Music: Quinn Kelsey's More Than Just a Pretty Voice

William Butler Yeats once mused poetically on knowing the dancer from the dance; it is similarly difficult to separate Kelsey from the music he sings.
He sets a mood immediately -- whether the loopy, comical world of Polyphemus the giant in Handel's "Acis and Galatea" (the aria, here described as "I Rage, I Melt, I Burn," is much better known as "O Ruddier Than the Cherry") or the bleakest despair of the Mussorgsky "Songs and Dances of Death." He is always believable -- indeed, he seems to be living through whatever he is singing about before our eyes and ears.

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) was not a great composer, but he was an unmistakable one: The three settings of Shakespeare that Kelsey sang, with their tart, tidy dissonances, could have been written by no other artist. A set of three songs by Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler's cycle "Songs of a Wayfarer" all come out of mid-19th century, middle-European folk traditions, but Kelsey imbued the Mahler works with just the additional trace of fin de si?cle neuroticism that they demand.

And it would be hard to imagine a more harrowing reading of the ghostly, ghastly Mussorgsky songs.
The concert was presented by the Vocal Arts Society, in tandem with the Marilyn Horne Foundation, which supports young and developing artists. And there were two of them to support on Monday.

Because Kelsey's usual pianist, Craig Rutenberg, was forced to bow out because of a broken wrist, his place was taken by Tamara Sanikidze, a doctoral student in music at the University of Maryland. Under the circumstances, she did an amazing job, especially in the Mahler and Mussorgsky pieces, where her work with Kelsey seemed all but unanimous in intent and execution.

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