ABOUT
Part of San Francisco Performances’ four-part, online series, SANCTUARY, this themed recital spanned four and half centuries of song, meditating on the notion of time and humanity’s relationship to it.
You can view the recital in its entirety at the bottom of this page.
ARTISTS
Nicholas Phan, tenor | Jake Heggie, piano
PROGRAM
I.
CHARLES IVES: Memories A & B
JOHN DOWLAND: Time Stands Still
II.
ERNEST CHAUSSON: Le temps des lilas
LILI BOULANGER: Les lilas qui avaient fleuri from Clairières dans le ciel
GABRIEL FAURÉ: Mandoline
III.
NED ROREM: Early in the Morning
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Silent Noon
IV.
NADIA BOULANGER: Heures ternes
LILI BOULANGER: Attente
HOWARD SWANSON: I Will Lie Down in Autumn
V.
JAKE HEGGIE: By the Spring, At Sunset from Of Laughter and Farewell
JAKE HEGGIE: The Sun Kept Setting from How Well I Knew the Light
VI.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: If it’s Ever Spring Again
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Before Life and After from Winter Words
GERALD FINZI: In years defaced from Till Earth Outwears
VII.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: Some Other Time from On the Town
RECITAL VIDEO
PROGRAM NOTE
All musicians have a special relationship with time. While pitches are what make melodies and harmonies, rhythm is equally foundational for music. When considering how the emotional atmosphere of a song is perceived, melody can steal the focus, but it is the tempo of a song which dictates its mood. A slow, languid pulse creates a sense of melancholy. A quick beat creates a sense of jollity or celebration. A piece of music taken at an unexpected tempo can revolutionize the way we experience a familiar tune. Take, for instance, this video, in which Dolly Parton’s recording of her masterwork, “Jolene”, is slowed down dramatically. It sounds like a completely different piece of music, and it takes on a new haunting character.
Musicians communicate with each other through the language of time. Rhythms are instructions on how to divide time: whole notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes (or quavers, semi-quavers, etc. if you happen to be British). Tempo markings like allegro, grave, lento, vivace, and presto all dictate the pace. One of the great expressive tools of a musician is to play at being Chronos, the personification of time in Greek mythology. Oftentimes, we accelerate in order to create a sense of momentum and excitement, to build to a climax. Other times we slow down. One of the musical descriptions for this is the Italian word, rubato, which is most directly translated as “stolen”. When musicians learn how to do this, we are taught to “take time”: to slow down over a juicy harmonic progression and milk it for all it is worth. “Stealing” time in an effort to savor these moments, we play at being masters of time. Yet even in music, this proves to be a fallacy: in almost every instance of rubato, if the piece is to retain its momentum and life force, what has been taken must be given back. Like the river of time, we may slow down or speed up to create tension and release, but no matter any musician’s efforts, we must continue to flow onward.
Music itself is a time machine, acting as bridge from past to present. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, no composer’s work can be fully realized without a living musician to perform it. Despite the fact that Beethoven, Bach and the Boulanger sisters put pen to paper hundreds of years ago, their creations can never be complete until a musician brings the notes and rhythms they put on the page to life. Musicians are akin to time-travelers, attempting to be a conduit to the past, doing their best to bring the composer’s intentions into the present.
Singers have an added layer to this relationship with time, because our bodies our are instruments. Young opera singers are constantly reminded that their instruments take many years to develop, particularly male voices: most male voices won’t reach the beginning of their prime until their mid-30s. Much less discussed, yet also lurking below the surface of that conversation is the fact that all human voices have an expiration date. As we age and pass the few years of our prime, our voices begin to decline, losing their luster and sheen as our vocal cords thicken with the advancing years. Classically-trained singers spend the early years of their careers impatiently waiting for their voices to mature. In the middle and later years, singers are in a race against time.
With the world locked down for safety, musicians now find themselves with nothing but time on their hands. Banned from our concert halls and opera houses, many of us (American musicians, in particular), have been told we will not be able to perform for live audiences until next year at the earliest. Even that start date remains tentative at best. Not really certain when we will be able to return to the live stage, isolated from our colleagues and audiences, this moment feels endless.
During this pause, I’ve found myself thinking about humanity’s relationship with time. Sometimes it feels fleeting, when the hours rush by and we can never have enough of them in the day. Other times (now), it feels suspended. Some perceive the flow of time cyclically, like the rotation of the seasons. Others as a linear, unstoppable river. We are always physically rooted in the present moment, yet our minds wander forward and backward into the past and the future. How difficult it can be to simply just be here, in the now.
This program is a musical meditation on the current moment, as well as an exploration of these themes, upon which composers and poets have been ruminating for hundreds of years. Because the program was about time, it only felt right to have the repertoire span over four and half centuries: you’ll hear songs ranging from John Dowland, who was born in 1563, to the music of composers writing today, such as my esteemed colleague at the piano, Jake Heggie.
I am very grateful to Melanie Smith and San Francisco Performances for the opportunity to take a bigger step towards approximating the concert hall and present this recital program for you. I am also extraordinarily thankful to Jake Heggie: not only for allowing me to perform his songs, but also his willingness to be my musical and programming partner for this meditation on time in the place where words and music meet.
Also, many thanks to Jake for his virtuosic feat of whistling and playing the piano at the same time in the opening Ives song, since I am one of those unfortunates who simply cannot whistle.
I hope to see you back in the concert hall sooner rather than later, by some miracle. In the meantime, wishing you all the best for good health and safety.
A note: While we are not shown wearing masks in this video, masks were worn at all other times during the filming of this performance.