wfmt.com, Sunday, July 1, 2012
Stephanie Blythe sings Kate Smith
Opera star brings beloved Americana to Ravinia
Stephanie Blythe, Kate Smith.
with Craig Terry, piano
Monday, July 2 at 8 p.m.
Martin Theatre, Ravinia
200 Ravinia Park Road
Highland Park, Ill.
847-266-5100; ravinia.org
BY ANDREW PATNER
Stephanie Blythe can do whatever she wants musically.
And what she wants to do these days is sing the songs introduced and made popular by Kate Smith. She launches a new tour of her Smith tribute at Ravinia’s indoor Martin Theatre Monday night with Chicago pianist Craig Terry.
Blythe, the American mezzo who grew up in small-town New York State and didn’t see her first live operas until she was 16 and 20, is in demand around the world in almost every style of the repertoire.
She reigns as Fricka, the powerful wife of the top god, Wotan, in the Metropolitan’s new production of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, seen all over the world in HD transmissions. She handles Baroque works in the Marilyn Horne tradition. She's an awesome force in Verdi, delivers in Puccini, and hilariously embodies the comic traditions of the English music hall. Chicago audiences in late 2010 saw her conquer Ulrica, the vengeful gypsy in Verdi’s Masked Ball and Katisha, the over-the-top “daughter-in-law-elect” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, back-to-back at Lyric Opera.
Her popularity with audiences, managements, and critics alike gives her the ability not only to offer song recitals at a time when such performances are too rare but also to give those recitals over to the even less-heard areas of premières, American song, and, with her current project, popular songs of the middle decades of the 20th century and the homespun woman who put them over.
How did an international opera star migrate to “God Bless America” and “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain”?
“My grandfather was a major connection to music for me,” Blythe said last week, speaking from her home in the Poconos in northeastern Pennsylvania. “I spent a lot of time in his house, he worked as what used to be called a decorator, hanging wallpaper and doing drywall, and he always had the radio on. It was the 1970s, he died when I was 11, but for him the radio was ‘old time music’ and I connected it with him and the happiness I felt with him.”
That early exposure to popular standards was reinforced by her father’s work as a jazz-band musician in the Catskills and elsewhere -- “saxophones, flute, and clarinet -- classic career” -- and her roles in high school musicals in Monticello, New York: “Queen Aggravain in Once Upon a Mattress, Guenevere in Camelot, Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!”
Opera took over in college at the Crane School of Music at the State University of New York in Potsdam and her career started quickly with her Met debut in 1994.
She’d put many of her other musical memories aside as her work grew. A few years ago, though, “and it was almost inevitable, I happened to hear some Kate Smith. I’m a big believer in sensory memory and this music and her voice just took me back. Not only to my grandfather’s house when I was a little girl, but to a time before that that I had not directly experienced. Perhaps it sounds strange, but this music from the 1930s and ‘40s made me feel I was at home.”
Is that any stranger than artists finding themselves “at home” in the music of Mozart or in a Puccini opera? “No, actually. That’s a good way of looking at it. But I also like that this music is music from my country -- from our country. I like that I have found this part of myself by coming back to our American music.”
Blythe was off to start researching Smith, who died at 79 in 1986 but had been performing until 10 years before that. “A man called Richard K. Hayes devoted years to her biography and to assembling lists of every recording, film, and stage appearance. This woman had a fifty-year career. She recorded 2,200 songs. Putting her picture on a box of washing powder sold washing powder. She sold more sold more than $600 million in War Bonds. She was a non-stop phenomenon.
“She was a big girl, and she knew that about herself. She didn’t hide it. She picked material that allowed her to make big, broad statements, and I love that. She sang songs of love, happiness. and joy. With a sense of hope. She was so uplifting. Why not share that today? Do we need that any less today?”
In putting her program together, Blythe went through hundreds of songs, listening to recordings and finding sheet music on the Internet. “eBay and I spent a lot of time together,” Blythe laughs. “I love the sheet music -- if you wanted to sell a song, you wanted Kate Smith to sing it and you wanted her face on the cover of the music.
“As a singer there are additional things to love about her for me. She painted with big, gigantic strokes. I like to be able to open up like that. To really put myself and my voice behind that.” With Terry, whom she knew from her work at the Met and at Lyric where he is an assistant conductor and was the onstage pianist this seasion in Show Boat, “I have a partner who is with me all the way on this material and what’s behind it.” Blythe says she is waiting “with bated breath” to be able to tell about future roles at Lyric. “But we can’t do those things until seasons are announced. Let me say, though, I am crazy about Lyric and am very excited about the future.”
Blythe emphasizes that she is not doing an impression of Smith, but offering a salute. “She sang as she sang and I sing as I sing. But the spirits connect.” She's heard from and met with relatives -- Smith never married and had no children -- and people who knew Smith, especially from her many summers in Lake Placid, New York. "I admire her as a person as much as as a performer. Everybody has someone who has something bad to say about them. But not Kate Smith. It's rather astonishing."
Audiences have responded to this on a very personal level as well as appreciating Blythe’s artistry. “I recently was singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover,’” the keep your chin up song that Vera Lynn had made into a British anthem in World War II and that Kate Smith later recorded for American audiences and troops. “And as I looked out into the audience I saw a man of a certain age put his hand up over his mouth and his eyes just filled with tears. I’m singing to people like that, people who served our country and know what matters about our history.”
Smith was caricatured later in her career, Blythe acknowledges. Her great hit “God Bless America” had fallen out of fashion in the 1960s during the antiwar movement and the counterculture. Irving Berlin had recast it for her in 1938 as an Armistice Day number from a trunk song of his written twenty years before, and Smith had another huge success with it in 1943 in the Berlin-score film This is the Army. Blythe agrees with the suggestion that the song's fortunes turned around after the events of September 11, 2001.
“People went back to an idea of pride. They realized, too, that this was not a militaristic song. It’s a complex song that touches on many emotions and it has a complex introductory verse. Kate Smith always sang that verse and I always sing the verse to it or any other song. And I instill that in my students, too.
“It’s a song about hope, as so many of her songs are. And that’s what I love about it, and that’s what Craig and I love to share with people.”