Adult Themes
Greta Feeney and Robert Behrman court old and new fans of classical music with a ribald and romantic take on the genre
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
Not all of classical music is white-gloved. Some of it gets its hands dirty, and opera soprano and actor Greta Feeney and pianist Robert Behrman are synching their musical breaths in the hopes of proving this to you at a Coffin School concert this week, courtesy of the Nantucket Arts Council.

The evening will include selections of work by Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber (including "A Green Lowland of Pianos") and Stephen Sondheim, as well as more contemporary and even experimental Cabaret Songs by William Bolcom. The Bolcom pieces feature the poetry of Arnold Weinstein, including "He Tipped the Waiter," "Song of Black Max (As Told to the de Kooning Boys)," "George" and "Waitin."

Feeney grew up on island. A prodigious young singer who saw a future in music, she got accepted to Juilliard and then to the Adler Fellowship program at the San Francisco Opera. Well educated on her subject - literate to the fringes - she returned to the island last year for a Nora Ephron kind of homecoming. While teaching at the NCMC/ Nantucket School of Music, Feeney met the smart, quirky and wholly original Behrman, who also teaches music classes at the school. The new music director at First Congregational Church, Behrman had just moved here from St. Louis, with a New Yorker magazine tucked under his arm and a cabbie hat on his head. It was fortuitous that he met someone who could speak the same language. Collaboration was inevitable. And it was inevitable that the material steer toward the new and exciting, and not avoid a run-in with sex.

"To me, that's really important, because that's a part of high art. ...with classical music, for some reason, [sex] has to be couched, explained or justified. But it's a huge part of the human experience," said Feeney, who added that her professors at Juilliard would tell her to sing from a libidinal place - even on a completely non-sexual song - in order to energize a performance. "The first time I was put on the spot with this, I had Opera Studio class with Frank Corsaro. I decided to sing a song by Strauss that made me feel really strong. ... I remember him just looking at me and saying, 'What are you singing about? Who are you singing to? And I said, 'My brother.' And he said, 'Your brother? I want you to back into that piano and hold onto it. I want you to think about sex when you're singing this song.' And I'd say, 'The song has nothing to do with that.' And he'd say, 'I don't care. That's your subtext. You know what the words mean, you know the song, and you've done this a million times; its rote. I'm telling you to add something underneath it, to buoy it up and give it life.' It doesn't change that much of the song, and it gives you a sense of being alive and helps you connect with your body."

Behrman, as you may already suspect, agreed. "You have to love what you're doing, and it's extremely intimate to be performing with somebody else, or even a few other people," Behrman said. "And then there's the sense that performers are engaged in some really intimate exercise with their audience. Sex as a metaphor works well for all of that. The whole experience of hearing music should feel sexy and cool, because that's what art does - deeply, powerfully and right in that spot of you where sex and love and all of that sits. But for some reason, the kind of music we do has become like Greek sculpture with the arms chopped off. And being young people who love this music; we understand that we want it to be sexy."

To listen to them discuss classical music is to see gas and fire having a conversation. Though the two have their disagreements - like whether Strauss, a brilliant composer but also a Nazi-sympathizer, can still be found appealing. In fact, they have differing views on a lot of things, which is probably why they can talk for hours about the state of classical music the way children on Halloween night discuss candy.

"Maybe we are guilty of overemphasizing the sexual aspect," Feeney said. "It's not all sexual. The Sondheim is romantic and deals with the complexity of adult relationships. While the Bolcom is graphic, flat out dirty. But also very clever and intellectual."

"And wonderful," Behrman said. "How often do you get to listen to songs about transvestites?"

The twosome is celebrating the ribald elements of the classical genre not because they are one-track-minded, but because they know the themes that have the most universal and powerful draw to new and young listeners. They want to recruit new listeners to classical music via their love of the romantic more than they want to connect listeners to the romantic via their love of classical music. And they're doing

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Robert Behrman, left, and Greta Feeney, right, on their respective sides of the piano.

this because they want it to last. Because they love it.

"I actually crave it," said Feeney, who wants her music students at Nantucket High School to feel the same way. "I think, when I'm at school, 'God, if I could just find 12 minutes to listen to the final trio from 'Der Rosenkavalier' and close my office door,

it would be the greatest pleasure." I
When: Saturday, March 3, 8 p.m.
Where: Coffin School, 4 Winter Street
Cost: $15 (NAC members); $20 (non-members)
For more information, 325-8588.