Performance Review: Recital at Atlanta's Spivey Hall, 2006

"Two notable concerts over the weekend were worlds apart, with different audiences and expectations, but each felt like a musical love fest. The humongous first. Friday at Spivey Hall, the performance was unusual for a couple of reasons: a young Polish baritone had come to Atlanta to make his professional recital debut, and the sparse audience seemed to include more New York agents and king-makers from the opera business than local music fans.

Pronouncing his name is the only obstacle. Mariusz Kwiecien (pronounced "kveeAY-chen"), still young for a classical singer at 33, is on the fast track to global stardom - not for cheesy crossover crooning but as a serious artist who can deliver the vocal and emotional goods. Blessed with a handsome mug, expressive eyebrows and lapel-grabbing charisma, he’s already sung major roles at smaller opera houses and is slowly infiltrating the marquee slot at the Metropolitan Opera. (He sang in the Met’s recent "Cosi fan tutte," broadcast locally on the WABE-FM.)

But the grandiloquence of opera is just one facet of a potentially great singer, the flip side to the intimacy of the recital hall and the personal confession of art songs. Thus the national interest in Kwiecien's debut recital. Scouts from Atlanta Opera and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra were among the audience members, too - envious, no doubt, of Spivey's programming coup.

Kwiecien and pianist Howard Watkins covered a limited repertoire (albeit in four languages) and did almost all of it superbly. Schumann's "Dichterliebe," about the abiding pain of a poet's unrequited love, filled the first half. They followed it with Slavic songs from Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and trio of lesser-known Polish composers, finishing with Ravel's "Don Quichotte a Dulcinee" and a Strauss encore.

The first thing you caught about him was his open temperament, his welcoming demeanor, his look-you-in-the-eye communication. A second later the voice hit: a huge, wide-open fan of sound, a rush of creamy tone touched with a bit of grit. So much power, but the voice doesn't lumber.

With remarkable control, he sculpted phrases in the seemingly effortless, "natural" style of a folk singer and, notably in the Schumann, avoided the mannered, recital-hall intellectualism in vogue these days. His attack on the opening line of "I do not complain, even if my heart is breaking" hit all the right images of anger and resignation; he then switched to bouncy, buoyant charm for "A Boy Loved A Girl."

[..] Even his idiosyncrasies are intriguing, and he imbued the final lines [of Paderewski's "The Piper's Song"] - a resignation to perpetual loneliness - with such aching lyricism, it was impossible to not succumb to him, on his terms."

Pierre Ruhe, "Young baritone, baroque group generate fireworks",
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 13, 2006