“A wonderfully light, floating, luminous intonation with tender expressiveness. Singing as in a prayer: making one want to bend down on one’s knees in adoration.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
"The songs of Hugo Wolf offer some of the greatest challenges in the entire lieder repertory for rising singers and vocal veterans alike, both for their nuanced musical subtlety and their complex interaction between prose and music. German soprano Anna Lucia Richter comes to the Board of Officers Room to interpret these glittering vocal works in her U.S. recital debut."
“With the exquisite renovation of the Board of Officers room… [Park Avenue Armory] now has a space for chamber music, which marries excellent acoustics and an austerely elegant Gilded Age interior… [creating] an atmosphere of luxury and concentration.” —The New York Times
"A subtle environment that dramatically counters the awe-inspiring proportions and vast space of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the newly reopened Board of Officers Room is the latest achievement in Park Avenue Armory’s ongoing restoration that “seems destined to set a new standard, not so much for its scale, but for its level of respect and imagination” (The New York Times).
This splendid space is the ideal setting for performances of chamber works, with the pristine acoustics and intimate scale originally intended by many composers. This season, we feature signal works from the classical music repertoire spanning more than 250 years, performed by intrepid interpreters from New York and abroad."
Since its inauguration as a performance space last year, the Board of Officers Room in the Park Avenue Armory has worked hard to carve out a niche for chamber music programming that is every bit as distinct as the monumental talk-of-the-town productions that take place in the Drill Hall. One point of pride is its ability to snag fast-rising European stars such as the pianist Igor Levit or the cellist Istvan Vardai for their American recital debuts.
On Thursday evening, it was the turn of Anna Lucia Richter, a 24-year-old German soprano who has been making waves across Europe: Last month, she sang (and danced) in Sasha Waltz’s production for the Dutch National Opera of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo”; recitals at Wigmore Hall in London and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam were enthusiastically received by critics and audiences. On Thursday, she presented an all-Hugo Wolf lieder evening, accompanied by the seasoned and eloquent pianist Gerold Huber, which revealed a singer of substantial talent and expressive gifts. Ms. Richter’s voice has the clarity and sparkle you’d expect of a young singer, but also a good deal of warmth and focus. The acoustics of the smooth-paneled room with its bronze chain curtains are not ideal for high voices, and after a few penetrating top notes turned caustic, she seemed to work hard to rein in the firepower she evidently commands.
What Ms. Richter possesses in spades are charm and charisma. She’s an animated actress with a knack for drawing the audience in as if to share a bit of juicy gossip as in “Begegnung” (“Encounter”) or in the comically dramatic “Storchenbotschaft” (“Stork’s Message”), her encore. Given her talent for bringing to life different characters and moments of direct speech in a poem, it was frustrating that much of the program was given over to songs that were placid, wistful and occasionally outright insipid.
While I admired Ms. Richter’s artfully naïve rendition of “Schlafendes Jesuskind” (“Sleeping Christ child”) and Mr. Huber’s attentiveness to the weird harmonies underlying “Auf ein altes Bild” (“On gazing at an old picture”), I couldn’t muster more than an academic interest in the woolly piety these songs expressed. “Wo find’ ich Trost” (“Where shall I find solace”), another selection from Wolf’s religious songs, was a different story. In the dramatic intensity and psychological and vocal nuances Ms. Richter brought to this study of a guilt-tormented soul at night, there were bright flashes of a promising operatic talent in the making.
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