UK audiences have heard too little of the Memphis-born soprano Melody Moore since a couple of appearances at English National Opera a decade or so ago. Her career rocketed in 2012 after she replaced Angela Gheorghiu as Tosca halfway through a performance in San Francisco. Since then, she has sung an eclectic repertoire all over North America, and is now leaning towards more dramatic roles: she sings her first Elektra this autumn. This recording is a calling card for a genuinely exciting and electric voice, solidly gleaming, with the high range of a soprano but fleshed out with dark, mezzo-ish colours and with its voluptuous richness focused into singing of striking directness and clarity.
She begins with Samuel Barber’s 1953 Hermit Songs, setting 10 poems written by Irish monks between the eighth and 13th centuries, whose concerns are sometimes spiritual, sometimes delightfully less so. In The Heavenly Banquet, as the piano dances a little clumsily sometimes in front, sometimes behind the singer, the monk imagines the “great lake of beer” to which he would treat his distinguished guests, should Jesus ever come to stay. Then it’s straight into a so-nearly-bleak evocation of The Crucifixion; yet there is consolation here as everywhere in these songs, especially in the capsule of contentment that is The Monk and His Cat, where Moore’s voice has just enough of a smile in it, and pianist Bradley Moore turns out the little miaows of the industrious mouser with understated charm.
The partnership of Moore and Moore (no relation) works beautifully throughout, with voice and piano in constant, easy dialogue. The balance of repertoire is less perfect, as nothing quite matches the pithiness of the Barber. Yet Jake Heggie’s 2018 These Strangers has a timely urgency to its texts that somehow reflects the timelessness of Barber’s monks; it includes a setting of Martin Niemöller’s words I Did Not Speak Out that starts in almost saccharine lightness but darkens before returning to simplicity for the inevitable “then they came for me”. More Heggie, plus Carlisle Floyd’s The Mystery (1960), Copland’s Four Early Songs and some folk song arrangements by Gordon Getty complete this assured and distinctive solo recital debut.
This week’s other picks
Clarinettist Mark van de Wiel pairs a poised live performance of Mozart’s concerto with the 2017 concerto written for him by Joseph Phibbs. Recorded with the Philharmonia and conductor Christopher Warren-Green, it’s an energised and energising work, well worth exploring.
