A rewarding afternoon of American music

By MICHAEL CARUSO

Smack in the middle of a raft of Christmas concerts, including one of its own, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented a pair of musicians performing a program that doesn't fit easily into any traditional category. Yet the recital filled the concert hall of the host institution, the Curtis Institute of Music, on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 19.

During the last few decades, the team of Joan Morris & William Bolcom, mezzo-soprano/pianist and wife/husband, have brought to light an entire repertoire of songs about which most American concertgoers know little or nothing. In a country in which the great divide between classical and popular art, including music, is both more clearly defined and more vehemently defended than in Europe, the body of songs deemed "popular" from the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries and onward in that they aren't "serious" as in "classical" contains within it some of the most enchanting and compelling pieces of music for voice and piano accompaniment.

These scores range from naughty cabaret songs to delightful selections from operettas through beguiling numbers from Broadway musicals we now acknowledge as "classic" to stand-alone songs written by composers responding to the unique prompting of their individual music.

A Morris & Bolcom program, always announced from the stage in response to the inspiration of the moment and drawn from a repertoire of countless songs, regularly offers well-known standards such as the Gershwin's jazzy "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" alongside sentimental masterpieces such as Irving Berlin's "You Keep Coming Back Like a Song" to Eubie Blake's insinuating "Makin' Whoopee" to the old-fashioned romance of "Over the Bannister Leaning" through the innocently charming "Nothing Could be Finer Than to Be in Carolina in the Morning" to contemporary thought-provokers such as those written by Bolcom, himself.

What might look haphazard on paper nonetheless comes together in a concert in a seamless flow of musical generosity, an invitation by the performers to the individual members of the audiences to share with them the bountiful treasures of American song.

Although Joan Morris' voice no longer exhibits the flexibility of line and the span of range that once were its hallmarks, she remains a remarkable vocal artist who continues to employ her singing to project far more than merely the meanings that the lyrics denote. With peerless precision Morris communicated the connotation of the text of each song by first establishing the tiny microcosm of its words and then guaranteeing their universality through an engaging identification with the emotions that inspired them in the first place.

While one might find an occasionally wrongly struck key within the pianistic texture of Bolcom's playing, his ability to create a world of sound that supports, decorates and inspires his wife's singing is unsurpassable. Not surprisingly, the pair's three encores hardly seemed sufficient, but suitably capped a rewarding afternoon of music.