There was an overflow of happy audience members on Sunday afternoon, June 29, in the living room of The Forte House in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district. That’s where composer JJ Hollingsworth, who owns the property with her husband, inaugurated a series of house concerts 12 years ago.
Sunday’s program had planned to include the voice and verse of Lisa Delan, but at the last minute, understudy soprano Leslie Katter was asked to sing in place of Delan, who was in attendance but dealing with persistent health problems. Katter was joined on the found stage by pianist Kevin Korth and David Barnett on clarinet and recorders.
Delan, a published poet as well as soprano, supplied her “Unlocked” as the text for a setting by composer Jake Heggie that involved all three of the performers. Katter, a regular on the Bay Area’s opera and operetta scene, vocalized brightly, her ululating combining with Barnett’s clarinet and Heggie’s lyricism in a manner evocative of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
The world premiere of Hollingsworth’s setting of Delan’s dreamy “3 a.m.” — a work with textual allure and a creative musical conception that’s deserving of an extended lifespan — allowed for a cappella and instrumental-only passages and a delightful variety of expression among the stanzas.
With “Blue-Green Beautiful Chlorine” (aka “Muffin’s Aria”) from William Bolcom’s 2004 opera A Wedding, Katter displayed her skills as a singing actor, and vice versa.
Barnett, featured in a concert at Forte House earlier this year, employed tenor, alto, soprano, and sopranino recorders throughout Gordon Crosse’s Water Music. At times, the differences in pitch and sustain between his instruments and the piano were a bit jarring, but the piece finished with a pleasant hornpipe homage to composer Henry Purcell.
Korth provided virtuosic and ever-attentive accompaniment on four songs by John Ireland, three with texts by Arthur Symons and one by Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Here, Katter displayed good tone and expression in her lower range and a command of dynamics, particularly in the pretty, ingenuous setting of Beddoes.
Composer William Alwyn’s four Seascapes enabled a more effective balance between recorder and piano, at times reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s approach to similar maritime inspirations. Katter’s pacing was engagingly naturalistic, with the poetry of Alwyn’s piece matching Delan’s music-friendly prosody elsewhere on the concert.
Sustained applause at the conclusion of the printed program earned the delightful encore of “The Monk and His Cat” in a little-known setting by Stephen Dodgson. Barnett got giggles by purring on his alto recorder, Korth pounced across the keyboard, and Katter, befitting the subject and her surname, sounded adorably clarion.
