So much work goes into these Schwab Rising Star residencies at Caramoor before Bénédicte Jourdois (the Associate Director), the cast, and I ever set foot in the Music Room. The program idea has to be honed, the songs have to be chosen, and scanned, and sent, and translated, and put in order, and divided up between the three pianists (Béné, the apprentice pianist, and me). I spend almost a week writing a program note, sure that not many people will actually read it. Still, it has to be perfect or I won’t be able to live with myself.
Then comes the first day, the Big Reveal, where we see if the concert Béné and I imagined will become a reality, and if we chose the right quartet of singers. This is a quiet drama that plays out throughout the whole first day, song by song, artist by artist. I am proud to say that we have a very good group this year, and that the performances should be be among our best.
I had worked with three of the singers before. Mezzo-soprano Kate Morton was in my Juilliard show last January, where she delivered some very strong performances including a time-stopping rendition of a Cherokee prayer. I had not worked with tenor Reed Gnepper or soprano Chea Kang for some time, but they too had brought the house down at past NYFOS@Juilliard concerts. Béné and I had confidence that their voices had developed, rather than tanked, in the intervening years, and our faith was rewarded—both of them have blossomed during their time away from New York.
The wild card for me was baritone Jamal Al-Titi, who had worked a bit with Bénédicte but whom I had never met. The journey from hearing a musician on YouTube to hearing them live is unpredictable. Some vocalists actually benefit from the close miking of a studio or a livestream, sounding richer and more impressive on video than in the flesh. But others shine brightest when you finally hear them live, and Jamal is in this second category. It’s one of Those Voices.
His life story will make an excellent book one day (I offered to co-write it with him during our 4 PM tea break); he was studying to be a chemist in Belarus, flew to Toronto where he petitioned for political asylum, and took up singing in his late teens (this had, as I understood—or possibly misunderstood?— it, something to do with finding a satisfying way to make money, which would make Jamal the first to enter our profession for that reason). From a small private conservatory in Hamilton, Jamal made his way to the Faculté de la Musique in Toronto and then to the Young Artist program at Opéra de Montréal.
There is so much more to this story—reuniting with his father in Canada, his mother’s flight to the West, and their very recent Canadian citizenship. The part of the story I don’t yet know is how Jamal mastered such elegant, colloquial English, honed a voice of beauty and technical prowess, developed a sophisticated approach to phrasing and musicianship, and did all of this in just a few years, far from his homeland. When he arrived in Canada his English was rudimentary. Today he is editing my translation of the Russian song in the program.
The first piece we worked on was the concert’s finale, Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.” Our program is called “Beginner’s Luck: the Artist’s Journey,” and it considers the issues that face creative people in their 20s. I knew Kate and Reed would take to the Dylan’s folky twang with ease, and I had a feeling Chea would find her way in to a style more colloquial than her usual rep. Indeed, they were wonderful. But Jamal? Would his Dylan sound like Rachmaninoff?
Happy ending, of course. He started his verse and my heart melted. It was touching, personal, relaxed—there were just a couple of vowel sounds that needed to be tweaked. He repeated the miracle when he sang “A Child Is Born” by Thad Jones and Alex Wilder. “I’ve never sung anything like this before,” he murmured apologetically as he came to the piano. I played my intro, and when he sang his first line, out came something so sublime I was fighting back tears.
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