Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presents Bernarda Fink and Anthony Spiri

A bright, colorful voice

Bernarda Fink has a beautiful voice that lies on the bright side of the mezzo-soprano spectrum. A lot of art song enthusiasts will attend a concert just for the pleasure of hearing someone make the kinds of sounds she can make. For me, her biggest appeal is the variety of pace, volume, and color she brings to each line. Fink was accompanied by pianist Anthony Spiri, who supports her with a precise touch, creating precisely modulated moods and scenes.

For the first half of her program, she stayed inside the traditional German art song repertoire. The selections from two cycles by Hugo Wolf could have seemed prosaic in less artistic hands. The eight songs in Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und–leben (A Woman’s Life and Love) present a man’s version of the emotions a young woman feels as she thinks about the man she loves.

In Schumann’s case, the exercise had some grounding in real life. The historical record indicates his wife, Clare Schumann, probably did regard him with most of the sentiments ascribed to the imaginary songstress. The cycle even ends with a nod to the harder realities of marital relationships, as the singer ponders the “first distress” inflicted by her husband.

Snub-nosed girls

Bernarda Fink is the daughter of Slovenian parents who emigrated to Buenos Aires. For the second half of the program, she drew on her heritage and sang selections by three 20th-century composers: Slovenia’s Lucijan Marija S̃kerjanc and Argentinans Carlos Guastavino and Alberto Ginastera.

Art song events tend to lighten up when they move away from the German tradition and this concert was no exception. The songs became more melodious and rhythmic and the subjects included autumn, spring, babies, cats, and the delights of “girls with little snub noses.”

In Ginastera’s song “Chacarera,” the man who says he love girls with little snub noses even tells us “a snub-nose girl is what I’ve got.” I feel that’s a great improvement on all those 19th-century German songs in which the lovers die because they can’t have the woman of their dreams.