Slavic Songs Showcase Artistry of Soprano Rodgers

Between appearances as the soloist in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony last week and next with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, British soprano Joan Rodgers made her Los Angeles recital debut on Monday at Gindi Auditorium at the University of Judaism.

She confined herself to repertory in German and Russian, singing works by Schumann, Wolf, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. It was the Slavic songs that showed her voice and artistry to their best advantage.

Rodger’s soprano is dark in timbre, cool, poised, focused as it rises and capable of blossoming in the heights. But it is somewhat marred by a rapid vibrato that becomes pronounced under pressure or when sustained in the upper range.

The seven character vignettes of Mussorgsky’s “Detskaya” (The Nursery), with their shifts in children’s and adult’s voices, allowed her imaginatively and sympathetically to project the composer’s elaborations of childhood events into major dramas.

Similarly, the low-lying tessitura of several songs by Tchaikovsky let her exploit a richly congenial melancholy that deepened into tragedy in “Was I Not a Little Blade of Grass (The Bride’s Lament),” the emotional high point of the program.

Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben” and eight songs from Wolf’s “Italienisches Liederbuch” found her never less than intelligent but not as deeply persuasive.

Throughout, Grant Gershon, assistant conductor of the Philharmonic, provided sensitive collaboration at the keyboard. The program was sponsored by the orchestra’s Chamber Music Society. Rachmaninoff’s “Believe It or Not” was the single encore.