Building a voice recital program

First, some questions to be answered

What are your reasons for wanting to do a recital? Because your teacher, coach, friends etc. think you should are all unacceptable answers. You must also be aware that there are four potentially competing influences: what you want to choose for material, what your teacher wants you to do (to best show off your voice and his/her teaching abilities), what your accompanist wants or likes to play, and what your audience wants to hear. All these must be clearly defined, understood and reconciled.

Where are you in your singing career? Requirements for a "refresher" recital are different from those of a debut recital. A singer who has done much opera and little or no recital work faces another set of difficulties to be overcome.

What is the setting to be — a studio, a salon, a small or large concert hall? Required dynamics for projection and audience proximity must be taken into account. It makes little sense to design a program for a studio or salon, try it out, and then think it will be fine unaltered for a large hall.

What are your strong and weak points as a singer, both technically and interpretively? Take advantage of the strong points and allow for the weak ones.

Do you have any particular literary interests? Does the pianist have any particular musical interests? If so, consider them in the research phase.

How good are your acting and speaking abilities? Are you comfortable addressing the audience in a lecture-format recital setting? If your dramatic skills are weak (do not be mislead into thinking you don't need any), how do you intend to improve them?

Do you want to organize the recital around a theme? Examples include a composer's birthday or centennial, a poet, language, country, local composer, period in musical history, folk songs, etc.

Do you want to limit your recital to voice and piano, or are you willing to consider other ensembles? Are you interested in adding other elements to your recital — poetry readings, correlations with art from the same period, multimedia supporting presentations? Note this relates closely to question #1 — why are you doing a recital and what do you hope to have achieved when it's over?

Some things to do

Do not limit yourself prematurely in choice of material. Use "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", Coffin's "The Singer's Repertoire", and Eslinger's "Classical Vocal Music in Print" as a start in your research. Read through with your accompanist anything and everything that might be of interest.

Unless you have decided early on a narrowly-defined theme, emphasize variety in styles, languages, musical periods, tempi and keys.

Set a tentative date for your recital, otherwise you will procrastinate indefinitely.

When you have chosen a particular composer, learn as much as you can about that person's life and ideas. First-person sources such as letters and other writings can be especially enlightening.

Choose an opening group that will put you at ease and will slowly but surely establish rapport with the audience.

If you plan to have an intermission, the last work prior to it should make the audience look forward to returning for the rest. This is an opportunity to show off your versatility, language fluency, and ability to establish rapport with the audience.

Following next is an opportunity to show off your virtuosity, and the last section can be in your native language, or in the language that best meets the expectations of your audience.

Within each group, and within the context of the entire recital, program the climaxes logically and carefully. Do not underestimate the importance of this.

Plan well in advance what, if any, the encores will be.

When you and your accompanist have tentatively decided on the program, ask yourself objectively if it will do two things: allow you to communicate something of personal importance to your audience, and whether the audience will be enriched and entertained in the process of your doing so.

    © Copyright David Kelsey