Perhaps you have to rest firmly in yourself to be able to touch emotionally, as the singer Lizz Wright did at the beginning of the season with the hr big band at her concerts in the broadcasting hall on Bertramstrasse. There it stands. A tree from a woman. Big, strong, embodying a whole cosmos. And sings the pain from his soul: “My man's gone now”, George Gershwin's funeral aria from the opera “Porgy and Bess”. But is that really just Serena's lamentation after the murder of her partner Robbins, which upsets us so much? Is that what the HR big band intones so sensitively, just the refrain of the compassionate choir from Gershwin's ingeniously imagined Cat Fish Row, in which we can't help but join in?
Leontyne Price from the deep south of Mississippi, the great Mozart and Verdi interpreter at opera houses from New York to Salzburg, once said at a workshop on Gershwin's opera that one must express the cultural context that is included in the music.
Lizz Wright from the deep south of Georgia, the great jazz and gospel singer, has freed the context from the music with her singing.
Serena's grief becomes the grief of a humane collective.
"How everything was, I know how everything will be, I see too," says the mythical Erda.
Something of this fabulous omniscience can be felt in Lizz Wright.
Not only in her confident singing, in her whole demeanor.
Everything serves the text and the context, the tones and undertones.
Nothing is for the show.
Original sounds of the blues and sensual timbres
It is unlikely that many female singers can be found on international concert stages today who have such a voluminous, fully developed voice that one could trust all the great alto parts of the opera repertoire and at the same time all the shimmering nuances of jazz, the limitless pathos of the spiritual and mastered the original sounds of the blues, which are barred from any written form. She demonstrated this on grandiose recordings, especially the early recordings "Salt" and "Dreaming Wide Awake", but also on more recent productions such as "Freedom & Surrender" or "Grace". And she demonstrated this live again with her Gershwin project in Frankfurt,Jim McNeely with his arrangements and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band with their orchestral movements and the various instrumental solos have rolled out an ideal soundscape.
McNeely divided the big band into differentiated chamber ensembles, shaped the introductions into small contrapuntal works of art and virtuously used the abilities of his musicians to create extraordinarily sensual timbres. He was able to build on the unshakable musicality of Lizz Wright, who sufficed a bass line from Hans Glawischnig to swing into the right ballad tone on “Embraceable You”, or the drums from Jean Paul Höchstädter alone to get the pulse of “I Got Rhythm "To capture appropriately. Presenting Lizz Wright right from the start is the promise of an extraordinary season.