In Hugo Wolf’s setting of Goethe’s poem, Prometheus has little interest in the authority of Zeus. He has made his own way, stealing fire and giving it to humanity, and now he stands before the god with open contempt. Wolf’s music gives the confrontation a rough, unsettled energy, as if the titan is still measuring how much power he truly holds over his own fate.

That tension between ambition and forces we cannot fully control defined the second program of Art Song Chicago’s Collaborative Arts Festival, held September 26 at Roosevelt University’s Ganz Hall. Where Wednesday’s opening concert considered gentler encounters with the natural world’s flora and fauna, this recital considered tougher fare. The sea came and went through songs by Nadia Boulanger, Pauline Viardot and Samuel Barber. Mahler turned a sermon to fish into a joke about the futility of ever changing anyone’s mind. Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” blurred the line between human and animal until it wasn’t clear which one was doing the seducing. And in Vivian Fung’s Lamenting Earth, the question stopped being metaphorical: The natural world is something we’ve already broken, maybe past fixing.

Saturday reminded me how art songs compress drama into minutes. A few moments of music can hold seduction, grief or a joke that curdles before you realize it. It asks performers to make words and music feel inseparable. Neither treating the voice as a vehicle for the poem or the instruments as its backdrop. Since 2010, Art Song Chicago has created space for that kind of listening in a city not always generous to the genre. Tenor Eric Ferring has led the organization since 2023, while tenor and co-founder Nicholas Phan remains artistic director. Both sang Saturday, joined by baritone Leroy Davis and soprano Raquel Gonzalez. Brent Funderburk accompanied on the piano while the Jasper String Quartet rounded out the afternoon, essential for Fung’s piece and for Barber’s Dover Beach.

In a program this varied, standout moments are hard to rank, but the afternoon ultimately hung on Fung’s Lamenting Earth. Saturday marked its Midwest premiere and only the second public performance of the complete cycle. Inspired by Claire Wahmanholm’s poem “O” and expanded with texts by students from New York’s Kaufman Music Center, the work confronts climate anxiety. The texts move between anger, hopelessness and sudden inspiration, sometimes within a single poem. The fourth song, “Vast Green,” opens with the assurance that “in the end love unites all” and ends with the narrator straining to remember the last time she saw the color green. It is rough material—and a clear wake-up call.

Fung’s music meets the texts with an often abrasive directness. She gives the quartet brittle writing at high registers, unresolved dissonances that sharpen the anger in the texts, and low, grumbling figures that anticipate ominous turns. The Jasper players made those contrasts without overwhelming Phan; his lucid, wide-ranging singing kept the words at the center even when the instrumental writing surged. Lamenting Earth is a bold work that deserves many more hearings.

Gonzalez’s account of Clarke’s “The Seal Man” offered another high point. The song tells an old folk story about a woman drawn to the ocean by a strange, seal-like man, seduced away from her family, only to drown when she tries to follow him into a world never built for her. Clarke’s gauzy music drifts about, anchored by piano writing with a quality like water pulling back over sand. Gonzalez leaned into that haze instead of fighting it, keeping her sound loose and colored, and letting phrases blur into one another.

Davis, who opened the program with Prometheus, returned in the second half for Barber’s early Dover Beach. The piece is full of atmosphere and instrumental color, and Davis contained his large voice, layering it carefully with the Jasper strings to amplify the work’s haunted quality with greater subtlety than he had shown in the Wolf.

The afternoon closed with Monteverdi’s “Zefiro torna,”  a showpiece for two tenors sung by Ferring and Phan. Monteverdi never fails to astonish, and this lively tune celebrating the return of the west wind, sweetened air, and spring offered an ideal finish. Ferring’s softer timbre matched nicely with Phan’s more focused sound, providing a fitting close from the two artistic partners who shaped the program.

Originally published on Third Coast Review

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Around Chicago

Kathy Hey, Third Coast Review – reviewing the first concert of the Collaborative Arts Festival

“Henry (Harry) T. Burleigh’s gospel-tinged “Among the Fuchsias” from Five Songs of Laurence Hope was sung beautifully by Blaustein, with soulful playing by Banwarth. Hugh Russell is a wonderful interpreter of the art song. The baritone is an expressive singer with an entertaining comic touch. He turned Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Captivated by the Rose” into a saucy tribute to meeting his lover in the woods. I found a touch of Bert Lahr in him. That is meant as the highest compliment, as I consider Lahr to be a comic genius and interpreter of song. Russell got the most laughs and knew how to work the audience.”