Few singers have devoted as much time to American art-song as the baritone Thomas Hampson. So it was natural for him to devise the "Song of America Project" in partnership with the Library of Congress, which possesses
the largest collection of songs made in the U.S.A. (and the colonies before it).Hampson now is touring with the project’s second recital program, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the first art-song known to be written in this country: “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free,” written in 1759 to a text of Thomas Parnell by Francis Hopkinson, a merchant-turned-lawyer who as a delegate from New Jersey would be among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The tune, in the Anglo-American song style that nourished the shape-note singing tradition and lives on in Protestant hymnody, opened Hampson’s program. It was neatly framed by his encore piece, the less venerable folk song “Shenandoah.”
Between the two, Hampson ranged from a relatively obscure bit of Stephen Foster, “Open Thy Lattice, Love,” through pieces by the late 19th-century composers Edward MacDowell, Amy Beach and Arthur Farwell to songs of the modern masters Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson and the still-living Michael Daugherty. None of this music, other than “Shenandoah,” is familiar to most listeners – although some texts, such as “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” (Vachel Lindsay’s ode to the founder of the Salvation Army, set to music by Sidney Homer) and William Blake’s “The Tyger” (set by Thomson), resonate from literature classes long ago.
The program leaned decidedly toward a declamatory, going on exclamatory, style of delivery, the musical equivalent of stem-winding political oratory and evangelical sermonizing, with some well-lubricated stag-night storytelling on the side. Hampson, who boasts a big voice (even for an operatic baritone) and effortlessly exudes a hail-fellow-well-met vibe, used both to winning effect in Copland’s “The Dodger,” Charles Ives’ “Circus Band” and “Charlie Rutlage,” and Walter Damrosch’s setting of Rudyard Kipling’s “Danny Deever.”
Less expected, and more gratifying for it, were the singer’s subdued passion and dreaminess in more lyrical and impressionistic pieces, notably the Foster song, Beach’s “Twilight,” Jean Berger’s setting of Langston Hughes’ “Lonely People” and Charles Naginski’s setting of Walt Whitman’s “Look Down, Fair Moon.”
The program’s most pleasing surprises were “Blue Mountain Ballads,” Paul Bowles’ settings of four verses by Tennessee Williams, and Daugherty’s “Letter to Mrs. Bixby,” which transforms Abraham Lincoln’s letter to the mother of five sons killed in the Civil War into something akin to a Kaddish prayer.
Pianist Wolfram Rieger gave Hampson accompaniment that was both spirited and sensitive.
Thomas Hampson will conduct a master class for University of Richmond students, open free to the public, at 11 a.m. Oct. 22 at UR’s Modlin Arts Center. Details: (804) 289-8980.