Joyce El Khoury And Brian Jagde: Tiny Desk Concert

Here during NPR Music, we don’t levy an awful lot of boundary when it comes to hosting musicians and their instruments behind (and spasmodic on tip of) Bob Boilen’s desk. We’ve shoehorned in concert organs and 11-piece go-go bands, and hosted harp players, pipa virtuosos and jazz coronet combos, though never show singers — until now.

Soprano Joyce El-Khoury and effort Brian Jagde are young, fresh-faced show singers during a emergence of earnest careers. El-Khoury has already seemed during New York’s Metropolitan Opera, while Jagde has sung roles in smaller houses here and in Europe.

When they concluded to move a small Puccini to a NPR Music offices, El-Khoury and Jagde were both singing during a Castleton Festival, a three-week summer song showcase and training belligerent for immature musicians. It’s run by a princely conductor Lorin Maazel and set on his large estate in a rolling hills of Rappahannock County, Va., about an hour’s expostulate south of Washington, D.C. Miloš Repickný assimilated a dual singers during a reliable electric piano.

The festival has been clever on Puccini, interjection partly to El-Khoury, whom we saw sing brilliantly in Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi dual seasons ago. For this Tiny Desk performance, she reprises her purpose of Lauretta in a latter show by singing a strike aria “O mio babbino caro,” in that she pleads with her father to let her marry her boyfriend. Listen for El-Khoury’s unblemished control of dynamics. Her soft, pianissimo records are dulcet and well-supported by a breath.

Jagde stairs adult subsequent for a series from Puccini’s Tosca — a opening effort aria, “Recondita armonia” — in that he muses about Tosca, his “dark-eyed mistress.” It takes a lot of work to sing it right, and Jagde produces a claim play and decibels.

The dual industrious singers tighten with a deliciously regretful duet that closes act one of Puccini’s La Bohème. “We’ve only depressed in love,” Jagde notes. “It happens unequivocally fast in a opera.” As their dual powerful, love-struck voices intertwine, a sounds of Puccini resonate off a walls of a whole fifth building — a good day in a office.

Set List:

• Puccini: “O mio babbino caro” (from Gianni Schicchi)
• Puccini:” Recondita armonia” (from Tosca)
• Puccini: “O soave fanciulla” (from La Bohème)

Personnel:

• Joyce El-Khoury, soprano
• Brian Jagde, tenor
• Miloš Repický, piano

Credits:

Producer: Tom Huizenga; Editor: Michael Katzif; Videographers: Michael Katzif and Tucker Walsh; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; print by Emily Bogle/NPR