CLASSICAL VOICE NORTH AMERICA REVIEWS 2025 COLLABORATIVE WORKS FEST
Nicholas Phan performs at the opening concert of Art Song Chicago’s 2025 Collaborative Works Festival: Songs of War & Peace
CLASSICAL VOICE NORTH AMERICA
“…Phan, who won a 2025 Grammy Award for best opera recording for his role in Kaijo Saariaho’s Adriana Mater with the San Francisco Symphony, is the heart and soul of Art Song Chicago both onstage and off. In his role as founding artistic director, he chose the line-ups for this latest edition of the festival with the care and intelligence he always brings to the organization’s programming. While Art Song Chicago has never ignored the pillars of the repertoire, it has tended to emphasize less widely known works and composers from the past and introduce new songs, and that was the case here.
The two programs were simply titled, respectively, War and Peace, with the first, the one reviewed here, using art song to examine the horrendous impact of conflict on soldiers and their families as well as civilians caught in the violence. ‘In a moment when multiple wars range across the globe and claim untold innocent lives,’ Phan wrote in his program essay, ‘this year’s theme feels both urgent and necessary. In an age when we are increasingly drawn into the online realm, song offers a space for real-world communion.’
Five singers took part in the opening concert, but Phan was the program’s anchor, shining each time he took the stage. Even some of the greatest opera singers have had limited success in the art-song repertoire, which unlike the grand scale and power of opera puts an emphasis on intimacy and inwardness. To be successful, a singer does not so much perform art songs as enter into and inhabit these miniature worlds, serving more as a musical storyteller than an actor. Phan is the epitome of such an interpreter, as he showed in Britten’s Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain.
Britten, whose sensitivity to the themes of this festival was further reinforced in his landmark War Requiem (1962), composed this 11-minute work in 1945, setting an Edith Sitwell poem she wrote in 1940 shortly after the Blitz, the German air attacks on London. It juxtaposes the horror of those attacks to Christ’s suffering on the Cross. The six text settings in the canticle alternate with instrumental theme-and-variations featuring either French horn or piano, the two only coming together at the very end.
Mark Almond, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal horn, potently realized his probing solos, using two different mutes at times to draw maximum expressiveness from his instrument. Here and throughout the concert, Kuang-Hao Huang showed himself to be a first-rate collaborative pianist, adapting to the myriad styles and moods of these songs and ably supporting his vocal partners.
That said, the star in Britten’s Canticle III was Phan. He brought a piercing intensity to the six text sections, capturing the ever-changing emotions from mournfulness to anger to pain and delivering each recurrence of the title stanza, “Still Falls the Rain,” a metaphor for the endlessly falling bombs, with subtly varied interpretative shadings…”