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However his recital on the Kennedy Heart’s Terrace Theater put Austin the place he belongs, heart stage, with accompanist Howard Watkins. As a map of Austin’s musical journey, the recital moved by spirituals and normal repertoire into Twentieth-century and modern artwork track and opera. It additionally discovered Austin dominating the stage, leaning in opposition to the partitions, decreasing himself to the ground, standing at its edge, palms out and up. He’s a pure performer — a star awaiting a galaxy to type round him.
Austin opened and closed his recital on religious notes — starting with Shawn Okpebholo’s luminously spare association of “Oh, Freedom” and later an encore of Julia Perry’s “I’m a Poor Li’l Orphan in This World,” a low-glowing religious with accompaniment by Watkins as tender as moonlight.
However this system between these bookends proved Austin greater than an thrilling singer — with a burly, burnished tone able to putting nuance and colour. He’s an equally intriguing thinker. Tuesday’s efficiency had the informal self-portraiture of a cabaret, the variability and depth of a strong DJ set and the unabashed anti-fascist spirit of a punk present.
A full of life studying of Ravel’s “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée” put early concentrate on Watkins’s attentive accompaniment — a tremendous match to Austin’s elastic theatricality. This was placed on full show for Klezmer singer and composer Daniel Kahn’s “Embrace the Fascists.” Based mostly on a 1931 poem by Kurt Tucholsky, it’s an acidic, sardonic primer for a way to not deal with Nazis: “You wouldn’t need to begin a combat, for combating is what they do finest. Embrace the fascists and also you’ll be blessed.”
As soon as struck, this foreboding chord resonated the remainder of the evening: A fiery account of the “Ballad of the Simple Life” from Weill and Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” delivered us into intermission, with the identical present’s “Name From the Grave/Dying Message” welcoming us again. Austin sank to the ground and located gorgeous softness and subtlety in its andante.
His voice hovered like a vapor over Ricky Ian Gordon’s setting of Langston Hughes’s “Music for a Darkish Lady,” and I beloved the element and drama he dropped at Gordon’s “Marvin Gaye Songs” — a two-part setting of textual content by poet Vievee Francis, strewn with stray bits of Gaye’s music, lovingly indulged by Watkins.
The 2 made one thing elegant of Robert Owens’s “Mortal Storm,” an aching five-song setting of Hughes. In truth, one might simply think about Austin performing a whole evening of Hughes settings, so naturally suited are the contours of his voice with the shadings of Hughes’s poetry. Together with Perry’s “Orphan,” Austin provided the highly effective parting second encore of Damien Sneed’s “I Dream a World,” a setting of Hughes composed particularly for the baritone in 2021.
It was a efficiency and a program that balanced ease and urgency, the political and the private — utilizing the recital corridor as a stage and the stage as a platform.
The following evening on the Terrace Theater, tenor Johan Hoskins took an equally autobiographical flip along with his Vocal Arts DC recital.
Accompanied with deep sensitivity and masterful contact and timing by pianist William Woodard, Hoskins opened with a set of calisthenic musical portraits by Jake Heggie. “Pleasant Persuasions” is a brief, four-song cycle involved with French composer Francis Poulenc’s coterie of buddies and associates. It was a intelligent opening choice, permitting Hoskins to shape-shift and present the numerous sides of his jeweled tenor — extra usually put in service of the lighthearted lyricism of Rossini or Donizetti.
“You most likely thought you had been going to return right here to chortle,” Hoskins stated from the stage, “however not tonight!”
From there his program — informally titled “Down the Rabbit Gap” — provided what he termed “a religious autobiography” in musical photographs: The blooming of a flower in a dream and the eager for that dream in actuality (Lee Hoiby’s “What If …”); the enjoyment of affection and the fragility of life (Schumann’s “Du bist wie eine Blume” and “Meine Rose”); the anguish of loss (Heggie’s “Ophelia’s Music,” with its devastating chorus: “The spring is arisen and I’m a prisoner there”).
Hoiby’s setting of Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights” (a reference to a celebration section, maybe?) delivered a sudden tonal shock and a showcase of the ability of Hoskins’s instrument, which sometimes graveled out when pushed demandingly low. A lighthearted suite of jaunty Satie items — “Les Trois Melodies” — furnished recent pre-intermission smiles, largely due to Woodard’s eager timing and wit.
We returned to confront a sequence of monsters: These in our creativeness (Hoiby’s “Jabberwocky”), these within the mirror (Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger”) and people who steal our innocence (Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig,” to which Hoskins lent a raw-edge terror).
Nevertheless it was within the ultimate stretch that Hoskins let his voice get snug and reveal itself. A duo of songs about solitude — Samuel Barber’s “Need for Hermitage” and Heggie’s “Pleasure Alone” — prefaced a spectacular account of Benjamin Britten’s “Canticle I: My Beloved Is Mine.” To italicize the love letter to tenor Peter Pears that Britten coded into this Seventeenth-century textual content by Francis Quayle, Hoskins swirled further sweetness into its closing lento. I’d love to listen to Hoskins sing extra Britten — it was electrical and alive, and appeared to coax a depth that was in any other case fleeting.
He ended this system with Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” from “Firm” — an uplifting end that suffered awkward silences from the absence of voices reprimanding the anxious Robert. A pair of encores discovered Hoskins dipping right into a candy spot of his repertoire, a lovingly adorned “Ah! Mes Amis” from Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.” This was adopted by Jack Gold and Marty Paich’s deeply neurotic association of “Jingle Bells?” — appropriately fitted with a query mark for Barbra Streisand’s 1967 “A Christmas Album.”
Like each different track on this system, Hoskins made clear that this one was private.
“You is perhaps tempted to sing alongside,” he stated as a preface with a cheeky smile. “Please don’t. That is my recital, not yours!”
