PATRICE MICHAELS BEDI, JEFFREY COHAN, AND DILEEP GANGOLLI
Things had started to change by the time viola da gambist Mary Springfels arrived almost ten years ago and founded the Newberry Consort. Some of her early-music colleagues came to take a look and then stayed. Eventually there were several fine original-instrument groups–the City Musick, the Orpheus Band, His Majestie’s Clerkes. New-music and chamber-music composers and performers also began settling down here, glad not to be part of the east-coast rat race.
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Soprano Patrice Michaels Bedi came here about the same time Springfels did, and after a couple of years as an adjunct member of Lyric Opera’s Center for American Artists she decided to stay. The decision must have been tough, for most opera singers want to appear onstage at the Met. I first heard her sing at a Curtis Hall recital shortly after she arrived. Her voice was already velvety, and her presentation was vivacious. Over the years, under the tutelage of voice coach Thomas Wikman, her artistry has improved. Not surprisingly, she now is the most sought after singer in the city, for her voice and for the esprit de corps she encourages.
Their rapport was also obvious in their performances of two French songs: Andre Caplet’s “Ecoute, mon coeur” and Jacques Ibert’s “Deux steles orientees.” Written in the mid-1920s, when Parisians were still enthralled with orientalism and French symbolism, both songs convey a yearning for the exotic, for an idealized love. In the Caplet, whose text is by the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, soprano and flute echo each other’s sentiments; the music is sinuous, reminiscent of Delilah’s aria from Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah. In Ibert’s skillfully nuanced song, the flute is reduced to a mere accompanist; in the first part the singing is sensuously languid, in the second much more assertive, insistent. Bedi’s singing was a model of clarity and ardor.
