Review of baritone Randall Scarlata’s Kennedy Center Terrace Theatre recital on January 16, 2002, which included my Men With Small Heads cycle and the premiere of Long Pond Revisited — with pianist Cameron Stowe and cellist Marcy Rosen.
On Thursday night, baritone Randall Scarlata joined forces with the adept and responsive pianist Cameron Stowe for a program of works by Schubert, Brahms, Poulenc, Marc Blitzstein and the contemporary American composers Lori Laitman and David Baker… He brought aching maturity to Brahms and daffy, childlike bewilderment to Laitman’s “Men With Small Heads” and “Refrigerator, 1957” (to texts by Thomas Lux that throw off loopy verbal sparks like so many Roman candles)…The world premiere of Laitman’s “Long Pond Revisited” was a melancholy pleasure. In this setting of five elegiac poems by C.G.R. Shepard, Scarlata was joined by the cellist Marcy Rosen. The words are declaimed in a direct and straightforward manner, while the cello follows the voice like an abstracted soul, reacting inwardly to the outward expressions of nostalgia and sorrow. The ending was nothing less than a masterstroke: After the last words had finished, the cello twitched on for a moment and then faded to an empty, nerveless open chord, and it was over. I was reminded of one of those deathbed scenes in the movies where the life line on the hospital monitor suddenly goes flat. Incredibly, in an instant the loved one is gone, the poetry is lost and the world is gray.