Mostly Mozart 2019 Festival Review: ‘A Little Night Music’ with Susanna Phillips & Myra Huang
“After the lights dimmed and the cocktail chatter faded, Phillips and Huang strode onstage, diving straight into a lovely rendition of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s “Morning Serenade.” The quick, fluttering opening was met by the warm, inviting phrases from Phillips, whose command of the German language heard expression through the way she crisply bit into certain consonants while smoothing out sections that were more lyrical.
As Phillips laid out the imagery, the phrase “a pair of doves coo to me their delight; yet I turn away,” bore a soft, envious tone that was bittersweet and vocally lovely; these feelings of separation carried through the piece, as Phillips molded her sorrow to either quickened delivery of the text, or to more lugubrious legato, as heard in the way she sadly extended the single word tear in the phrase “And a lonely tear quivers more fervently down my cheek.”