MUSIC REVIEW : ‘Bel Canto’ Opens Bing Concert Season

Restraint governed both repertory and presentation of “The American Bel Canto,” a program given on Wednesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Alan Feinberg, opening a new season of Bing Concerts at the Museum.

Neither Feinberg’s atmospheric underpinnings nor Narucki’s sweet, accurately tuned vocalism could enliven a quartet of well-behaved songs by Amy Beach, but the duo did project the moodiness and harmonic daring of the superior ensuing group by the undervalued Afro-American composer Henry Burleigh (1866-1949).

In keeping with the “Bel Canto” theme, the program avoided any futuristic manifestations of American art-song, the partial exception being John Cage’s wordless “A Flower,” its poignant vocal line pointlessly undermined by an accompaniment not on the piano’s keys but on its wooden appurtenances.

Not coincidentally, there was much to admire in another vocalise, Duke Ellington’s “T.G.T.T” (no explanation of the title was offered), where Narucki’s otherwise often faintly articulated consonants were not a factor.

Successful, too, were the pair’s elegant delivery of a Gallically sensuous Loeffler group, a rapt presentation of Ives’ crushing “Like a Sick Eagle,” and Ellington’s sinuously bluesy “Prelude to a Kiss.”

Rhythmic and verbal bite were, again, lacking in Narucki’s delivery of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s arrangement of “Gambler’s Blues,” while the menacing undercurrents of Griffes’ “The Rose of Night,” powerfully suggested in the piano, were sanitized by the singer’s unruffled presentation.