’s daughter, and they are whimsical, stylistically chimerical, and definitely worth knowing. Bliss and Allen unraveled the jumbled phrases of “Lady will you come with me into” with wry restraint.

In the second half, the performers found popular selections that stood up better to scrutiny, starting with “Lonely House” from Kurt Weill’s American classic, Street Scene. A chromatic ostinato in Allen’s left hand evoked the nocturnal melancholy of the text, and Bliss found an astonishing range of delicate vocal sounds, including a dulcet head voice. Songs that featured the subtle side of Bliss’s voice, like “Where or When” by Richard Rogers and “One for My Baby” by Harold Arlen, worked best.

Bliss seriously misjudged the proclivities of the usual Vocal Arts DC faithful, judging by the number of empty seats in the small hall. The self-indulgent missteps were numerous, from a Simon & Garfunkel cover and a Ray Charles tribute that bordered on cringeworthy, to mediocre Leonard Bernstein (with significant memory slips) and Noël Coward (not even American), and yet more Sondheim. Ending with Philip Glass’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” a repetitive accompaniment to the spoken recitation of a long, rambling poem by Allen Ginsberg, defied explanation.

Even odder perhaps to end an American program with Liszt’s “Pace non trovo” as an encore, but the evening had already been a string of incongruities. Bliss’s voice—by that point worn out from the effects of some congestion, according to the tenor—sounded strained by the unnecessary extra.

Tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Ken Noda perform Schubert’s Schwanengesang and selected Italian art songs 7 p.m. November 9 at La Maison Française. vocalartsdc.org