Speedo Green makes masterful solo debut at Carnegie Hall
Ryan Speedo Green is such a consistent and enjoyable presence on the New York City classical music scene that it was amazing to realize that his Wednesday night performance in Zankel Hall was his first solo engagement at Carnegie. Because the bass-baritone has been nearly ubiquitous at the Met since the 2021-2022 season, this was a welcome chance to hear him sing in much more modest physical and musical dimensions.
Accompanied by what felt like deeply simpatico thinking from pianist Adam Nielsen, Green was excellent. In music by Hugo Wolf, Mussorgsky, Mahler, Wagner, and others, his considerable skills were on display. He has the classic virtues of a big, warm voice, rounded and with a firm core that trades some resonance for a more modern, and pleasing, tactile edge.
That’s the sound, but what makes Green special is the character of his singing. At the Met, he’s like an operatic Gene Hackman, embodying different roles with his voice and manner. In art songs, with no specific personality (but for one exception), this quality was just as strong and rewarding. The music on the first half, Wolf’s Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo and Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, brought the subtle details of his musicality to the front.
His articulation was superb, even without knowing all the languages or following each word in the printed translations. Green always expressed clear ideas within musical lines, that not only was he singing but literally speaking. This is an invaluable quality, and Green is as good as it gets. His phrasing was also integrated into complete breaths and in turn into a great naturalness to the start and finish of each line. This was beautiful and again deeply expressive, cementing how the music was a thoughtful, coherent representation of ideas within the words.
The Wolf songs were graceful, relaxed, a little wistful, and Green proved a great singing actor for Mussorgky’s songs. These little tableaux introduce a narrative and then present death as a character, singing within the story. The drama is right up front, and for these Green was almost understated, which was marvelous. In the introductions, he was poised and slightly aloof, the phrases precise, while as death and the other characters he was mercurial, pushing at his inflections and pulling at his timbre, yet without exaggeration. This was as fine a performance as one has heard in these songs.
Green stepped out to begin the second half with an unaccompanied traditional spiritual, “Deep River.” It opened up the contrast that he and Nielsen, in their introductions from the stage, had described for the program as “death and salvation.” Green pointed out that “Deep River,” and Howard Swanson’s setting of Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were markers of death as salvation in the African-American experience, death being the only freedom from slavery, a way to find peace, if not joy.
Green’s internal character came through in these; this was the singer as himself, channeling the aching complexity of finding some kind of meaning in unfathomable tragedy. He followed “Deep River” with Mahler’s “Urlicht,” a wonderful segue, especially with the luminous sound and gentle hand he had for the music.
The music effectively whipsawed back and forth between possibilities and despair, within pieces and between them. After Mahler, Green sang Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” and this was dry, with vehemence that approached anger. This feeling was at times just above sub rosa in Swanson’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” before Green carefully modulated it through the wrenching complexities of the lines “I’ve known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
He reached into opera for the finale, the Dutchman’s aria “Die Frist ist um,” from Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer. This may have been the most obviously characterful music of the night, but Green sang it less as a character than a man who, having wrestled with death and its meanings all evening, had found his own personal resolution. It was beautiful, stirring, but expressive and believable on a human scale, free of myth and supernatural forces.
Green and Nielsen delivered two encores, one big and one modest, both gorgeous. First was the wonderful “Peculiar Grace,” from Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, in which Green has sung the lead role of Charles at the Met. The other was the song that Green explained he sings to his kids at night, “Edelweiss,” as graceful and meaningful as ever.
Theatre of Voices sing Stockhausen’s Stimmung, 7:30 p.m. February 11. carnegiehall.org
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