Review: Fleur Barron’s Spivey concert shows why she’s a rising opera star

A major new singer has arrived on the scene. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, still building a career, made her Spivey Hall debut Sunday afternoon. The fragrant beauty of her voice, the range of her skillset and the intuitive intelligence of her interpretations tell us she’s becoming an artist of the highest caliber. She delivered Romantic art songs, angst-ridden modernist music and Broadway show tunes with equal verve.

With a mother from Singapore and a British father — the BBC war correspondent Brian Barron — she led a globe-trotting, multi-lingual youth. Educated in New York, now based in London, she’s probably a couple of breakthrough opera performances away from that career tipping point, leading to legit international stardom and all its trappings: the glitzy opera productions created around her; the recording contract; the gala evenings; the magazine covers. 

At Spivey she was partnered by the consummate accompanist Julius Drake, playing the gentle-voiced instrument nicknamed “Clara.” Barron’s peripatetic upbringing informed their program, called “HOME(Land).” It came with its own subtitle: “What does ‘home’ mean to you? It’s a physical place, a state-of-being, a cultural identity, a feeling? HOME(Land) explores perspectives on childhood, nostalgia and belonging.”

A program on the multiple meanings of “home” allowed them to connect songs and poetry that were so disparate you’d not expect to hear them side by side. Chinese opera, Johannes Brahms, Cole Porter, Alban Berg and a newly commissioned piece all connected seamlessly. Barron and Drake made it a riveting experience, as much storytelling as glimpses into complex emotional states. 

They opened with an effective set of Chinese-born modernist composers and Chinese folk songs, interspersed by Brahms. Huang Ruo’s “Fisherman’s Sonnet,” understated and soulful, evoked the fisherman’s song from Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (in a sort of artistic East/West feedback loop) and connected with myriad folk and modernist styles, all in the composer’s powerful voice.

Composer Chen Yi has had a strong U.S. presence for several decades, and she’s now teaching at the conservatory in Kansas City. Like the New York-based Huang, Chen’s music creates evocative and very personal-sounding images using styles and techniques from several cultures. Her “Know You How Many Petals Falling?” was commissioned in honor of the New York firefighters who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Singing in Mandarin, Barron here had to employ techniques from Chinese opera, with swoops and scoops and vocal acrobatics. It offered perhaps the widest range of any song on the program, showing that the mezzo’s top notes are lustrous, piercing and full (without thinning into a soprano-ish tone). Her amazing lower range is creamy warm, verging on adorably husky for the very bottom notes.       

Between the Chinese-language songs was Brahms’ Heimweh lieder (Longing for Home), perfectly crafted and beautifully delivered. She caught the autumnal wistfulness and pathos in the opening line of “O wüsst ich doch Weg zurück, Den lieben Weg zum Kinderland!” (“Oh, if I but knew the way back, the sweet way back to childhood!”), her phrasing and almost theatrical timing adding a golden glow to Klaus Groth’s poem.

Seven songs by Russian primativist Modest Musorgsky, The Nursery, were perhaps the afternoon’s only weak point. Barron took the pinched, nasally voice of a child throughout, acting (and overacting) the texts as she sang, sometimes a bit too cloyingly, about bad kitties who unspool yarn and about a crazy long list of loved ones in her bedtime prayers. Still, the voice is radiant across her range and, in the best moments, she offered disarming tenderness of expression.   

Their third set included a new song by Chen, commissioned for this “HOME(Land)” tour, which started in Philadelphia and continues in Europe later this spring. Chen’s five-minute “Thinking of My Home at Night,” drawn from an ancient Chinese poem from the 8th-century Tang Dynasty and sung in Chinese and English, showed Barron’s easy, graceful fluency with languages.

The program’s incredible breadth stepped up to a still higher level. The Chen premiere was followed by Charles Ives’ “My Native Land,” robust and plainspoken in spirit.

Then came the afternoon’s biggest surprise: “Ananurhan” by the Uyghur composer Zubaida Azezi, based on a Uyghur folk melody. (Edo Frenkel, a London-based composer and conductor, was listed as co-composer.) As has been widely reported, the Uyghur people are mostly Muslim, speak a language related to Turkish, and form a semi-autonomous region in China’s far northwestern corner. But the U.S. government, among others, has accused China of genocide and slave-labor practices against the Uyghurs in an attempt to subdue or eliminate the people and their native culture altogether. (It’s exactly the sort of place, and urgent news story, that Barron’s TV-journalist father might have reported on.)

Barron herself responded with the power of an artist. She commissioned “Ananurhan,” a folk tale about a beautiful girl kidnapped to become the king’s concubine. Instead, she stabs him and jumps from a high window. Her true love mourns her death in song, the tragic song Azezi and Frenkel set to music.

As Barron explained to the audience, Uyghur music is known for its danceable rhythmic pulse. Pianist Julius Drake put tape and small bits between the piano strings — called “prepared piano” — to create a muted percussive sound and imitate Uyghur drumming. Above this funky beat, the mezzo sang and chanted in the Uyghur language, sometimes singing directly onto the piano strings, to ghostly effect, with her head under the lid. (Later, as Drake removed the stuff from the strings, Barron showed herself to be a darling personality on stage. She gave us a naughty smile and stroked the piano like it was a cat on her lap, purring “No harm was done to the piano!” The audience chuckled. Her charisma and wide-eyed charm were reeling us in.)

Barron and Drake sculpted phrases with great care in late-Romantic songs by Alban Berg. Her voice — at least scaled for Spivey’s intimate acoustics — isn’t a booming cannon of sound but rather a controlled, malleable instrument, alert to the nuances of text and mood. She placed Cole Porter’s famous “Night and Day” into the art-song camp rather than as a crooning Broadway number, with lovely, understated results.

Charles Trenet’s wonderful “Boum!,” closing the formal program, felt like the best encore possible — a sly, playful song of uninhibited joy. The audience was giddy with pleasure. Barron first heard one of her actual encores, “Fengyang Flower Drum Song,” when her mother sang it, in Mandarin, around the house. It was one of several real-world links to place and home, and helped inform this uncommonly well planned and gorgeously executed afternoon of song.

::

Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.