Paul Sperry, a tenor who championed little-known American artwork music and spiky recent works, and who was once praised for his incisive performances of the classics, died on June 13 in Long island. He was once 90.
His loss of life, in a sanatorium, was once led to via center failure, his son Ethan stated.
In a self-discipline the place his friends tended to persist with tried-and-true German and French classics from the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Mr. Sperry carved out a distinct segment, making a song songs via dwelling composers from his personal nation. However he additionally took on one of the most maximum tricky late-Twentieth-century Europeans, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze, who have been kept away from via many singers. That boldness, his son recalled, earned him stable paintings.
Mr. Sperry, a Harvard Industry Faculty graduate who eschewed a profession in actual property and became to making a song, his old flame, in his past due 20s, was once a low-key performer who constantly earned prime marks from tune critics over 3 many years. They cited his clever option to music, his figuring out of texts and his imaginative systems.
“Paul Sperry is a true connoisseur’s singer — he may not have the most glamorous tenor voice imaginable, but he does some wonderful things with it, and his programing is always interesting and exploratory,” the critic Peter G. Davis wrote in The Unused York Occasions in 1975 in reviewing a recital of lieder, together with works via little-known 18th century composers who preceded Schubert.
When critics discovered fault along with his accentuation — Mr. Sperry was once maximum relaxed in deeper registers — they nonetheless praised the mind and musicianship in the back of it.
“Further up, the voice turns grainy, gritty and constricted. Even then, his interpretative virtues are so pronounced that it hardly much matters,” John Rockwell wrote in The Times in 1977.
“Those virtues,” Mr. Rockwell added, “start with a precise musicality in matters of pitch and rhythm, extend to a sensitively intuitive gift for phrasing and continue with a solid linguistic command — 11 languages — and a nice feeling for dramatic sentiment.”
Mr. Sperry extremely joyful in appearing showy, frequently Broadwayesque works via little-known composers he was once near to, akin to Tom Cipullo and Robert Beaser, in addition to the mocking, angular works of American classics just like the songs of Charles Ives. Critics had prime honour for Mr. Sperry’s consideration to phrases; in Francis Poulenc’s music “Montparnasse,” based on the poem via Guillaume Apollinaire, his diction was once impeccable and he was once alive to the nuances of Apollinaire’s wry surrealism.
However he was once maximum attracted to American tune. “Whether I’m singing Theodore Chanler, or Richard Hundley, or Paul Bowles, or Arthur Farwell, or what have you, I’m pounding the drum for American music because I think it’s wonderful,” Mr. Sperry told the music critic Bruce Duffie in 1989. “I feel that I’m doing something that I do better than other people — not better than everybody, but it’s where I feel I have something really special to offer.”
Critics in another country additionally spotted. Writing in Gramophone, the British classical tune booklet, in 1981, Edward Greenfield praised Mr. Sperry’s “fine singing” in a recording of his premiere efficiency of Leonard Bernstein’s “Dybbuk” suite. There have been many alternative premieres all over his profession, a lot of them American works, together with “Canti del Sole” via Bernard Rands, which gained the Pulitzer Prize for tune in 1984. Mr. Henze, Bruno Maderna and William Bolcom had been a number of the prominent composers who wrote for him.
Mr. Sperry additionally had a complete profession as an teacher, educating American music and the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century music repertoire on the Juilliard Faculty and the Long island Faculty of Song. “Paul was very special to me,” Daybreak Upshaw, the distinguished American soprano, wrote in a observe to Mr. Sperry’s son next his loss of life. “A mentor and an inspiration in my early professional life.”
Mr. Sperry had mini endurance for court cases, from both listeners or performers, in regards to the difficulties of modern tune. “What young singers are really saying when they say that is that they don’t want to work that hard!” he advised the tune critic Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe in 1992. “It does take time and effort, and sometimes the music is not well written — usually I can tell if a piece isn’t well written because I can’t tell if I’m off, and the composer can’t either!”
Paul John Sperry was once born on April 14, 1934, in Chicago to Leonard Sperry, a a success businessman who contributed to the advance of the Xerox system, and Rose (Adler) Sperry. He attended the Putney Faculty in Vermont and graduated from Harvard School in 1956 with some extent in psychology and from Harvard Industry Faculty in 1959 with an M.B.A.
Mr. Sperry studied French civilization on the Sorbonne and took making a song courses with the famend French baritone Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc’s spouse, in Paris. They remained near till Mr. Bernac’s loss of life in 1979. Mr. Sperry made his Unused York recital debut at Alice Tully Corridor in 1969.
He would proceed directly to sing in every single place the arena; produce diverse recordings, together with of Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which his son stated he thought to be the height of music; and bring together and edit 8 books of American music.
Along with his son Ethan, Mr. Sperry is survived via two alternative sons, Raphael and Joshua; a brother, Leonard; a sister, Deborah Goldyne; and 7 grandchildren. His spouse, the sculptor Ann Sperry, died in 2008.
“If my dad had had his way, he would have been the great American lieder singer, but nobody wanted that,” Ethan Sperry recalled. “He fell into American contemporary music, and that was the best thing that ever happened to him. He kept on saying, ‘I love Schubert, but I never get to talk to him.’”
