Parlando closes season with a concise cabaret night
Parlando concluded its season with the launch of “The Cabaret Project” at Merkin Hall on Thursday evening. Running less than an hour, the concert showcased works by composers outside the mainstream, featuring colorful orchestrations and an interesting backstory. It proved the kind of imaginative and historically grounded musical experience expected from Ian Niederhoffer, founder and conductor of Parlando.
The story began in the late 1880s in Paris, where cabaret originated. In intimate venues, the audience was entertained with songs, dances, and theatrical bits stitched together by the repartee of a master of ceremonies. It was sophisticated, satirical fare that took jabs at politicians, fashion, and sexual mores. In Germany, censors kept cabaret artists in check until after the First World War, but it flourished in the Weimar Republic until the Nazis came to power in 1933.
The concert began with Trois Petites Pièces Montées by Erik Satie, who, for a time, was a pianist at Chat Noir, the most famous of Parisian cabarets. He composed the suite for piano in 1919, later arranging it for a small orchestra. The three-movement piece, which lasts a few minutes, was inspired by the French Renaissance satirist and writer François Rabelais’s series of novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Niederhoffer painted each movement with deft musical brushstrokes. A light melody introduced the baby giant in “The Infancy of Pantagruel,” who drank the milk of 4,600 cows daily, while the infant’s footsteps were ponderous thuds. The “Cockaigne March” played with bravado by trumpet and oboe summoned guests to a banquet. In “Gargantua’s Games”, the clarinet and bassoon engaged in a lively discourse, which ended with a raucous blat from the trombone, which prompted laughter.
Franz Schreker’s link to cabaret is more tangential. He is one of the composers, primarily Jewish, whose music was suppressed by the Nazis and whom Niederhoffer champions. Schreker died in 1934, and his music largely disappeared as well. Niederhoffer posits that Schreker’s style was carried to America by his contemporaries who fled Nazi persecution and revived in Hollywood film scores. Songs from those films became part of the Great American Songbook, a manifestation of cabaret inseparable from New York cafe society.
Schreker’s Chamber Symphony, composed in 1916 while a professor at the Vienna Music Academy, is his best-known work. The makeup of the faculty dictated the use of a 23-piece orchestra, which includes harp, celesta, harmonium, and piano, and each string player having an individual line.
Niederhoffer emphasized the episodic nature of the piece, which is stitched together by a sprightly motif that courses through it over a shimmer of sound from harp and keyboard instruments. Late German Romantic style, especially that of Korngold and Zemlinsky, adds lushness to the score. Under Niederhoffer’s baton, the surges of sound with the subtle ebbs and flows brought to mind Ravel, as did the Chamber Symphony’s shimmering, transparent concluding measures.
In the late twentieth century, William Bolcom breathed new life into the genre through his Cabaret Songs with lyrics by Arnold Weinstein. Dedicated to his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, the first two volumes were composed from 1977 to 1985, and the third and fourth volumes from 1993 to 1996. Morris and Bolcom performed and recorded all 28 songs.
Measha Brueggergosman-Lee’s link to Bolcom is almost as direct. She performed the composer’s orchestrations of eight Cabaret Songs, which he made specifically for her. Bolcom’s orchestrations are colorful, featuring plenty of brass and percussion. Even in a small venue like Merkin Hall, Brueggergosman-Lee’s voice should have been amplified. Her performance was ebullient, but text and nuance suffered, not to mention full comprehension of her flippant repartee.
The melodrama of songs, however, came through loud and clear. Brueggergosman-Lee injects irony and humor into a song through perfect timing, her rubber face, and the glint in her eyes. In “Song of Mad Max”, she was mysterious and sinewy, while a mix of innuendo and wide-eyed knowingness illuminated small-town sexual shenanigans in “Amor.” “Toothbrush Time” pinpointed the awkwardness of morning rituals performed between lovers who prefer not to share a bathroom in the morning after their evening assignation.
The final song was “George”, the tragic tale of a cross-dressing soprano –“just call me Georgia” – stabbed while singing “Un bel di”. Brueggergosman-Lee kept the camp under wraps, but reveled in the drama, wearing a dress Georgia would have died for.
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