Soprano, chamber music colleague

Soprano Susanna Phillips’ voice — as big, beautiful and amazingly versatile as it is — was not the main thing at the Chamber Music Milwaukee concert Wednesday evening.

The main thing was interaction of that voice with Todd Levy’s clarinet, Ted Soluri’s bassoon, Gregory Flint’s horn and Brian Zeger’s piano. She reacted not only to their tempos, but to their phrasing and the shading of their timbres. She sang like a chamber musician, and the wind players took on the expressive qualities of a fine and sensitive singer.

Phillips and Levy tuned in to each other as if by telepathy in Parto, parto, ma tu, ben mio, from Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, in an arrangement of R. Strauss’ Morgen that added clarinet (by way of encore), and especially in Lori Laitman’s I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a cycle of six songs on English translations of poems by inmates of Nazi concentration camps.

The Laitman cycle, for clarinet and voice only, is no less monstrously difficult and no less poignant for being understated. The voice and the clarinet play many different roles. Sometimes, the voice carries the line and the clarinet winds around it — sometimes, it’s vice versa. Bitter ironies lie in the weirdly cheery, vaguely klezmer clarinet parts when paired with the grim texts of Man Proposes, God Disposes and Yes, That’s the Way Things Are. The clarinet has mostly soft pedal tones, without vibrato, against an active voice part loaded with tritones — which Phillips hit with deadly accuracy — in the final song. Nothing about this music or these mood-perfect performances strained for effect. On the contrary, that last number came off as the haunting evidence of entropy overtaking the abandoned home of a victim of genocide.

Flint muted his horn into a velvet veil of sound in Schubert’s Auf dem Strom, a gorgeous and complex developing song about a sailor being carried away from his beloved on a river’s current. Each stanza intensifies as it varies the initial musical setting of the poem, a profound and beautiful text by Johann Gabriel Seidl. The piano drives the mood, and Zeger managed the ever-rising tide of emotion expertly. Phillips rode that tide with that magical combination of utter musical control and utter emotional abandon. At the climax, the river thrusts the sailor into a roiling sea, which Schubert draws in heaving piano arpeggios and an outburst in the horn. In a transcendent denouement, the sailor finds peace in the starry night sky.

Phillips, officially a dramatic coloratura, showed a mezzo range and impressive heft in Ah! no peines, from Cherubini’s Médée. Soluri responded in kind to her richness and beautifully shaped phrases.

Flint and Zeger gave Phillips a break with the jolly virtuosity of Vaclav Nelhybel’s Scherzo Concertante, a fleet juggernaut of motor-rhythms studded with toe-stubbing breaks and meter changes. Levy and Zeger offered as Romantically dreamy and meditative a reading of Schumann’s Three Romances as you will ever hear.

Phillips and Zeger finished the evening with five varied Richard Strauss songs. In the more ardent songs — Rote Rosen, Ich Trage meine Minne, Cäcille — they brought out the contrast between the conversational, expository passages that wind the spring and the soaring melodies and attendant momentum that release the energy.

Even as a songwriter, Strauss thought like an opera composer, and Phillips gave herself some leeway to play the diva more than the chamber musician. She can act, too, and found just the right scale for the occasion. In Muttertändelei, she prattled on about her perfect child not as a braggart, but as a young mom breathless with enthusiasm and utterly charming for it. She surged with the phrases of the passionate songs. My favorite of all was her charged stillness in Freundliche Vision, on a be-here-now poem by Otto Julius Bierbaum: And I walk with one who loves me, in a peaceful mood in the coolness of this white house, in which peace awaits our arrival, full of beauty. In these lines, Bierbaum would bottle the holy awareness of a moment. Phillips, her voice exquisitely soft and high and her face transported, filled the hall with such awareness and gave us such a moment.

This program, given at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Zelazo Center, is part of the Chamber Music Milwaukee series. Which you should certainly check out.