A stylish and agile young tenor with a mature sound
January 16, 2008Young tenor Lawrence Brownlee, in his Tuesday Musical Club recital debut on Jan. 15, confirmed his growing reputation as a bel canto opera singer, but some of his best work came in a set of deeply sensuous French art songs by Henri Duparc.
According to his own testimony and the evidence of a few discreet coughs, Brownlee was suffering from some sort of upper respiratory distress -- the norm for January in San Antonio -- so an accurate assessment isn’t possible. But there was much to like in his recital, in collaboration with pianist Justina Lee.
In two bel canto showstoppers, Almaviva’s “Cessa di piu resistere” from “The Barber of Seville” and “Ah! Mes amis” from “The Daughter of the Regiment,” Brownlee impressed with his consistently accurate aim and agility. He nailed the repeated high C’s in the latter. He delivered some of the florid ornamentation in the former with click-stop precision, though he wasn’t able to sustain that level of performance all the way through.
Songs by Luciano de Crescenzo and Salvatore Cardillo brought out Brownlee’s natural and idiomatic way with the rhythms of the Italian language.
On Tuesday, Brownlee projected a weighty, somewhat dark sound -- not the classic leggiero of the current bel canto divinity, Juan Diego Florez -- and this timbre gave his voice an attractively mature virility. Brownlee opened up and brightened with overtones at full voice in a noble account of Samuel Taylor-Coleridge’s “Oh Freedom” and in “Phydile,” the last of the Duparc set.
If his performance in those wonderful late-Romantic songs of love and loss was not the last word in refinement or coloristic subtlety, Brownlee richly conveyed the eroticism in the musical lines and the feeling in the texts. His tight vibrato, focused timbre and clean diction admirably suited the style of the music.
