Tag Archives: Thomas Hampson

Margaret Bonds: pianist composer, and teacher

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Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was a pianist, composer, and teacher of music. I probably first became aware of her as a teenager, through some of her arrangements of spirituals for "classical" voice, especially as sung by Leontyne Price (e.g. He's Got The Whole World In His Hand, which Price commissioned from Bonds in the early 1960s) but have only recently delved more deeply into her work, and realized that many of her compositions --- the classical songs and some piano pieces are what I've really gotten into so far--- should be considered classics of 20th century American music. I expect they will become---indeed, hopefully, many of them already are---a permanent part of the classical music repertoire.

Most recently, I was reminded of Bonds by an excellent essay by pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, whose blog Do the M@th is essential reading for those interested in jazz and/or classical music. "Black music teachers in the age of segregation" emphasizes their contribution to the musical development of jazz musicians, both by teaching European techniques and theory, and leading ensembles often covering a wide range of music styles, sometimes integrating African-derived and African-American-developed elements and procedures. Iverson doesn't mention Bonds in his essay, but she is yet another example of a black musician whose role as teacher was important in American music---although her compositions and (sadly, probably under-documented) live performances are equally important contributions.

Bonds as teacher, as well as performer and composer, figures prominently in the diaries and essays of Ned Rorem---she was one of his childhood piano teachers in Chicago, and helped him with his first forays into notated composition. Rorem's discussion of his time with her, as well as with other childhood teachers, in the essay "The Piano in My Life" from Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary is engrossing.

It was time for a real teacher... Margaret Bonds .... at twenty-two was a middle-western "personality", having played Carpenter's Concertino with the Chicago Symphony under the composer's direction, and being herself a composer of mainly spiritual arrangements and of original songs in collaboration with Langston Hughes. ... At our first lesson, she played me some ear-openers, The White Peacock by Griffes, and Carpenter's American Tango. Had I ever heard American music before? ...

Margaret Bonds played with the authority of a professional, an authority I'd never heard in a living room, an authority stemming from the fact that she herself was a composer and thus approached all music from the inside out, an authority that was contagious. [...]

The first piece I wrote down, "The Glass Cloud," was influenced by Margaret's other prize pupil, Gerald Cook. [...] In the years to come his identity with Margaret would shift from student to colleague as the two-piano team, Bonds and Cook, became a glamorous enterprise at Cerutti's in New York, and at Spivy's Roof. When Margaret went her separate way to marriage, motherhood, documentation of Negro song, opera writing, and death, Gerald turned into the greatest living accompanist of the Blues, working first with the lamented Libby Holman, then--and still--with Alberta Hunter.

Did I outgrow Margaret Bonds? Why were lessons discontinued? If there was an objection to a seeming glib jazziness chez elle, Margaret thought of herself as classical and deep. (Conversely, I feel as influenced by prewar jazz as by "serious" music. Not the tune itself but Billie Holiday's way with a tune taught me to knead a vocal phrase, just as Count Basie's piano playing still shapes my piano composing.) In any case Margaret and I lost track of each other until we had all moved East during the war. Then we remained close friends until she died.

The whole essay is a great read, simultaneously sketching with vivid strokes aspects of an era in American music and American life, and of Rorem's musical development.

There is much more about Bonds at the pages for the 2016-2017 exhibitions "Margaret Bonds: Composer and Activist" and "Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes: A Musical Friendship" at the Georgetown University Library (where some of her papers are held) including music manuscripts, photographs, concert programs, and correspondence from, among others, Rorem, Hughes, and Andy Razaf (whose stationery sports a sidebar listing songs he composed and/or wrote the lyrics to). Directly relevant to the matter of Black teachers and the institutions they worked in as a crucial resource in the development of American music is this from the exhibition text:

Throughout the 1950s, Bonds continued her work as a composer, performer and teacher. In addition to private lessons, she joined the staff of East Side House Settlement, a non-profit social services organization committed to serving New York’s underprivileged youth. At East Side House she taught weekly music classes, hosted performances featuring African-American composers, and served as music director for the annual spring musical.

There may be a lot to rediscover about her influence, as a teacher, on jazz and classical musicians, especially African-American ones, during this period in New York. East Side House Settlement is still active.

As far as her work as composer is concerned, from what is available on disc or digital streaming I'm particularly partial to her pieces for solo piano, and her songs. What is available in these genres is extremely good, and should find a permanent place in the repertoire of pianists and singers. Although the list of works in her Wikipedia entry is not lengthy, there is much that looks promising that does not appear to available in recordings or online performances; one hopes that will change.

 The Bells, based on the spiritual Peter Go Ring Dem Bells, from her Spiritual Suite for Piano, beautifully melds influences from European and American classical music (especially Debussy, Ravel, and perhaps Americans like Charles Tomlinson Griffes (who crops up in the Rorem quote above)) with African-American spirituals and pianistic touches reminiscent of jazz or perhaps the popular music of the time. Here it is played by Thomas Otten as part of a 2013 symposium on Bonds' work:

The other two movements, Dry Bones and Troubled Water, are also on youtube played by Otten at this symposium; below, Troubled Water, based on the spiritual Wade in the Water, is played by Samantha Ege:

The Youtube listing for Ege's performance gives the date of Troubled Water as 1967, but Randye Jones' online biography (which also displays the abovementioned concert program) also lists it as part of the Spirituals Suite, which it dates to the 1940s or early 1950s.

Bonds' setting, published in 1959, of Three Dream Portraits by Langston Hughes is superbly done. The only version for low male voice with piano that I've found on Youtube in acceptable sound is an excellent one by baritone Thomas Hampson with Kuang-Hao Wang on piano:

(Dorian Hall deserves mention for a superb performance with Dr. Timothy Cheek on piano, but there is unfortunately a lot of distortion in the recording---this would appear to be a casually recorded, though musically top-notch, recital.) There are several female voice versions on Youtube in good sound, for example one sung by Bonnie Pomfret with Laura Gordy on piano; another by Icy Simpson with Artina McCain on piano and one by an unidentified singer and the Ritz Chamber Players. The live recital recording of no. 1 in the series, Minstrel Man, by Nicole Taylor with Joan Sasaki on piano, is also worth mentioning, though the recorded sound quality is not perfect. Yolanda Rhodes and Josefina Gandolfi also do an excellent job with this song.

The settings of Hughes' Songs of the Seasons are also excellent. Below, an excellent live performance (the vocalist is Louise Toppin) of Summer Storm from a valuable 2013 symposium on Bonds, available as a sequence of youtube videos, that includes lectures as well as performances of works by Bonds and by her teacher, Florence Price (e.g. Price's Night, beautifully sung by the extraordinary countertenor Darryl Taylor).

In this symposium Toppin also performs several excellent songs that are not listed in the Wikipedia entry on Bonds. Stopping by Woods and The Pasture, from 1958, are on texts by Robert Frost; Feast, on a text of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Winter Moon, another of the four Songs of the Seasons, is available in a studio recording by Toppin with John B. O'Brien on piano. Bonds' songs also work beautifully sung by baritone Malcolm Merriweather with Ashley Jackson on harp rather than piano: Winter Moon from Seasons, To A Brown Girl, Dead (1933) on a text by Countee Cullen, and the Three Dream Portraits appear on a CD along with Bonds' Christmas cantata, Ballad of the Brown King, to words of Langston Hughes. Little David is an example of Bonds' setting a traditional African-American spiritual melody and text:

Here, as in many of Bonds' arrangements of spirituals, the piano part doesn't provide a conventional chordal background, nor does it double the voice---it is new musical material that is entirely Bonds', and contrasts with the vocal line while being absolutely appropriate to it.

Last but not least, perhaps Bonds' best known song is her setting of Langston Hughes' The Negro Speaks of Rivers, composed around 1936 and first published in 1944. Bonds spoke of the great personal significance of this poem to her, in an interview with James Hatch quoted in Jones' online biography:

I was in this prejudiced university [Northwestern, where she matriculated in 1929 and where, according to Jones, "she was allowed to study but not to live or use their facilities"], this terribly prejudiced place–I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he [Langston Hughes] tells how great the black man is: And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have–here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school–and I know that poem helped save me.

A favorite performance of mine is Gerald Blanchard's, from his CD on Blue Griffin:

Thomas Hampson gives a mellower, less urgent reading, but beautifully phrased and recorded, and making the text exceptionally intelligible:

One can also find on youtube a mixed-chorus SATB arrangement of this setting---it is not clear to me whether the arrangement is by Bonds herself or not, though I suspect it is---which would be well worth tracking down by interested choirs.

There's much more to be said, and investigated, about Bonds and her work; some of the links above, especially the Kilgore dissertation and the brief online Randye Jones biography, are good starting points, as is the Song of America page on Bonds. I have a copy of Mildred Denby Green's Black Women Composers: A Genesis, which has more on Bonds, her teacher Florence Price and others, on the way, as well as an Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers, edited by Willis Patterson (published by Hal Leonard Corp.) that includes the score of Three Dream Portraits. I'm looking forward to seeing what I discover in this anthology, although I'll probably be studying the musical content of, rather than singing, the Dream Portraits, while searching for scores for the Songs of the Seasons and the Frost and Millay settings, which are not included in that anthology. But I'll stop here for now, and leave you to enjoy her music.

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Lucevan le stelle: Tosca at Santa Fe

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The stars, seen at intermission from the exterior loggia at the Santa Fe Opera two nights ago, were shining over the Sangre de Cristo mountains, through the gaps between the clouds remaining after a typical New Mexico late summer evening shower.  And they were definitely shining onstage in a performance of Puccini's Tosca.

Tosca is one of the great operas.  (If, like Benjamin Britten and Berkeley musicologist Joseph Kerman, you're one of the doubters on this score, I may address your doubts in another post, but now is not the time.)  And the Santa Fe Opera put on a great performance of it two nights ago.  Not a perfect one, but a genuinely great one.  The sets were a bit unorthodox, with the church setting of act I portrayed with the dome suspended globe-like, its coffered, gilt-highlighted interior toward the audience, at the rear of the stage, which was open to the pinon-covered hills and more distant mesas and mountains of New Mexico.  Stage right and left, chapel gates lined the church aisles, scaled down toward the back for artifical perspective.  And rising ramp-like from front center, the huge painting on which Mario Cavaradossi is working---while standing on it---for most of the first act.  Unorthodox, but very effective.

Brian Jagde (who replaced Andrew Richard, who had been scheduled for this season) sang Cavaradossi with elegant but unfussy phrasing, and a voice that was not huge, nor over-the-top dramatic, but handsome and focused, with a good core and excellent intonation, well suited to the part overall if a bit restrained at times.  Below, I say more about why he is a really superb artist.  Amanda Echalaz, from Durban, South Africa, has been getting some rave reviews for her Toscas at Covent Garden, the English National Opera, and elsewhere.  Her voice is perhaps a bit far over on the dramatic side, rather than lyrical, to be perfectly ideal for the part which seems to me to require equal measure of both.  It is produced with a lot of vibrato, and at least in the first act's scene of love, jealousy, and flirtation, some measure of distortion or strain in high, loud notes---which somewhat paradoxically, seemed to mostly disappear in the dramatic, no-holds-barred extended confrontation with Scarpia that is the second act.  Her acting was superb, and the less-sweet side of her voice does emphasize the possibly more worldly side of Floria Tosca, who is after all a woman in show business (an opera singer, in fact!) at the turn of the 19th century, so the first act did have plenty of humor, tension, and drama.  But she really came into her own in the second act.  With Thomas Hampson playing a relatively suave and controlled but thoroughly despicable Scarpia, singing with effortless control and refined phrasing in a deep, honeyed baritone---no hammy villain he---this was unquestionably a highlight of the season at Santa Fe---as it would have been anywhere.  Echalaz responded to each new piece of calm but implacably studied coercion, each newly revealed depth of evil, with more and more frenzied alternation of despair and rage, masterfully paced and not overdone, at the end almost like a lioness in the cage of Scarpia's office.  And as Scarpia finds out, you don't want to be in a cage with an enraged lioness, especially if you are threatening one of her loved ones. The choral scene at the end of the first act should be singled out too...it's essentially a dark credo sung by Scarpia, with a hugely effective minor modal melody slithering up and down behind him, the orchestra providing a dirgelike, menacing 2/4 groove, and sacristans, priests, church officials piling on in a Te Deum along with a superb boy choir.

There was plenty more excellent singing, and of course fabulous music, in some of the love arias in acts I and III.  Tosca's aria Vissi d'arte (I lived for art, I lived for love") also stood out.    But the high point of this performance, and it was very high, was an aria that may well be the crux of the opera --- Cavaradossi's solo "E lucevan le stelle" ("And the stars were shining", or more literally, "and the stars shone"), in act III.  Waiting to be executed, he recalls how the stars were shining the night he met Tosca, the creaking of the garden gate as she comes to him, her sweet kisses and languid caresses, and so forth... ratcheting up to "That time is gone, I die in desperation.  I have never loved life as much as I do now!"  There have been some great versions of this aria.  Often the emotionalism, the remembered passion and the despair at oncoming death, are heavily underlined by the vocal interpretation, with massive rubato in places, changes in dynamics, a sensation that notes are being tossed or wrenched out into the air.  Under control, this can make for a very effective interpretation.  Roberto Alagna is among the farthest to this end of the continuum among successful interpretations; Giuseppe di Stefano much less so, depending on the performance.  In the superb 1956 La Scala performance with Victor de Sabato conducting and Maria Callas as Tosca (available on CDs from EMI) di Stefano is impassioned but relatively controlled except for some (in my view unfortunate) minor sob/breakdown vocal effects at the very end.  At Santa Fe, Jagde was at the opposite end of the spectrum---with vocal histrionics to a minimum, full, legato phrasing and musical beauty prioritized.  Emotionally, the beauty of remembered times with Tosca predominated, and the final "I have never loved life so much" ("Non ho amato mai tanto la vita!") resonated more than the immediately preceding "I die desperate!" ("muoio disperato").  The music does more than enough to convey the pathos of the situation; Jagde's smooth, focused, firm and centered but not at all harsh or hard, and very slightly dark, voice, and supremely musical phrasing was perfect for this interpretation, and the effect was devastating, perhaps even more effective than a more highly wrought rendition.  It is hard to know---and doesn't much matter---whether this judgement would hold up on listening to a recording, but subjectively, in its effect in context in this live performance, this was one of the greatest pieces of opera singing I've ever been privileged to hear.  It brought down the house.  Crucial to this aria's impact, of course, was the foundation provided by the singing and acting of the leads earlier in the opera, especially the Tosca-Scarpia confrontation by Echalaz and Hampson in Act II.    (If you're curious what Richards might have sounded like had he been able to make it to Santa Fe this season, you can hear Richards sing Stelle in an August 2008 performance at the Bregenzer Festspiele; try to ignore the sobbing in the minute of lovely music that precedes the aria, and following it (although it's indicated in the score, it's overdone here), and you'll get an idea of how Richards sings this. Except for the histrionics, calmer and more centered than most of what you'll find for this aria, and quite beautifully sung...not that far from Jagde's interpretation, actually, though Richard's voice is a bit larger and deeper and his singing just a little less legato.)

Lucevan le stelle is preceded by a long orchestral interlude with Cavaradossi alone on stage, rather Debussyan in some of its harmony and moodiness, although with a bit more standard harmonic motion underneath.  This is probably the place to mention that the orchestra, conducted by music director Frederic Chaslin, played superbly throughout.  Very clear, almost transparent textures much of the time, supple phrasing, excellent timbres from the individual instruments, delicacy when needed but also a tasty bite and crunch from the brass and percussion when appropriate, and plenty of lushness, menace or power as required (which in Tosca, is often).  I've been to the opera at Santa Fe quite a bit over the years and overall this season the orchestra is probably playing the best I've ever heard them play.

When Tosca arrives on the scene just before the execution, which she believes will be faked as Scarpia had promised, the interaction between her and Cavaradossi is not the transcendent love duet that publisher Ricordi had apparently tried to talk Puccini into; Puccini defended this choice on dramatic grounds, and I'm inclined to agree.  There was no letdown musically, vocally, or dramatically, though, as the opera swiftly moved to its [SPOILER ALERT ;-)] dire conclusion.

Santa Fe made a great move here in engaging three major stars---one, Echalaz, relatively newly minted as a star through her replacement of Angela Gheorgiu as Tosca at Covent Garden in 2009, another, Hampson, relatively far along in his illustrious career but portraying Scarpia for the first time and the third, Richards, relatively unknown to be before this but to judge from credits in major roles at places like the Met and La Scala, somewhere near the peak of an important career.  And even though only two of them could make it to Santa Fe in the end, the less well-known Jagde really came through, in this performance, as Richards' replacement.  With excellent support from the orchestra, chorus, and supporting singers, and by engaging fully with each other vocally and dramatically, Jagde, Echalaz and Hampson put over Tosca not just as the highly emotional and musically lush potboiler it is easy to see it as, but as the---to be sure, highly emotional and musically lush---masterpiece it really is.