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By Cameron Kelsall
A sold-out crowd welcomed tenor Lawrence Brownlee and bass-baritone Eric Owens to the stage of the Perelman Theater on February 22, where Philadelphia Chamber Music Society (PCMS) presented the first engagement of a multi-city recital tour. The artistic pairing proved notable for several reasons.
Opera stars Eric Owens (left) and Lawrence Brownlee are rarely onstage together. (Photo by Pete Checchia.)
Philly roots
Both men have strong local connections. Owens grew up in Mount Airy and began his musical studies at Settlement Music School before matriculating at Temple and Curtis. He joins the faculty of his alma mater this fall as co-head of the opera department.
Brownlee serves as an artistic advisor to Opera Philadelphia, where he appeared last season in the world premiere of Tyshawn Sorey’s Cycles of My Being. That politically engaged song cycle might be the single most exciting local music event in recent memory.
An unusual pairing
Under normal circumstances, these two titans of the opera world likely wouldn’t find themselves sharing a stage. Brownlee, a dynamic lyric tenor, specializes in perennially hard-to-cast works of the bel canto repertory. More than two decades into his professional career, his voice remains pliant and easily produced.
Owens has made the leap into serious Wagnerian territory, debuting Wotan in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s ongoing new production of the Ring Cycle. The Metropolitan Opera announced earlier this week that he would sing the title role in Porgy and Bess on opening night of its 2019-2020 season.
A Nemorino and a Wotan on the same recital stage may seem strange, but Brownlee and Owens showed dexterity across an expansive program that included opera arias, spirituals, and selections from the Great American Songbook.
Solo stars
Each man had solo moments to shine. Brownlee easily dispatched the nine treacherous high Cs that cap “Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête,” the showpiece aria from Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. He particularly dined out on the last sustained note, which Owens jokingly tried to replicate. Brownlee also displayed great textual attention to detail and sterling French diction in “Je crois entendre encore,” a plaintive ballad from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.
Owens thundered through Verdi’s “Infelice! E tu credevi” and offered a refined, humorous account of “Le veau d’or" from Gounod’s Faust. Yet his rendition of “Se vuol ballare” from Le Nozze di Figaro lacked the legato one craves in Mozart singing, and a few craggy notes suggested a possible cold.
Dual challenges
The duo’s first duet proved the evening’s one true misstep. Divorced from its context, Donizetti’s “Voglio dire, lo stupendo elisir”-a reliable highlight of L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love)-caused the pair to strain for laughs, resorting to prop comedy with a stray dollar bill and a bottle of water standing in for the titular elixir. Owens struggled with the number’s tongue-twisting patter, and both men occasionally seemed out of step with each other-and with pianist Craig Terry, who provided workmanlike accompaniment.