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Maria Tecce
October 16, 2009
“Viva!”
Metropolitan Room – October 11
Maria Tecce arrived on the Metropolitan Room stage reciting a poem by Nobel Prize-winning Pablo Neruda, and that’s definitely something you don’t see or hear in too many other cabaret acts. The love ode, which Tecce recited in Spanish, includes a reference to “a butterfly cooing like a dove.” It’s not one of Neruda’s most felicitous phrases, and it certainly doesn’t describe what the Boston-based (after much time spent abroad) thrush proceeded to do during her one-night stay. There was absolutely no dove-like cooing.
Slim and dark with hair pulled dramatically back from her face and falling down her back in a long ponytail, Tecce wore black with a touch of red and launched into “Madreselva” (Carlos Gardel), which made me think I was about to see a set-long flamenco routine. I almost expected to hear the clacking staccato of flamenco heels. I didn’t, and later I realized Tecce performed most, or possibly all, of the songs bare-footed—also not an everyday intimate-room occurrence.
What I did see as the act unfolded was someone who would undoubtedly like to be described as fiery. She’s fiery, all right, a trait that worked for the first few songs, through which Tecce flashed her eyes and flung her right arm in the air (without benefit of castanets), but the ploy began to lose appeal when she got to “Sway” (Pablo Beltran Ruiz-Norman Gimbel), which she sang in English, swaying throughout. By then it became apparent that all the Latin-ized fire she was figuratively igniting wasn’t fueled by genuine emotion. Nor were matters helped when she cajoled an audience member to dance and sway along with her.
Tecce confirmed her lack of investment in the intention of lyrics when she launched into the Antonio Carlos Jobim “Triste” with its doleful message. In her rendition she gave no indication that anything in the least bit sad was affecting her. Her beg-off, Roy Orbison’s “Crying” (in Spanish), was another histrionic turn.
Tecce—who accompanied herself on the guitar several times while Ross Patterson at the piano went south of the border more than he is usually called upon to do—has a strong soprano into which nasal intonations creep every once in a while. She may talk more than she needs, or maybe it’s just that what she has to say isn’t always what an audience wants to hear. The story of how she was seduced in Barcelona by a bartender who turned out to be married fit the Too-Much-Information guideline.
I liked her best when she climbed on the piano, bare feet dangling, to sing Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy” slowly and mournfully. Interestingly, she sang more lyrics to it than most interpreters do—and that includes Nat Cole. At last she connected with a song’s pathos.
