One of the more interesting features of concert life in New York in the past decade has been the growth—one might almost say the ubiquity—of the vocal recital. By the “vocal recital” I mean the classic “art song evening,” as opposed to an evening of opera arias. Historically, the “art song evening” was limited to inner-core music lovers, specialized recordings (such as those of the Hugo Wolf Society in the 1930s), and specialized voices, like that of Povla Frijsh—voices that had minimal, if any, contact with opera. Mostly, the vocal recital was a province of the German composers, with an important French subjunct, and it was performed with a distinct elevation in tone and attitude.

Today, there is hardly a week during the New York performing season that does not include vocal recitals, often several, and all which attract audiences. Indeed, the fifteen-year-old New York Festival of Song, founded by Michael Barrett and Steven Blier, which performs in the small Weill Hall of Carnegie Hall and in the larger Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, is usually sold out to an enthusiastic crowd.

In addition, singers (especially English-speaking) who only rarely performed this repertory are doing so far more often and more thoroughly. Whereas earlier a Schubert group might appear along with a whole roster of nineteenth-century operatic chestnuts on an opera singer’s concert list, today the Schubert group is the only nineteenth-century contribution to an entirely twentieth-century song program. Although the recording of classical music has severely declined in the past