By David Gordon Duke, the Vancouver Sun, 24 April 2010

It’s not just the hockey season that’s both gearing up and winding down. Until early June our classical calendar is jam-packed with “last concerts of the season”— not to mention tantalizing glimpses of treats in store next fall.

Both the Vancouver Symphony and the Vancouver Recital Society offer major late-season productions: a fine Szymanowski/Bruckner double bill at the Orpheum, May 1/2/3, and the long-awaited recital of bass-baritone Gerald Finley at the Chan May 6.

Finley is certainly at the top of his game. This year alone he has sung at the Metropolitan Opera and toured in recital; just last month he premiered Peter Lieberson’s Songs of Love and Sorrow with the Boston Symphony.

Born in 1960, Finley grew up in Ottawa. In high school he contemplated a career in science before the lure of music proved too strong to resist. Canada is a major exporter of vocal talent; while it would be a bit far-fetched to wax rhapsodic over the “Canadian tenor” as a distinct species, it remains interesting that those best-of-breeds Jon Vickers and Ben Heppner are fundamentally known for their intensity and power. Finley combines his energy with considerable finesse. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross recently commented: “The greatest singers, from Callas to Sinatra, make words and music indivisible; even as the voice envelops you, the lyric is etched into your mind. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley has a similar gift.”

Finley has an illuminating take on his double career on the opera stage and in the recital hall. As he told BBC Radio 3’s Sean Rafferty: “I like to consider song recitals as a whole series of connected operatic scenes in microcosm. A group of songs is an adventure that the poet or the characters are experiencing, and the dramatic training that one has on the operatic stage is very useful in the recital situation. By the same token, the experience in the recital hall, where you’re having to refine emotions so that they’re not overblown in a small space, that can be very useful on the stage too, in not overplaying.” [Click here for the entire transcript of this BBC interview]

Finley’s Vancouver recital employs some fresh ideas in programming. The evening is centred around songs by Robert Schumann—a relative no-brainer, given the excellence of Schumann lieder and the fact that 2010 is the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. But Finley and pianist Julius Drake also offer some Ravel plus a significant chunk of the American repertoire, including a group of songs by another birthday boy, Samuel Barber (born 1910).

And, intriguingly, others by Charles Ives, who is not exactly standard rep for many singers. His thorny, highly individualist approach to every musical genre marks him as one of music history’s great mavericks. Songs with titles like “In the Alley” and “Slugging a Vampire” certainly grab your attention!