Recital Review: Erin Morley at the Yale School of Music
Erin Morley (Chris Gonz)
It is true that it is most often the coloratura voice that composers call on to capture birdsong, but even among the dazzling crop of coloratura sopranos that opera lovers these days enjoy — to take just a few, Sabine Devieilhe, Pretty Yende, and Kathryn Lewek —, it feels unusually perfectly natural that Erin Morley’s first solo album, Rose in Bloom, should be nature-themed. She commands great versatility with her crystal-crisp voice, which sometimes resembles a richly filigreed silver flute, other times the ethereal otherworldliness of a glass harmonica. The latter led me to picture her singing the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor as both soprano and accompaniment.
As her pianist and close collaborator is none other than Gerald Martin Moore, the director of the Yale Opera, and her husband, John Morley, is a professor at Yale Law, it was a happy inevitability that one of the stops on her album recital tour should be at the Yale School of Music. The Morse Recital Hall, where she sang, is charming and unostentatious — if you wish me to describe it as demure, you will have to put up with an eyeroll from me.
Erin (Chris Gonz)
Beginning with Rachmaninoff’s “Lilacs” and intensifying with Saint-Saëns’s “La Libellule,” both of which feature piercingly high climaxes, I got the feeling that, were I to hold a wineglass up in the air, it would soon shower the audience with its shards. The light fixtures were encrusted with gold rather than crystal, and though I cannot say whether this choice was deliberately made to avoid glass accidents, I think it was a wise one. Every time Erin sang one of her electric high notes, I could sense the sound humming and crackling about my ears. My jaw dropped open multiple times. She is the lark, I thought, listening. She is the nightingale. Were she to stand in a forest and sing a few notes of Saint-Saëns’ wordless “Le Rossignol et la Rose,” how many birds would call back to her?
The centerpiece and impetus of Rose in Bloom is Ricky Ian Gordon’s Huit Chansons de Fleurs, which Erin world-premiered this year. Unusually for any art collection, it includes works by two spouses. Jane Kenyon wrote the poem “Peonies at Dusk” while dying of cancer, as Erin explained from the stage, and Donald Hall wrote “Her Garden” while dealing with her death. (It must have taken some chutzpah for Gordon to set the words “let it go, let it go” to music after 2013’s monster hit with the same lyrics.) “Her Garden” moved me enough to earn a place as my favorite of the Huit Chansons, although in terms of lyrics, nothing topped Dorothy Parker’s deliciously snippy “One Perfect Rose,” in which she upends romantic notions of flowers by asking, “Why is it no one ever sent me yet/One perfect limousine, do you suppose?” Only five of Gordon’s eight songs were on the program, I imagine to both send listeners to the album for more and to make space for other nature-related songs that didn’t make it into the recording, including Bizet’s utterly charming “Ouvre ton cœur” and Julius Benedict’s “La Capinera”. The program featured no fewer than five languages — English, French, Russian, German, and Italian —, and Erin sounded at home in all, no mean feat.
Erin in her red gown at the Kennedy Center
The best non-musical part of the event was Erin’s ravishing gowns, both designed by Alex Teih. The first half’s dreamy dress has a dusty lavender bodice and a royal purple skirt, where flowers appear to fall sparsely from the waist to collect at the hem. I scrolled Erin’s Instagram during intermission, trying to guess which would be her second dress. It was a gown with large red roses printed on the skirt, with fabric gathered at the bodice to resemble another of those vibrant flowers. I couldn’t decide which outfit was more stunning.
For three of the last four songs, including Arthur Sullivan’s “’Neath My Lattice Through the Night,” Erin and Moore were joined by flutist Ransom Wilson. Wilson teaches flute at Yale, on top of his duties as music director of the Redlands Symphony, Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Artistic Director and Conductor of the Le Train Bleu ensemble. He did more than just accompany Erin; the two played off of each other, such as when Erin playfully sang the (insane) high F#s in “’Neath My Lattice” right at Wilson. In their album rendition of the song, the sounds of flute and coloratura blended and mirrored one another to such an extent that one has to listen very intently to catch that there are not one but two different instruments on display. I myself didn’t realize it until the concert.
I was aware that not every single song from Rose in Bloom had made it into the concert program, but Ivor Novello’s “We’ll Gather Lilacs” seemed like a particularly glaring omission. It is one of the highlights of the album and a special song for Erin and Moore. Its lyrics express longing to reconnect with a loved one far away, imagining the quietly blissful activities that the singer will do with her loved one “when you come home once more.” Moore introduced the song to Erin during COVID lockdown, bringing her to tears, “because it expressed everything I had been feeling,” she said. And in the evening by the firelight’s glow, You’ll hold me close and never let me go. The question of the song’s exclusion from the program was cleverly resolved at the concert’s end, when the audience demanded an encore with an enthusiastic ovation (something not as rare in concerts as in opera). Erin obliged with a poignant performance of “We’ll Gather Lilacs,” after movingly explaining its significance for both her and Moore. Doubtlessly, the song being omitted from the program and then sung as an encore was entirely coincidental.
Erin in Les Contes d'Hoffmann in 2015 (Marty Sohl/Met Opera)
Tonight, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann opens at the Met Opera, with Erin as the doll Olympia. After Hoffmann closes on October 18, Erin will take her Rose in Bloom recital for two more outings, on November 1 at Brigham Young University in Utah and on November 15 at Portland State University in Oregon. Her Orchid Classics recording is permanent, and can be listened to anytime, anywhere in the world, but nothing beats the thrill of the live voice. If you have an opportunity to attend her concert, I suggest you don’t pass it up. Just be forewarned: do NOT bring anything made of glass.
