The legendary Jamaican-born bass Willard White made his New York City Opera breakthrough the year I was born, so he has been around a long time (I am no spring chicken). But any fear that time had diminished his powers was gone within seconds of him starting to sing in his recital last night at Kings Place. Willard White has still got it. But I was less convinced by the playing of the Brodsky Quartet, who have been around for about as long as White, and performed with him regularly for the last 20 years. Their playing, although much more secure in the second half, was quite ragged in the first, with issues of intonation and ensemble.
The programme was a bit odd. In the second half it settled into an enjoyable exploration of the Great American Songbook, but the first included diversions into Schubert and Massenet between the Copland, Gershwin and Barber. Barber’s Dover Beach was probably the highlight of the evening, and perhaps not coincidentally one of only two pieces not heard in arrangement. White’s singing was warm and generous-toned, with a kind of visionary sense and a range of vocal colour. The other original scoring was a revelatory quartet by the 14-year-old Benjamin Britten, Poème, which was questioning, insistent, peculiar and utterly beautiful. It’s an extraordinary piece, played with a winning vulnerability, and I will have to investigate it further.
Elsewhere, the arrangements – mostly by violist Paul Cassidy, with some by cellist Jacqueline Thomas – were inventive, but didn’t always come off. I love Britten’s "The Ash Grove", originally for Peter Pears with Britten on the piano, but here it wobbled, White taking liberties with the rhythms and the quartet struggling to keep up. The selection from Porgy and Bess was better – I was amazed to read that White is still playing Porgy on-stage – but I do find “I got plenty o’ nuttin”, great tune though it is, to be, in the modern parlance, “problematic.”
The second half was better both in terms of programming coherence and performance. The tribute to the Hollywood String Quartet’s collaboration with Frank Sinatra, "Close to You", was glorious, the last few bars of playout so cute it raised a chuckle. White was at home with the storytelling of songs by Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, and the rapport with the string quartet, both in spoken introductions and the songs themselves, was apparent. White finished with "My Way", which he said he had avoided for many years because of its association with Sinatra, but his performance, a million miles from Sinatra stylistically, was powerful in every sense. For all its familiarity, this is a truly great song, and was sung with eloquence here. White opened up in the grand climax and it was very moving, helped by a charming arrangement by Jacqueline Thomas, which started with a nod-and-a-wink quotation from Bach’s Air on the G-string, that now heard seems such an obvious connection.
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