Soprano Ava Pine has won accolades around the world for her operatic performances, but she still calls Texas home. She grew up on 50 acres of land in Fredericksburg, where she says she enjoyed singing country music with her father.
Pine’s first exposure to classical music came through singing in a choir; her love of the theatrical experience was sparked by musicals at the Majestic Theatre, and watching people who felt “so strongly about things that they just had to sing!”
Those early experiences still fueled Pine’s performance for the Tuesday Musical Club at the Laurel Heights United Methodist Church a couple of weeks ago.
During a recital that covered songs by Fernando Obradors, Samuel Barber, and Francis Poulenc, Pine moved and gestured to the crowd of 200, “acting” out the music as she sang. “There’s nothing more boring than someone just standing there and singing with their hands clasped in a holy pose in front of their sternum,” Pine explained after the concert.
“I bring what I feel and what I think the music is trying to say to what I’m doing, and that is what will make a successful performance. I’m concentrating very hard, but also having a lot of fun.”
Pine’s recital included music from Lieder und Gesägne by Gustav Mahler, a composer chiefly known for his large-scale symphonies like the Titan and Resurrection.
“These [songs] were ever only written for piano, and they’re very folksy,” said Pine. “There’s kind of an earthy feel in them as well, the characters in it. Hans and Grethe are silly, lusty people, and they’re fun to play. Des Knaben Wunderhorn was poetry collected on the Rhine river, and folk poetry is great fun, and he really captures that well in his settings.”
To close her program, Pine performed a series of cabaret songs written by composers better known for their otherwise “serious” classical fare, like Francis Poulenc and Benjamin Britten. Pine acknowledged the writing skills of the composers, saying, “The Britten [song I performed] could be a Cole Porter tune. And Cole Porter, for all his brilliance, couldn’t have written that.”
Listen to all this brilliance for yourself in the links on this page, and be sure to visit Ava Pine’s website at avapine.com.
