Heggie premiere caps impressive recital by London laureate Moore
Charitable foundations are often family affairs, and the George and Nora London Foundation, which assists aspiring opera singers, is no exception. But the Foundation’s presentation of mezzo-soprano Megan Moore and pianist Francesco Barfoed in recital at the Morgan Library Sunday afternoon had a truly novel family angle.
Crossing Borders, a compelling new song cycle by Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, based on the wartime diary of the teenaged Nora London herself, received its world premiere in Sunday’s concert.
The renowned bass-baritone George London established the Foundation in 1971, and following his death in 1985 his widow Nora presided over it for decades. Only at her own death in 2022, at age 98, was it discovered that she had kept a diary as a Jewish refugee, whose family fled Paris for Portugal (and eventually the U.S.) just steps ahead of Nazi troops.
The Foundation commissioned Heggie and Scheer–whose collaborations include Moby-Dick, currently running at the Met–to create the work from excerpts of young Nora’s diary, and selected Moore, a 2022 London Foundation Competition winner, to introduce it to the world.
By the time the new work was unveiled at the end of Sunday’s program, Moore had shown herself to be an artist of exceptional command and intelligence, able to communicate the essence of a text and its emotional undercurrents without mugging or excessive gesticulation.
She was aided in this by the fertile imagination of pianist Barfoed, whose characterizations of each song created a world of imagery for Moore’s shaping of the texts to exist in. The poise and subtlety of her singing was made possible, at least in part, by having been relieved of the burden of generating the entire affect of the song by herself.
The singer’s operatic instrument, with its firm foundation, energized vibrato and occasional flights to a ringing top, stood up easily to the pianist’s most orchestral fortissimos. When she pulled back to soft shadings in straight tone, the effect was ravishing—not for its own sake, but for its illumination of the text.
Before the new piece’s premiere, Nora London’s grandson Eric London Wollberg, treasurer of the London Foundation, came onstage to outline her young years and tell how the diary’s discovery among her possessions led to Heggie’s piece. Although the composer couldn’t be present, librettist Scheer stood up to be recognized.
As soon as the performance began, Heggie’s flair for drama was evident, and there was a geographic sweep to the titles of its three songs, “Suitcases (Paris),” “Crossing borders (Lisbon),” and “To My Diary (New York).” But this was a girl’s thoughts, not Aida. In sharply contrasting tempos, the first song evoked the flurry of activity to pack up and leave, but also Nora’s check-ins with herself: “I’m tired….I still love life….I must think about smiling, to give hope to others.”
In the second song, the piano picked out a Jewish-flavored minor-key melody. Long pauses in the music symbolized waiting at borders for permission to continue their journey, as Nora mused, “Where am I going? What’s to become of me?”
In the third song, with Nora safe for the moment in New York, the Jewish melody began to lose its harmonic bearings. Moore as Nora confided to her diary “I have filled your pages with myself” but admitted that “I am searching for my star and I have no direction.” The music swung from desperate fortissimo to desolate pianissimo as she wrestled with a storm of emotions, only to quietly conclude that “It’s enough to write a few sentences.” The work ended in a wordless vocalise, fading to silence. The piece, and the performers’ sensitive rendering of its emotional ins and outs, received a lengthy ovation.
To make a full but compact program without intermission, Heggie’s serious, inward-looking piece was matched with others of a similar disposition, whose humor, if any, tended to be on the ironic side.
Singer and pianist embraced anachronism in the program’s first song, “L’Eraclito amoroso,” a lover’s complaint by the early Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi, with Barfoed bringing a Chopin-like touch to the opening bars and Moore smoothing out the twitchy ornaments and staccato lines. Stylistically correct or not, the performance wove an atmosphere of delicate pathos and, in its own way, it worked.
The program continued with a charming vignette in three songs by Rossini, La Regata Veneziana, in which a girl stood onshore and cheered on her lover as he rowed to victory in the gondola race—thanks, of course, to spotting her in the crowd. The excitement included staccato passages and high notes for the singer and thrashing double notes in the piano as the boat plunged through the water.
Though inspired by the German lieder tradition, Prokofiev was still Prokofiev in Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Op. 27, beginning biting and staccato in “The sun has filled my room” and closing slyly with a mock funeral march in “The grey-eyed king.” In between, Moore sang sustained lines and occasionally rose to a fine high pianissimo in “True tenderness,” “Memory of the sun” and “Greetings.”
Pianist Barfoed reveled in Rachmaninoff’s lush, layered piano style in “The Dream” and “A-oo!” from that composer’s Romances, Op. 38. Undaunted, Moore powered through the thicket of piano notes, matching her partner crescendo for crescendo in these rhapsodic settings.
The ironic humor of the piano in “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht,” the first song of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, was matched by the singer’s low growl and non-vibrato whine. In contrast, both performers skipped and gamboled brilliantly through “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld,” only to hit the poem’s wall of disappointment at the end.
The singer rode the piano’s angry waves in “Ich hab’ ein Glühend Messer,” but told a more complex story in “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz,” transfixing the listener with her low, clear delivery and sustained line. The pianist set the scene with a persistent slow march rhythm and harmony that stayed somber even when the key changed from minor to major.
Thus trouble and bitterness in the adult world echoed in the mind as a child sought answers in the next piece, Heggie’s Crossing Borders.
The warm response to that work prompted a single encore, a surging, robust rendition of “Var det en dröm” by Sibelius.
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