MUSIC REVIEW : A Study in Finesse and Flair

Music lovers of a certain age--my age, for instance--love to look backward. Today’s singers are all right in their limited way, we cluck dismissively, but in our day they had faces.

They also had voices. And they had technique.

We were spoiled. After all, we grew up with. . . .

Fill in the blank.

When it comes to sopranos and the intimate challenge of the song recital, most nostalgia addicts fill the blank with the same name: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Her interpretive mannerisms may have increased as her vocal resources declined, but her sensitivity, her intelligence and her virtuosity remained disarming.

Who can begin to equal her today?

Well, there’s Sylvia McNair.

Monday night, during a most welcome calm after a most horrendous storm, the soprano from Mansfield, Ohio, offered an exquisite, introspective program at Thorne Hall, Occidental College--her first solo recital in the Los Angeles area. The audience was distressingly small, even though regular tickets cost only $15 and students were admitted free. Those who came, however, were generously rewarded.

McNair, now 35, is internationally celebrated in opera and in concert. She has sung twice at the Music Center with our Philharmonic: in 1988 under Christopher Hogwood and in 1990 with Andre Previn. She made an auspicious debut at the Met last season.

If there is any justice in the irrational world of the arts, her next recital hereabouts will attract the masses.

This one can be regarded as a down payment, a blissful preview of coming attractions.

Brilliantly accompanied--also supported, propelled and inspired--by pianist Roger Vignoles, McNair exulted in the complex art of simple portraiture. Her voice is wide-ranging, essentially lyrical, amazingly flexible. It has a silvery sheen at the top, but the slender, perfectly focused tone loses neither vibrancy nor substance as the line descends.

This is a remarkable instrument, to be sure. Even more remarkable, however, is the way McNair uses it. Without resorting to exaggeration, much less distortion, she inflects each phrase with subtle colors and projects the essential moods with canny invention.

She sings prettily but rejects prettiness for its own superficial sake. She even knows how to stand still, how to focus emotion, how to use her face and body to gently reinforce an expressive point.

She opened the program with the poetic dignity of three Purcell songs. Then she explored the wit, whimsy and arching pathos of six Morike Lieder of Hugo Wolf, exerting urgency while steadfastly resisting every temptation to be precious. Her diction turned out to be as lucid, and as idiomatic, in German as it had been in English.

In Richard Strauss’ Ophelia songs, she defined the Shakespearean tragedy with crazed delicacy, and she savored the impact of restraint in three rhapsodic reflections by the same composer.

She devoted the final portion of the program to clever, pleasantly trivial pursuits by Leonard Bernstein--venturing “Somewhere” from “West Side Story” as a potentially mawkish climax. If the songs tended toward archness at one extreme and vulgarity at the other, the elegant performances did not.

Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” was the single, hypnotic encore.

McNair’s recital, not incidentally, represented the official swan song for Phyllis J. Warschaw, the enlightened Occidental impresaria who has served the college with extraordinary distinction for 31 years. It is reassuring to know that she is still booking next season, but sobering to realize that another era is coming to a close.