The New Criterion – On a recital by the baritone Lucas Meachem for Vocal Arts D.C.
“This art form is dying,” said the Grammy-winning lyric baritone Lucas Meachem at a recital opening the new season of Vocal Arts D.C. (formerly the Vocal Arts Society), an intrepid organization that presents monthly concerts featuring rising soloists in the classical tradition. Washington’s cultural scene has always trailed behind those of other American urban centers, and neither the COVID-19 pandemic nor the capital’s post-2020 crime wave has helped it to thrive. Nevertheless, Meachem’s large and enthusiastic audience at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’s Terrace Theater seemed to contradict him. Indeed, one should bear in mind that Vocal Arts D.C., whose first season thirty-four years ago auspiciously featured a newcomer called Renée Fleming, was founded specifically out of disappointment with the capital’s lack of vocal recitals.
Meachem’s hyperbole is also belied by his work with young artists, such as the meet and greet he generously offered after the conclusion of this recital, which presented a diverse repertoire across five languages. He was joined after the show by his Romanian-born wife Irina, an accomplished vocal coach for opera companies who also accompanied her husband on the piano during his performance, and he exhibited the impressive stage presence he brings to his own frequent engagements in opera.
Reviews do not normally start with appreciations of a recital’s encores, but I will do so here. Meachem was at his vocal and dramatic best in his first return to the stage, singing Figaro’s rollicking cavatina “Largo al factotum,” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Mastering its patter, he added bel canto embellishments and used his voice not merely to deliver the music as written (come scritto, as the Italians say), but also to imbue it with comedic insouciance. The second encore, “Eri tu,” from Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, is a heavier piece, delivered by a character reflecting on what he—wrongly, as it turns out—believes to be his wife’s infidelity with his best friend, who also happens to be his king. Meachem, who is taking on more Verdi roles as he progresses in his career, named it as one of his favorite arias and delivered it credibly, though without the darker timbre of true Verdi baritones.
Most of the announced program was better suited to Meachem’s higher lyric baritone, though opening with Franz Liszt’s Tre Sonetti di Petrarca pushed him into a lush romanticism that came off with less authenticity. Liszt’s compositions are a tough sing even for veteran performers, and Petrarch’s emotionally suffocating and endlessly self-referential verse leaves little wonder why his idealized Laura—unreachable and unresponsive though she may have been—would give him the slip. Ravel’s song cycle “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée” allowed Meachem’s instrument to settle in better form. Ardent and funny by turn—a fine reflection of Cervantes’s contradictory character—these songs remain at least on the fringe of concert repertoire despite being passed over by the Austrian director G. W. Pabst for his 1933 film about the chevalier gallant, which instead featured songs by Jacques Ibert performed by the legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin. Equally well-suited to Meachem’s brighter notes was a triptych of more introspective songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff, which use ample observations of nature as hopeful metaphors for feminine beauty. Meachem’s Russian diction had some flaws, but the notes were round and gracefully delivered.
The program’s highlight by far was Meachem’s moving and insightful performance of Gustav Mahler’s song cycle Kindertotenlieder (1904), whose translated title, “Songs on the Death of Children,” sounds almost comically macabre to the English ear. Moved by the childhood loss of no fewer than eight of his siblings, Mahler selected five poems by the German poet Friedrich Rückert, who meditated on loss and absence after the death of two of his children from scarlet fever. Coincidentally, this was the same illness that killed one of Mahler’s own daughters three years after he finished the songs. Rückert wrote a staggering total of 428 poems on his loss, enough that one could argue he covered it from every possible emotional angle. Paring that corpus down to just five pieces allowed Mahler to compose for maximum effect, reflecting not merely on death and absence, but also on the power of memory and, in the final song “In diesem Wetter,” the possibility of transcendence. The authoritative gravitas of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s enshrined performances of two generations ago sets a high bar, but Meachem’s lighter tones and soaring high notes accentuated Mahler’s themes with a fresh and enjoyable approach.
The announced program concluded with arresting deliveries of William Grant Still’s song “Grief,” another soulful meditation on loss and resurrection, and the traditional “Oh Shenandoah,” a folk song with origins deep in the misty rivers of the colonial American frontier. Omitting its lyrics from the printed concert program may have been a mistake, but in their absence the audience could focus fully on the artist, a native of North Carolina who clearly feels at one with the piece.