As a burly Samoan-born teenager growing up in New Zealand, Pene Pati tried out for the rugby team. But his school had a rule: To play on the team, you had to sing in the choir. The result, Pati recalled in a short documentary, was a choir stocked with beefy young men and a rugby team “who sang their own anthem on the field and then would go out and kill the other team.”
The policy also created one of the most unlikely and charismatic stars on the classical scene. Pati has won critic’s awards and audience ovations on international stages including the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in January as the Duke in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” A video of his “Nessun dorma” has garnered over 300 thousand views, with commenters comparing his plush tone and unforced bright top notes to Pavarotti. A new album of Neapolitan songs reinforces the comparison to that star tenor.
On Wednesday in the Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory, Pati made his New York recital debut with an idiosyncratic program of French, English and German songs that showcased his voluptuous lyric tenor and a true chamber musician’s sensitivity to the color and nuances of language. His particular affinity for French poetry came through in the first half’s works by Fauré, Henri Duparc and Lili Boulanger. With crisp diction and idiomatically supple phrasing, he leaned into the sensuality of the language.
In Duparc’s “L’invitation au voyage,” where lovers dream of a land of sensuous delights, he lingered on the consonants of “volupté” with almost erotic relish. The three short songs of Fauré’s “Poème d’un jour” became a miniature drama tracing infatuation through heartbreak to resignation.
At the piano, Ronny Michael Greenberg was a sensitive and alert partner. In Duparc’s “Phidylé,” a song of suspended desire, Pati dialed his voice down until it seemed to nestle inside the piano’s texture, releasing it only in the final line — “reward me for my patience!” — with a thrilling surge of sound. In Boulanger’s “Clairières dans le ciel” (“Clearings in the sky”), Pati produced an airy, transparent sound that retained its reverential tenderness throughout the dips and jumps of the melody. Floated pianissimos and exquisitely controlled diminuendo are something of a signature of his art. In a voice of such natural amplitude the effect is startling, like a Kashmir shawl, spun so fine that it can be pulled through a finger ring.
The second half began with songs by the Victorian composer Roger Quilter, music of parlor prettiness on the page that Pati transformed into something deeper, imbuing them with radiant seriousness and an evident connection to their themes of gratitude and wonder.
The three Britten songs that followed were the highlight of the evening. In “The Last Rose of Summer,” Pati’s tone flickered between dark and light as he ornamented lines with a shiver that conjured the bleakness of Thomas Moore’s poetry. By contrast “The Choirmaster’s Burial” was animated by his expressive acting skills.
The Strauss selections were not as persuasive, the German less idiomatic, the delivery more external than inhabited. A few times, Pati pushed his voice into territory that felt showy. But the brief monodrama “Ach weh mir unglückhaftem Mann” about a penniless suitor’s fantasy of pulling up at his beloved’s house in a dashing carriage drew laughter with its vivid portrayal of multiple characters.
With his encores, Pati ended on a vulnerable note: “Amarilli, mia bella” by Giulio Caccini, rendered with moving restraint and directness; and a Samoan song, “Le manutagi e ua tagi ta’amilo,” about longing for home, which he dedicated to his father, who was often heard singing it. It was a touching gesture that both honored the songful legacy of his Samoan roots and acknowledged the personal cost of a dream career on stages far from New Zealand.
Pene Pati
Performed on Wednesday at the Armory.
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