Gerald Finley performs in Philadelphia: ‘A voice ....that felt like a cashmere scarf on a cold night’

Singing wasn’t quite enough. Having starred in some of the more prestigious and intriguing opera projects of the last 20 years, bass-baritone Gerald Finley arrived for an eagerly-awaited Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital on Wednesday at the Kimmel Center needing stories to tell.

A selection of Franz Schubert favorites and some relatively lyrical Hugo Wolf songs made up a cultivated but not always energized first half. His honeyed, middle-weight voice and sure sense of German language felt like a cashmere scarf on a cold night. But any number of flashes of drama reminded you of how much more this Montreal-born singer can offer — and has in operas from Vaughan-Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress to John Adams’ Doctor Atomic.

Then came stories in some of the best music of the program: the 2019 song cycle Without Ceremony by British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Finley’s long spoken introduction seemed unduly detailed but turned out to be warranted.

The poems were later-period Thomas Hardy (ca 1913) and were about love found with wife Emma, lost in the shuffle of a busy life, and then found again on her deathbed.

Turnage, now 61, had a punk-sensibility iconoclasm in decades past, but has lately emerged as the ultimate content-dictates-form composer. His vocal lines were deeply attuned to meter and meaning of Hardy’s intensely personal poems, as if Turnage wasn’t really composing but drawing out music that was always there. He even dared to have one song unaccompanied. The piano writing always had the right emotional temperature — harmonically comparable to mid-20th-century composers such as Paul Hindemith (specifically his song cycle Das Marienleben).

Often, the final stanza (or final line) broke away from the rest, going to a different, higher place. Songs also ended with what sounded like a harmonic question rather than any sort of conclusion. Most especially, the final song “Epilogue,” when the words talk about how Emma calls to him from the afterlife, concluded with a harmonic shift that seemed otherworldly in an arrestingly distant way. A stroke of genius?

After Turnage, the final set of songs were all drawn from Shakespeare plays such as As You Like It. So Finley had more stories to work with, though excerpted ones. Korngold’s setting of Under the Greenwood Tree is a keeper with its saturated harmonies. Einojuhani Rautavaara contributed a musically manic version of the sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” Other selections felt like an odd collection of novelties, including “Where is the Life that Late I Led?” from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate.

After Turnage, all of this felt a bit trivial, but was part of the recital’s pent-up quality. After lockdown, Finley seemed out to do everything he could. Even his distinguished accompanist, pianist Julius Drake, held the final chords of almost every song on the program as if he was unwilling to let the music stop. I understand. Completely.