A Jewel Beyond Price
NORDLINGER, JAY
Music A Jewel Beyond Price By Jay Nordlinger When I was a teenager and vulnerable to fashion, I was much taken with Bertolt Brecht's acid observation that those who desire heroes are saps. Now...
...Everyone disdains the bore who says, "You had to have heard so-and-so in the flesh, because the recordings simply don't do him justice," but in Price's case, it is so...
...The buyer knows what he is getting, and the seller never disappoints...
...She ends the printed program with two spirituals...
...First, there is the voice, a mysterious instrument about which rivers of ink have been spilled for almost five decades...
...But actually, an appreciation of heroes is more like a return to the pure and honest beliefs of a child...
...The first half closes with a blockbuster Italian aria...
...Piccolo iddio" from Madama Butterfly (complete with simulated knife-plunge), and "Chi il bel sogno" from La Rondine (showing off on Cs, even at this hour...
...Following is a Mozart aria, cleanly Classical and daringly uncovered...
...It cannot be taught, cannot be earned, can only be saluted when on display...
...Recordings will explain only part of the phenomenon to grandchildren...
...What she has, Kreisler and Beecham and Rubinstein had...
...Now that I have put off childish things, I see Brecht for what he was, and that heroes, like ideals, have their place...
...He wasn't bad, either...
...And second, there is the woman herself, whose character seems inseparable from her musicianship...
...The encores are plentiful: Puccini's "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca, "Tu...
...A Price recital is a strange mixture of prima-donna-fest and church service, with no small amount of personal idolatry thrown in...
...Once when she was singing this latter, I could have sworn she looked dead into my eyes on the line, "Now, come on, sinner: Don't you be late...
...Mickey Lolich...
...And in an age that prizes unpredictability and change, they are always, dependably, the same, these recitals...
...The first may be "Witness," "My Soul is Anchored in the Lord," or "Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit...
...That this is often said-a hackneyed belief-makes it no less true...
...These recitals have made for 16 or so well-spent hours, and anyone who has attended just one of them can say why...
...The other was Leontyne Price, the soprano...
...the spiritual "This Little Light o' Mine" (which she announces was her mother's favorite...
...And Leontyne Price, against the leveling tendencies of an unheroic age, is a giant...
...It is often said that a recital with her is a religious experience...
...But she appears genuinely humble and grateful, and when she says, as she does, "I love you," it is not in the air-kissy manner of the socialite, but with the sincerity of the devout and serene...
...There is Gershwin's "Summertime" (Porgy and Bess...
...As someone remarked to Schubert, 'Take me to your lieder,'" Tom Lehrer once quipped...
...I said earlier that, in rejecting Brechtian cynicism, I had put off childish things...
...Then she opens the program with something Baroque (normally Handel or Bach...
...There is such a thing as a performing genius-different from a creative genius-and Price clearly is one...
...The second is almost always "Ride On, King Jesus...
...She enters ready for business- all gown and smile and diva regality-and feigns astonishment at the frenzied adulation of the audience...
...She returns, to even more ecstatic applause, for a French set: Faur?, Poulenc, conservatory chestnuts like "Ch?re nuit," all delivered with unmannered refinement and Gallic cool...
...In my boyhood, there were many heroes, but two who towered...
...Price is every inch the opera star (and why shouldn't she be, given that she has caused all of the fabled houses to kneel at her feet...
...This may well be Verdi's "Pace, Pace" from La Forza del Destino, whose concluding maledictions-ferociously hurled by one of history's most convincing Leonoras-leave the fans numb and amazed as they head for the lobby...
...he went on to run a doughnut shop north of the city...
...and Cilea's "Io son l'umile ancella" from Adriana Lecouvreur (whose final A-flat can be floated forever, even as you start back to the wings with a little valedictory wave of the hand...
...I think about her a lot, and the other week I heard my eighth Price recital...
...Then you have the American group, in which she honors and gives a leg up to her friends: Samuel Barber (no longer in need of promotion), Ned Rorem (ditto- he does enough of it himself), Lee Hoiby, Margaret Bonds, and others...
...One wonders, fretfully, how long she will go on...
...She is only two years younger than Bob Dole, and you are not supposed to be able to sing for as long as you can run for president...
...It does not alter, and that is the glory of it...
...One was Mickey Lolich, the portly pitcher for the Detroit Tigers...
...Next comes the lieder set-some combination of Joseph Marx, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss...
...I don't think of the Mick much anymore...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 27
