The Globe and Mail, Canada
May 10 2005

Soprano needs to get serious

By KEN WINTERS

Isabel Bayrakdarian, soprano
Serouj Kradjian, piano
at Roy Thomson Hall
in Toronto on Sunday

Sunday afternoon at Roy Thomson Hall, the lovely young
Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian sang songs of Pauline
Viardot (in a svelte golden-apricot gown) and Gioacchino Rossini (in
a low-cut black number with long feathers flaring about the bottom
half of the skirt). In the end, she brought the house down, but,
alas, there are caveats.

Without in any sense wanting to rain on the parade of this glamorous
young star with her already large and adoring public, I feel
nevertheless compelled to say that if she wants to become a deeply
engaging artist as well as a clever and admirable vocalist, she will
have to give more serious consideration to repertoire than she did on
this occasion. To dedicate the entire — and longer — first half of
a recital to songs by the legendary singer but very minor composer
Viardot seems at best an underestimation of what will do.

Viardot was a kind of Maria Callas of the era of Chopin and
Mendelssohn. She was a pupil of Liszt, an enchantress of the vocal
art (greatly admired by Berlioz) and a woman of strong charisma and
rare intelligence. She also composed things for herself to sing and
doubtless justified these as slender diversions in the context of
more substantial programs. They tend to be pretty but derivative and
rather similar, with an emphasis on ornamental roulades flattering to
vocal agility but scarcely enthralling on any other level.

Of the 14 Viardot songs Bayrakdarian chose, by far the best were not
Viardot’s at all, but rather her vocal adaptations of three Chopin
Mazurkas. These three at least had melodic, harmonic and rhythmic
distinction, and gave some sort of closure to the first half of the
recital.

The other 11 conceivably might have fared better in an intimate hall
with Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata of the Aldeburgh connection to
provide the sort of special pleading they would need. But with no
enlightening program notes to help, with Bayrakdarian’s own spoken
comments inaudible past the first six rows of the main floor, and
with Roy Thomson Hall’s cool, distant, vocal-unfriendly acoustics
firmly against them, not to mention the audience’s dogged
determination to clap, however tepidly, after every single song,
Viardot’s morceaux were virtually doomed.

Rossini, after intermission, might have afforded redemption, but the
choices were disappointing. We might have had three gorgeous arias —
say, the beautiful Willow Song from Otello (in which, as it happens,
Viardot made her stage debut in London in 1839), the ravishing Sombre
forêt from Act II of Guillaume Tell, and the aria from Elisabetta,
regina d’ Inghilterra, which Bayrakdarian actually did sing to end
her recital. These, in succession, could have summoned her art from
some deeper reservoir. Instead, we had four trivialities from Les
soirées musicales of which only the last — the catchy La Danza —
made the grade, followed by the just moderately entertaining three
songs of La regatta veneziana.

What redemption there was came in the Queen Elizabeth aria and the
two encores: the song version of Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona’s
masterpiece, Malaguena, and what I took (Bayrakdarian’s
identification of it was, again, inaudible) to be a sad Armenian
song, which she sang exquisitely and touchingly with a whole heart.

She is too greatly gifted and intelligent a singer ever to involve
herself with musical material she cannot sing thus with a whole heart
and a whole mind.

The Canadian-Armenian pianist Serouj Kradjian was her capable and
sensitive partner-accompanist.