At Tanglewood: Thomas Hampson’s National Anthem

Thomas Hampson, baritone
Craig Rutenberg, piano
Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood
July 22, 2009

July 4, 1776 might be America’s birthday, but the country’s allegorical puberty, the often-awkward formation of the American psyche, can plausibly be argued to encompass the outburst of the Civil War and the smug self-actualization of the Gilded Age. Wednesday’s all-American song recital at Tanglewood by baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg, while programmatically covering a wide swath of chronological American history, almost always was, in some way, referring back to that particular 19th-century period — a running commentary on the country’s glorious and sometimes grating perpetual adolescence.

Hampson has been touring with variants of this program in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the first American art song. Francis Hopkinson — who spent at least part of July 4, 1776 signing the Declaration of Independence — published “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free” in 1759, its Handelian phrases rounded with aristocratic gentility. Still antebellum, Stephen Foster’s “Open Thy Lattice, Love” was a little more artfully rustic in its phrasing, but no less genteel. But Aaron Copland’s setting of “The Dodger” — Hampson dropping in some Lefty Frizzell-ish offhand twang — shifted the setting to a country on the make.

Hampson unearthed a couple of thoughtful stabs at Victorian respectability — Edward MacDowell’s “The Sea” and Amy Beach’s “Twilight,” both slow, ruminative outlays of polished Romanticism — but the rest were outliers. Arthur Farwell’s starkly epic “Song of the Deathless Voice” adapts an Omaha Indian panegyric to a fallen warrior, insistent in its anti-sentimentality; Hampson pealed both its stentorian force and its shadowy echoes. Henry Burleigh’s “Ethiopia Salutes the Colors” sets Walt Whitman’s snapshot of an elderly former slave witnessing Sherman’s march in effective though episodic fashion, but sneaks in a bit of ethnomusicological reparation: as the woman curtsies, the piano transforms the quotation of “Marching Through Georgia” into a fleeting snatch of ragtime.

Even more contemporary songs pointed back. Michael Daugherty’s 2009 “Letter to Mrs. Bixby” mixes the Lutheran Passion Chorale and a dark-hued waltz tune with Lincoln’s condolences to a mother who lost five sons in battle (cold water moment: three of the brothers actually survived the war). Daugherty’s music is muted and haunting, but the extravagantly melismatic setting of Lincoln’s signature seems a bit of heavy-handed branding. More elegant was Charles Naginski’s 1940 “Look Down, Fair Moon,” which frames a Whitman battlefield nocturne, rendered in quietly oracular populist style, with a limpid, dissonant, lethally delicate musical landscape of its own. Hampson and Rutenberg closed the first half with a gorgeous, gripping reading of Leonard Bernstein’s “To What You Said” — rescuing a chorus from his failed musical “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Bernstein married it to another Whitman poem, a bitterly proud defense of his homosexuality. It might be the most beautiful thing Bernstein ever wrote, the seductive harmonies overlaid with lyricism that nonetheless cuts and bleeds.

The entire second half was given over to Charles Ives, both a daring and an almost endlessly rewarding contrast. Ives, too, kept at his core a 19th-century musical sensibility, but, unlike the songs of the first half, recreated its emotion with hallucinatory immediacy, eliminating any safe distance between us and the raw conviction of its source. In such a total-immersion presentation, Ives becomes the classical equivalent of what Greil Marcus famously called “the old, weird America,” a forgotten past bursting insistently into the present.

Even channeling parlor-song style — in “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” or “The Children’s Hour” — the way Ives continually pivots and slips makes it seem as if we’re in the presence of Stephen Foster’s untrammeled id. “Charlie Rutlage” gives a tragic cowboy tale its sprechstimme-laden Expressionist due; “In Flanders Fields,” shot through with typical Ivesian patriotic quotation, turns John McCrae’s World War I elegy into a warped, surreal pageant. Hampson has the tools to cover the gamut — from a child in increasingly vehement love with his own tale in “The Circus Band” to the quietly passionate intellect of “Thoreau” — while Rutenberg poured forth Ives’ dense accompaniments in rich waves, layer upon layer of musical conversation.

The uncompromising Ives had a rare spotlight as well: songs like “Lincoln, the Great Commoner” or the late “Sunrise” (with Boston Symphony concertmaster Malcolm Lowe contributing a fine-spun obbligato) are unrelieved blocks of singular mood — clanging rhetoric in the former, knife-edge serenity in the latter — and performance becomes not so much a matter of pulling them off as having the confidence to let them be what they are. Hampson and Rutenberg gave them that space.

Hampson is a marvel; when he’s in fine form, as he was this concert, the sheer variety of voices he can conjure is phenomenal, in the literal sense. It’s an instrument that’s grown bigger over the years, and, on this evening, seemed to grow stronger as the show went on: his final encore, Copland’s “The Boatmen’s Dance,” featured high notes ringing through the hall with overwhelming, visceral power. But he still was willing to pull back to a silken messa di voce for the final chorus. And the technique comes packaged with a curiosity and imagination that are unparalleled. Fittingly, Hampson closed the program proper with a bit of local color, from just up the road: “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” in a terrific reading. Ives orchestrated it for “Three Places in New England” (which the TMC Orchestra performed earlier in the week) but as a song, the composer’s idiosyncratic idea of transcendence comes through even more clearly, American restlessness as a divine, wondrous mystery.