Paul Bass Photo
Operatic and concert soloist and recording artist Adriana Zabala at WNHH FM.
Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper-Chekhov never made it to a villa they dreamed of on Italy’s Lake Como. Adriana Zabala shed a tear about that the other day.
Zabala, a mezzo-soprano, also lifted her voice. You can argue that she helped make the Chekhovs’ dream come true.
Zabala shed that tear and offered that argument Tuesday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
She was describing a photo of the lake and the villa that appears on the cover of her new album, A Few Words about Chekhov: songs and cycles of Dominick Argento (Bridge).
The album features works by the late American composer Argento (1927 – 2019), including a song cycle drawn in part on letters from the late-19th Century Russian playwright and short story writer to his actress wife.
In one letter Anton writes:
There is a feeling of black melancholy about your letter, clear actress -- something 'immense swooping down upon me' and so on. You must think about the future, otherwise we shall never live, but go on sipping life from a tablespoon, once an hour. When are you going to take me away? We shall go first to Vienna, stay a day or two, then on to Switzerland, then to Venice (if it is not too hot). Then to Lake Como, where we shall take a villa and settle down properly.
Argento put those words to music as part of his 1996 Chekhov song cycle. Zabala, an international operatic and concert soloist and recording artist who is based here as an associate professor of voice at Yale School of Music, was “blown away” with the cycle when she was first asked to perform it years ago for a song festival. She was already a fan of Argento’s music, including his choices of poetry and literature to work with, when the opportunity arose to participate in this new album.
Backed by Martin Katz on piano, Zabala recorded several solos from that cycle as well as duos with baritone Jesse Blumberg.
Argento’s composition brings out the painful irony in Anton’s letter about the villa.
“You can feel the the pathos of realizing that they’ll never make it there for that, for that vacation,” Zabala said on “Dateline” amid a fallen tear. Chekhov would die of tuberculosis at the age of 44 before that could happen.
She was asked whether the composition, and then her performance and recording, salvage beauty from that dream, and even create an ending in which the Chekhovs do settle “properly” in the waterfront setting of their dreams. Whether art can create a reality and a beauty outside the physical realm that people genuinely experience.
Zabala argues that it indeed can.
“In all real ways,” she said, “if our brains and our hearts and our souls are resonating with an idea that it sparks our humanity, our imagination or our feelings — how can we say that’s not real?”
The 18-track new album (you can order it here) features selections from two other Argento song cycles, as well as a series of cabaret songs he composed upon finding love in later life. One of the cycles includes a piece set to a poem by Alun Lewis that also finds lakeside reassurance amid heart pangs (not to mention fears that resonate in today’s national moment):
Deep is the heart of the lake
Where the last light is clinging.
A strong foreboding voice
Is patiently singing.
Do not fear to venture
Where the last light trembles
Because you were in love.
Love never dissembles.
Fear not the boast,
The bully, the lies, the labor.
Make no show for death
As for a rich neighbor ...
Cold is the lake water
And dark as history.
Hurry not and fear not
This oldest mystery ...
Click on the below video to hear three tracks from the album (including the one set to Lewis’s “Deep is the Heart of the Lake”) and the full conversation with Adriana Zabala on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”