A Silver Cord If you care for music and get around town, you may find your peregrinations startlingly linked by a silver cord of pure, soaring radiance. At Miriani’s Restaurant (2208 N 45th St, near the Guild 45th), or Leo Melina Ristorante di Mare (96 Union St, downtown), the sapient sibyl crooning the pitfalls of precarious love into a collective bittersweet may seem familiar, if hard to place—perhaps at the Camlann Medieval Fair, as the standout among The Sisters, spiriting up some rowdy troubadour ditty or the long-breathed, mystic rapture of Hildegard of Bingen with equal persuasiveness. If you have a grateful ear and a good memory, you may also recall a similarity between the chick charming up the crackling sentiment of the old Gershwin, Porter, and Berlin standards at Star's on the occasional Saturday night and certain moments of conspicuous and moving brilliance in last season's Stabat Mater (Dvorák) with Orchestra Seattle/Seattle Chamber Singers under director George Shangrow in the Isley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall of the fabulous new Benaroya Hall. That’s Rebekkah Graves, and you may also have heard her in Puccini and Verdi—"those masters of heartbreak and humor"—at various dinner concerts, or singing Brahms with the Northwest Mahler Festival Orchestra, or as the soprano soloist for the Shangrow-led Mozart Requiem last spring, or taken in some of her numerous recitals and caught her larking the silver linings of Debussy’s atmospheric songs or winging the poetry of Verlaine with exquisite passion in settings by Debussy’s neglected contemporary, Charles Bordes. And it will please you to know that the versatile Ms. Graves is also a charming, interesting person whose sensuous beguilements as host of the weekend Music Through the Night programs on KING-FM 98.1 replace the usual funereal presentation of classical music with an appropriate grace. Our gain, in fact, is theology’s loss, for Ms. Graves also harbors an equal passion for the "queen of the sciences," as it used to be called, though in her day job she is a senior computer technical support manager and documentation author. And, when time allows, she is also an accomplished poet, whose cycle of poems, Rachel Rising, may be read at her literary website, http://www.DragonFriend.com. And wanting to take them to your heart, she’s commissioned composer Dr. C. Tim Blickhan to edge them in ardent lyricism. Then, there’s the scholar-artist. Happening upon the songs of the wholly forgotten Charles Bordes (1863-1909) came the thrill of recognition…the world evoked by Proust and exalted in the lyrics of Verlaine—the grand passions, nostalgia, irony, joys, and regrets—refracted in music balancing poise and ardor to make the missing note in the major chord hovering between Debussy and Fauré. With something of the crusader combined with the sure, sheer instinct of the performing artist, Ms. Graves has made Bordes her own, tracking down his long unavailable music, mastering it, performing it in recitals and on the air on KING-FM's Live! by George show, and preparing to record his complete songs. Coming up this season, she’ll be heard in Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music in Orchestra Seattle/Seattle Chamber Singers' opening concert on the main stage of Benaroya, the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, in October, and Samuel Barber’s insightful and colorful setting of the words of James Agee in Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra in February, and numerous other engagements to be announced. If Rebekkah Graves gives the impression of being in a bewildering number times and places at once, she may be recognized in any one of them by her pure, soaring, silvery radiance. Hear her. Adrian Corleonis 20 September, 1999 |