WCPE in the News

A remarkable, and natural, pairing
Wharton Center offers two nights of vocal artistry with legends Marilyn Horne and Barbara Cook.

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO
April 10, 2002

To say that the blue-moon pairing of supreme classical vocalist Marilyn Horne and Broadway legend Barbara Cook is "Just Between Friends," as the Wharton Center modestly bills its most exciting show of the year, is like calling the Yalta Conference a weekend of gin rummy.

Come to think of it, the long and magnificent reigns of these two divas have far outlasted the comparatively brief Churchill-Roosevelt era (not to mention Comrade Stalin and the entire country he rode in on).

So what if one cornered the market on Gioacchino Rossini, and the other on Jerome Kern; one started out in a modernist opera called "Wozzeck," the other in a Broadway show called "Flahooley;" one asks her vocal students for "complete technical perfection," the other for "more stuff." When Horne and Cook hold court at the Wharton Center's Great Hall Friday and Saturday, Lansing's winter-and-war-weary music lovers will find themselves in a rarefied stratosphere of vocal artistry that easily spans two worlds of song. Unlike those who run the world raging outside, however, Horne and Cook rule two benevolent queendoms in which disputed borders only make for a bigger playground.

"We have such great respect for each other," says Horne. "We come from very different worlds, but at a certain point, we come together." The mutual territory for this weekend's summit is the trunk-filled American attic full of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley standards that American singers of all genres have joyfully rifled through for nearly a century. Although it's more Cook's turf than Horne's, the classical one is more than willing - and qualified - to split the stake.

"I've sung the great American classics of popular music all my life," Horne says. "I just played Bloody Mary in a revival of 'South Pacific' two years ago at the Hollywood Bowl and had a ball doing it."

What will happen when these two legendary human instruments resound together? "I think they're gonna like the program," Horne slyly predicts. "We're working on some really terrific duets." Each of the two also will perform solo, with material culled largely from the same Broadway songbook. The Greater Lansing Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gustav Meier, will provide the starlit sonic backdrop for this rare vocal transit.

It's a remarkable pairing, but also a natural one. In the past, Horne and Cook have only sung the occasional benefit together, but in a way they've played in each other's back yards all their lives. "I'm a Broadway freak," says Horne, who lives a block away from Radio City Music Hall and revels in the ceaseless fizz of New York culture. The night before we spoke by phone last week, she went to the Cafe Carlyle to hear young cabaret singer Melissa Errico ("It was delicious"); just before that she enjoyed the new musical version of "Sweet Smell of Success." Cook, who also lives in Manhattan, jumps over the net and returns the volley with ease. "I go to opera all the time. I love it."

Immediately before and after a recent singing tour in Australia, a homesick Cook managed to hit the Metropolitan Opera five times. "I walk in there and say to myself, 'I'm home.'" Both Horne and Cook were dropping their jaws in the audience when Napoleon and friends took over the Metropolitan Opera in February's spectacular "War and Peace."

Unsurprisingly, when asked to pick out the traits they most admire in each other, both singers singled out characteristics for which they themselves are famous. "Barbara is just a great singer," says Horne of Cook. "She's a great communicator, and she gets to the heart of the matter when she sings. It's just pure joy to be in her audience." Cook in turn describes her colleague as "very down-to-earth and a very, very nice lady. I've always enjoyed being around her."

Summarizing their two amazing careers in a few paragraphs is literally like recapping a century's worth of "The Sopranos." Marilyn Horne's supremacy in the world of opera, powered by a gleaming coloratura with the middle-register stomach-kick of a mule, has overwhelmed audiences all over the world, from the San Francisco Opera to La Scala to the Met to Covent Garden. At 19 she was hanging out with the likes of Igor Stravinsky, who dedicated his last work to her. Her mastery of Rossini heroines is absolute and unmatched. She also has breathed life into baroque opera (especially Handel) and staunchly supported many modern composers, including a show-stopping 1991 turn in John Corigliano's "The Ghosts of Versailles" at the Met. She is also among the most devoted lieder (art song) interpreters ever to vibrate a uvula, with thousands of song recitals under her belt, including this year's commission of a new song cycle by composer William Bolcolm.

In the course of it all, Horne's voice has expanded, like the Roman Empire, from soprano to mezzo-soprano to contralto. "Listen, I've sung everything," she says. "Everything." Don't go volunteering to dust her awards shelf, either. In the 1990s alone, the Kennedy Center made her an honoree by presidential request, the United Nations proclaimed a Marilyn Horne day, and she was named by the Rossini Institute as "the greatest female singer in the world."

For her part, Barbara Cook was recently called "the greatest singer in the world" - period - by smitten London critic Alistair MacAulay, who deemed her the only "popular singer" worth the serious attention of classical people. Even from folks with noses parallel to the earth, Cook has probably garnered more critical raves and fanatical followers than any other Broadway singer. She made her Broadway debut in 1951 as the sprightly ingenue lead in the above-mentioned "Flahooley" (which also featured exotic cult goddess Yma Sumac), she soon found herself at the center of a golden age of American musical theater, singing in such classic shows as "Carousel" and "Oklahoma!" Later, she originated the role of Marian the Librarian in the original 1957 production of "The Music Man."

Cook made so strong an impression that Leonard Bernstein tailored the difficult role of Cunegonde in his original production of "Candide" to her bell-like, agile soprano voice. "I loved working with Lenny," says Cook. "I particularly needed support for "Candide," because I hadn't sung stuff like that before. He made me feel I could do anything." The transition from ingenue to maturity occasioned a brief period of inactivity in the '60s, which Cook referred to as her "middlelescence." She came back with a vengeance in the '70s, setting new standards in the forthright, communicative interpretation of American song. Although Cook has not done full-scale shows in recent years, her classy cabaret recitals at New York's Cafe Carlyle are more popular than ever, gaining a patina of legend with each new triumph (in 1999 The New Yorker declared her at an "absolute peak").

Recently, both Horne and Cook have faced up to the passing years by turning forcefully to the task of educating new generations of vocalists. "There are still a lot of people who want to do musical theater," says Cook, "and some are very talented. Not all, of course, but some." Cook's hallmark as a teacher is to egg her students on until they summon up personal resources they didn't know they had. When presented outside the context of a story, even the most well-written songs can exhibit an unconvincing, off-the-rack hang - especially on the average superstar who swoops into town for a one-night tooth show and a fat check. Cook urges her students to tailor the song to their own experience, cut out the pretension and harness their technique to honest expression. They routinely testify to her ability to unlock the powerful communicator trapped inside the nervous performer.

With centuries of opera and classical song to draw upon and more being written all the time, Horne is keenly aware of her position as keeper of a cherished flame. "The greatest repertory of all has been written for the human voice," she declares. "No other instrument has that vast a repertory. And it's here to stay," she adds. "There's no question about that. The young talents keep coming, and they want to sing."

Horne has long realized that the long-term problem is building an audience, so on her 60th birthday - "a big one"- she started the Marilyn Horne Foundation, a unique organization devoted to the "care and feeding" of vocal music. In New York and around the country, the foundation co-sponsors local recitals that otherwise would not have gotten off the ground. But just planting flowers in the field isn't enough - if Horne had her way, every hive of youngsters would get a top-notch location dance. "For each recital," she says, "we have outreach programs into the schools, so if one of my artists comes, say, to East Lansing, then two or three days prior to their recital they would go into the schools and do half-hour to hour-long programs."

The real impetus for Horne's teaching efforts is a genuine desire to share her art in ways other than singing, which, unlikely as it may seem now, she can't keep up forever. "I feel sorry for people who don't experience classical music," she says. "They have no idea what they're missing. The last time I was driving through North Carolina, WCPE Raleigh started to play Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony, and it was so gorgeous I had to pull over to the side of the road because I had tears in my eyes. I really feel sad for people who can't experience things like that." She hopes that her foundation will help in some small way.

In the meantime, claims Horne, "all that hard, hard, hard singing is behind me now and I'm just having a good time." But where she and Cook are concerned, that kind of talk only sends the showbiz understatement meter off the scale. It's far more likely that both singers have armadas of projects backed up and waiting like supertankers at the Suez canal, their firepower demurely hidden under unassuming verbal embroidery like "Just Between Friends."

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