TANGLEWOOD REVIEW: Timely, feminine convergence at Ozawa Hall

Joshua Marzan, piano, and soprano Elizabeth Fischborn perform 'Six Songs' by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) at Tanglewood Music Center’s vocal fellows’ program Thursday, July 7. Illustration: Carolyn Newberger
Illustration: Carolyn Newberger

Returning to Ozawa Hall from this excursion, the highlight of the set of Six Songs by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847), was the sweetly lyrical Spring, with its own intergalactic metaphor. Here, Joshua Marzan’s piano was both profoundly expressive, and in the short interludes, truly virtuosic. Soprano Elizabeth Fischborn’s plush voice was adorned by subtle and knowing facial expressions, in particular on the dreamy closing verse by poet, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. You can take it, if you will, as a kind of compensating prequel to the bestial bromides in Cole Porter’s Let’s Fall in Love:

The moon and stars say it,

And in dreams the forest rustles it,

And the nightingale warbles it,

She is yours, she is yours!

Eli Newberger and Carolyn NewbergerThe Berkshire Edge
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