Hankey makes a case for a woman’s “Dichterliebe” in Vocal Arts debut

Wed Jan 15, 2025 at 11:09 am

Samantha Hankey performed a recital with pianist Myra Huang for Vocal Arts DC Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. Photo: Courtney Ruckman/ VADC

Samantha Hankey made a charismatic Washington debut Tuesday night, in a compact recital presented by Vocal Arts DC. The Massachusetts-born mezzo-soprano has been notching acclaimed American performances in recent years, at Santa Fe Opera, among others. Her time in Munich, on a fixed contract with the Bayerische Staatsoper, likely contributed to her excellent German, featured in this program’s centerpiece at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

Men usually sing Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, although the composer did not specify any voice in the score and dedicated the cycle to soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. In the original keys there are top notes that lean these sixteen songs toward a higher voice, either male or female.

Schumann composed these songs in 1840, the same year that he finally succeeded in marrying the young piano virtuoso Clara Wieck. He selected the poems from Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, poetry striking for its bitter, cynical tone, as a young poet finds himself forced to watch his beloved marry another man. Schumann, who had to fight legal cases to overcome the opposition of Clara’s father, could have found himself in the same painful situation.

Hankey did not seek to impress with blistering power and struggled at times in the high range of this cycle, singing it without transpositions from Schumann’s published keys. Yet she made a convincing case for a woman singing Dichterliebe because of her luscious legato tone, which was heard to remarkable effect in the first two songs. This approach, combined with a poet’s care in considering the words and phrasing them with just the right sensibility, created an overwhelming sense of romantic wistfulness.

A male voice can provide more power in some of the angrier songs, especially the growling “Ich grolle nicht” and the rage-filled final song, “Die alten, bösen Lieder.” On the other hand, the sense of Hankey as a sort of teenage Cherubino gave a surprising twist to the quick, short song, “Die Rose, die Lilie,” with its dizzying patter of lovesick words. At times, she carried an operatic sense of acting too far, as when she audibly sobbed in the silences of the postlude to “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet.”

Photo: Courtney Ruckman/ VADC

Fortunately, Hankey’s accompanist, Myra Huang, heightened the story-telling of this interpretation. Schumann gave the piano crucial dramatic contributions in extended preludes and postludes to many of the songs. Huang showed the same sensitivity to the instrumental “text,” dreamily extending the fermatas in “Aus meinen Tränen spriessen,” for example, and adding delicate shadings of touch and rubato, as if giving voice to a musical narration. (Huang also accompanied the last Vocal Arts DC performance of Dichterliebe, with Lawrence Brownlee.)

Schumann personalized the story by opening the first song, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” with a tender piano prelude derived from the slow movement of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. When that music reappeared, somewhat incongruously, in the long postlude to the last song, Huang gave it the sense of relief perhaps intended by Schumann, as if the narrator were waking from a bad dream to the reality that he would indeed be united with his love, Clara, after all.

The program opened with an equally charming rendition of Francis Poulenc’s Trois Chansons de Federico García Lorca, from 1947. Poulenc set the Spanish poet’s surrealist poetry, about a child searching for its voice or an orange tree begging to be cut down because it cannot produce fruit, to a startling range of musical styles, from flamenco guitar strumming to intense dissonance. Hankey and Huang drew out these songs evocatively, in all their exquisite weirdness.

The second half of this short program (less than 80 minutes) felt comparatively lightweight. Huang had fun with the calliope-like accompaniment of Erik Satie’s “La Diva de l’Empire,” which set the tone for a series of mostly insubstantial songs, recalling operetta and music theater. The one surprise of the evening was “Gigerlette,” from Brettl-Lieder, an unexpected foray into cabaret songs by the young Arnold Schoenberg.

Charles Trenet’s vivacious popular song “Boum!” led naturally into two Kurt Weill songs, “Speak Low” (from his Broadway musical One Touch of Venus) and “Youkali,” all evoking elements of jazz or tango. Cole Porter’s “So in Love,” from the musical Kiss Me, Kate, felt like a showy encore, but fortunately Hankey had one more trick up her sleeve. Her fetching rendition of “Près des remparts de Séville” from Carmen offered a preview of her role debut in that opera, planned for Tokyo this season.

Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and pianist John Churchwell will perform for Vocal Arts 7:30 p.m. February 20 in a program featuring Schumann’s second Liederkreis. vocalartsdc.org


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