Music Review : Price Carries On Despite Grief at Pianist’s Death

Shouldering her grief in the best professional fashion, soprano Leontyne Price sang a demanding recital as scheduled Saturday at Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts only four days after the unexpected death of her longtime accompanist.

David Garvey, who had served as Price’s exclusive pianist since 1955, died Tuesday of heart failure in New York as he was preparing to accompany the acclaimed soprano to the Southland. Garvey was 72.

The youthful Neal Goren, who has played for Price in master classes but not in recitals, according to a Cerritos official, was drafted for the occasion. No explanation for the change was deemed necessary by management or the singer.

But the depth of Price’s feelings about the situation may have emerged when she appeared genuinely overwhelmed at the words of love called out by well-wishers in the audience between encores.

The collaboration between Price and Goren could not, of course, so quickly achieve the close partnership fashioned over the years between the singer and Garvey. Goren, who must have been under enormous pressure, tended to play hard and fast, though later he allowed more nuance to emerge. With diva generosity, Price acknowledged him after every selection.

Price sang the same program she had sung last April at Ambassador Auditorium, a mix of languages and periods from Baroque to contemporary American and gospel, though she gave fewer encores.

Scooping and swooping into notes bedeviled some of the selections. The extreme low end of the range, drawn upon so frequently in lieder by Joseph Marx, sounded more troubled and unsupported. The coloratura passages in “D’Oreste, d’Ajace” from Mozart’s “Idomeneo” emerged more labored; the tone of “Se pieta di me non senti” from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” more harsh and unfocused.

But these were warm-up exercises. With “Pace, pace mio dio” from Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” Price, 68, found herself back in her distinctive repertory and she sang with full-throated strength and dramatic urgency. The top range still soared; the middle, despite occasional cloudiness in melodies by Poulenc, Duparc and Hahn, sounded rich and secure.

She used her interpretive intelligence cannily in Hoiby’s “The Serpent” and arrestingly in Margaret Bond’s “Minstrel Man.”