Thomas Meglioranza & Reiko Uchida at Cafe Sabarsky

The Cafe Sabarsky is a beautiful corner room in the old mansion at East 86th Street and 5th Avenue, across from Manhattan's Central Park.  The old mansion is now a museum, Neue Galerie, devoted to German and Austrian art, and Cafe Sabarsky seeks to recreate some of the atmosphere of a 19th century Central European restaurant.  Every now and then they offer a cabaret night featuring good food and live entertainment, and last night the entertainment part of the evening was provided by my favorite baritone, Thomas Meglioranza, in collaboration with his frequent recital partner, pianist Reiko Uchida, in a selection of songs all written within reasonable temporal proximity to World War I (and a few even having some topical connection to that conflict).  War nostalgia.... not quite!

The meal was excellent, the setting superb, and the performance the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae.  Meglioranza is an excellent singer of the standard art song repertory, has triumphed in opera (from Purcell and John Adams to the latest novelties, such as a production of "Angels in America" set by Peter Eotvos), but also has a terrific sideline in what might be called "historic cabaret."  He's not singing 1950s and 1960s Broadway standards here, but rather "lighter" fare by composers such as Kurt Weill (in his early German phase), Francis Poulenc, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Charles Ives (I don't think there is lots of precedent for thinking of Ives as a cabaret composer, but his more sentimental pieces work nicely in that setting).  Indeed, Meglioranza included songs by Anton von Webern in this show - horrors!  (Actually, quite nice the way he sang them.)  And Carrie Jacobs Bond.  Taken together, it was a very eclectic program, running about 70 minutes, and it was exciting to hear this team perform in such an intimate venue.

I found myself thinking that it would be so wonderful were he to have an opportunity to record these things, but on second thought, what would really make sense would be a DVD of a "live" performance, because the combination of performers, audience, performance space, and the visual aspects of performance all come together to magnify the effect of what might be a perfectly OK recording into a real cabaret concert experience.  Lacking that, however, an audio-only recording of Meglioranza and Uchida in this repertory would be well worth hearing.

Comments

[R J Keefe]

I agree about the beautiful ephemerality of the performance — you had to be there, really — but I would still kill for a recording of that Blitzstein song about the new suit "with the button fly" that Tom used as a signature a couple of seasons back. Not to mention the "Half-Minute Songs" from last night!

[Art Leonard]

Yes, I definitely think it is time for Tom to record his repertory of American songs. His wonderful recital at Symphony Space a few years back would make a terrific recorded program, including the "Button Fly" song by Blitzstein. I did manage to track down a recording of that song by William Sharp on a New World recording many years ago, but I'm not sure the recording is still "in print." A big part of the impact when Tom sings it, however, is his visual acting out of the song, so an audio recording would provide a very incomplete experience. What would be an ideal stop-gap is if he made a video recording of just that song and put it on his website!!