Countertenor John Holiday is no stranger to operatic stages. Known for the title role in Philip Glass's Akhnaten, which he performed at Los Angeles Opera and Komische Oper Berlin, he's also sung Mozart's Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro at Washington National Opera, and performed in world premieres by Kevin Puts, Luna Pearl Woolf, Matthew Aucoin, and Daniel Bernard Roumain.
On his debut album, Over My Head (Pentatone), Holiday shifts gears to more intimate fare. In the course of 20 tracks, which he recorded with his own piano accompaniment and that of Kevin J. Miller, Holiday reveals his authentic self in this very personal collection of spirituals, classics, and new art songs that offers in his own words, "messages of hope, love, and resilience."
Beginning with Hall Johnson's well-known "I'm Gonter Tell God All O' My Troubles," the recital includes world premiere recordings of three Vocalises by Carlos Simon and five songs by Theo Morrison. It also spotlights a number of Holiday's own arrangements, culminating in a medley of "Over My Head and Amazing Grace."
For the first ten tracks, Holiday sticks to the written score. Exhibiting an innate sympathy for spirituals, he brings a gorgeous voice and fine diction to Johnson's classic sand exults in the melodious beauty of two of Simon's Vocalise. I was less convinced by his performance of Morrison's five settings of poems by James Joyce, in which both he and the composer seem to skim the surface rather than dive deep into Joyce's universe.
Holiday hits his interpretive and vocal stride in three songs from Robert L. Morris's Lyric Suite. He has a ball with the traditional spiritual whose refrain goes, "Do you call that religion? / No, no / Call that religion? / No, no / Call that religion? / No, no / He scandaliz' my name!" He also opens up the full reach of his wide mezzo-soprano range, which occasionally dips into contralto chest voice/male baritone before soaring gloriously into soprano territory.
Holiday is hardly the first singer who, in their own arrangements, sometimes gets so carried away by showcasing their improvisational versatility that the emotional center of songs gets sacrificed. (In the operatic realm, reference the early acoustic recordings of Spanish coloratura Maria Galvany.) I was hard-pressed to hear the spirit in Holiday's do-over of Abel Meeropol's "Strange Fruit," let alone the lullaby at the heart of "Summertime." But, when Holiday settles into H. Leslie Adams's setting of Langston Hughes’s "Prayer," he returns to the essence of belief and pride that makes "Over My Head" such a wonderful album.
