A Stylish Soprano for All Seasons

Sylvia McNair has won over the early music crowd and is a particular favorite of John Eliot Gardiner, the popular period instrument conductor. She is, however, equally at home with the more mainstream opera, symphony and song crowd as well. A favorite of the likes of Claudio Abbado and Andre Previn, she is a dream Mozartean and Mahlerian, and ideal for New Year’s Eve Strauss.

And then there are those who find her best in the modern repertory. She appeared at the Hollywood Bowl Wednesday night fresh from a critical success in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” at Santa Fe Opera.

But, let’s face it, McNair is an American soprano born to sing American music, and her real celebrity, which is just beginning, is going to come from doing exactly what she did with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra under John Mauceri in a program that included Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” and a selection of American show tunes.

In the notes to the new Philips CD “Come Rain or Come Shine,” McNair’s jazz collaboration with Previn of songs by Harold Arlen, Previn writes that musicians hate the term “crossover,” since it mostly “evokes visions of opera divas and purely classical instrumentalists, driven by cupidity and venal instinct, venturing into alien territory and, more often than not, making fools of themselves.” But we have seen just the opposite, too, such as when Leontyne Price turned the extraordinary excitement of her voice into invincible soulful utterance in American song.

McNair falls right in the middle of those two worlds. She is not really a pop singer. She cannot completely scale down to the intimate sound of older Broadway tunes and has too much taste to sing the music written for a less-intimate, modern Broadway. But she knows how to use a microphone, and she sings words as clearly and as accurately as she sings pitches and rhythms.

Hence her way with “Knoxville,” Barber’s nostalgic 1948 setting of a passage from James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family,” has some of that vocal thrill found in Price’s classic 1960s recorded account of it, but it also has the advantages of a more understandable text and a more specific dramatization of every moment (although even it may seem a bit too hot for the many who have come to love Dawn Upshaw’s innocent account on her best-selling Nonesuch recording of it).

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The songs in the second half of the program, titled “An American Songbook,” were carefully chosen to include examples from the biggest names of Broadway throughout the century. Beginning with Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein (“One Kiss” from “New Moon”), she worked chronologically through Kern, Victor Herbert, Gershwin, Arlen, Rodgers (both with Hart and Hammerstein) up to Sondheim (ending cleverly with “One More Kiss” from “Follies”).

As a history lesson, this survey proved unrewarding. That is for singers with less operatic voices and slightly more stylistic flexibility than McNair. But holding a hand mike, McNair, nevertheless, proved she knows how to bring a song off in her own way and with authentic show-business ease. She has a great sense of humor, and there were a couple of really wicked numbers, especially in the hilarious Rodgers and Hart “To Keep My Love Alive”--a hundred ways to kill your husband.

But McNair is suited best of all for ballads, where she can let her voice expand to its full range. Whether it was the Kern-Hammerstein “All the Things You Are” or a touching early Sondheim song, “I Remember Sky,” McNair seemed to find the meaning of words in pure tone with no unnecessary added sentiment.

Mauceri accompanied exuberantly and was in his own element with an effusive performance of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and a couple of Broadway overtures along with the premiere of “Night Waltzes,” a fussy orchestral suite he and David Gursky made from Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra played, as it is supposed to with this repertory, with seeming ease.