Music Review : Accornero Disappoints at Barnsdall Theatre

To operate an automobile, perform surgery, cut hair, sell houses or serve food to the public, a license is required. To sing a recital of great art songs, all that’s necessary is to find an available stage and get on it.

Something is wrong with this system, as baritone Marc Accornero proved conclusively Saturday night in Barnsdall Gallery Theatre. If singing is like driving, and communicative artistry like delicate surgery, then in this case the car was wrecked and the patient died.

Accornero’s qualifications for his lofty responsibility include linguistic facility, rhythmic accuracy, admirable taste in programming, a reliable memory for words and music and excellent judgment in selecting his accompanist, the always sympathetic John Boyajy.

Otherwise, three Bellini songs, Ravel’s “Don Quichotte a Dulcinee, Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer,” canciones by Ginastera, Guastavino and Obradors, and eight old Spanish songs harmonized by Federico Garcia Lorca were severely compromised by a voice that was throaty, constricted, tremulous and lacking resonance.

The tendency to sing constantly under pitch made particularly painful moments of the “Amen” that closes Ravel’s “Chanson epique” and the sustained “Ah!” that ends Obradors’ “Del cabello mas sutil.”

The last straw was a prosaic, flat-as-a-pancake Serenade from “Don Giovanni.” If the maidservant opened her window to this Don, it would probably be to throw something at him.