I could have sworn that midway through his gripping performance of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, tenor Michael John Butler locked eyes with mine. Safe to say I wasn’t the only one who felt that intense and intimate connection on Wednesday, March 19, at the Barbro Osher Recital Hall, perched on the 11th floor of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Bowes Center.
Butler, navigating the ecstasies and despairs of young love in poet Heinrich Heine’s texts, turned romantic confession into an excavation of the soul’s deep recesses — its yearnings and self-deceptions, acuities and elusiveness. How fitting that the venue was glass-walled: Everything felt emotionally, psychologically exposed.
Butler’s account of the cycle with pianist Julian Garvue highlighted a Schwabacher Recital by 2024 graduates of the Merola Opera Program, which helps train musical artists in collaboration with the San Francisco Opera Center (a co-presenter of the Schwabacher series). Baritone Olivier Zerouali was the tenor’s opposite number, accompanied by pianist Ji Youn Lee.
The 16 songs that comprise Dichterliebe (originally there were 20) are among some 130 that Schumann poured out in 1840. This performance mirrored that profusion. With a burnished but labile tone that turned from ravishing to raw in seamless phrasing, Butler spun out the cycle with keen dramatic judgment. He was by turns pensive and penetrating, exultant and grave. His expressive squarish face, boyish shock of hair, and intuitive stage presence embodied the songs’ complex blend of innocence and knowingness.
With the slightest pause in the opening number, “In the wondrous month of May” (German-to-English translations by Richard Stokes), Butler hinted at the darker weather to come. He rattled headlong through the nature catalog in the cycle’s third song and used rubato in the next one to deepen his erotic contemplation of his lover’s body.
The interpretive nuances continued and built, whether in confiding pianissimos or the impulsive rush from an ironic “I bear no grudge” at the end of one lyric to the wounded heart of the next song. In Dichterliebe, lovers’ feelings fly and crash. Butler made both things happen, as the gravitational pull of the coffin-haunted last song took hold.
Raffishly dressed in a powder-blue suit, black shirt, and deep crimson bow tie, the singer made his costume choices seem like a kind of ironic disguise. Dressed for an elegant night out, he was metaphorically stripped bare.
Zerouali opened the evening with Francis Poulenc’s The Painter’s Work (translations from the French by Christopher Goldsack), one of two sets by the composer that the baritone undertook. In crafting portraits of various painters (Picasso, Jacques Villon, Paul Klee), Poulenc tapped poems by Paul Éluard to create a musical gallery. While Zerouali made an impression with his vigorous baritone, he painted with a broad brush. A dynamic sameness and lack of poetic playfulness made the songs register in a narrow range.
Adopting a looser and more relaxed approach, the singer fared somewhat better with Poulenc’s settings of poet Guillaume Apollinaire in Calligrammes. But it was only with I Was There, composer Lee Hoiby’s settings of five Walt Whitman poems, that the baritone hit his most rewarding vein. His burly tone and driving delivery paid off especially well in the seafaring numbers. “O Captain! My Captain!” had the amplitude of a musical monodrama. “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!” leapt forward. Earlier, Zerouali crafted a shapely, sensitive reading of the title song. Lee, his accompanist, did her best work in this part of the program as well.
The recital ended — almost — with Butler’s gorgeous illuminations of three Richard Strauss songs, with “Morgen!” (Tomorrow) as the set’s spun-silver centerpiece. The audience let out a collective sigh when it was over. Garvue, who exhibited real fervor elsewhere, was equally delicate here at the piano.
Both singers and their keyboard partners returned for encores. Zerouali offered a tender, subtly sly reading of a Frank Bridge song, “Dear, When I Look Into Thine Eyes.” Then Butler, fully inhabiting his showbiz garb and persona, danced, mugged, and charmed his way through Leonard Bernstein’s “Lucky to Be Me” from On the Town. A performer as artistically limber and likable as this one had no trouble getting the audience to finger-snap along with him.
