Christmas comes but once a year, and so does the opportunity to hear Julia Migenes sing holiday songs in a cabaret setting. To listen to that magnificent operatic voice within the close confines of an intimate room is quite an experience — special, awe-inspiring and unbelievably beautiful, almost like a private recital in someone’s living room in Elizabethan times.

Half of her performance consisted of Christmas songs from Germany, while the second half consisted primarily of more traditional carols. But Migenes also stepped out of opera mode for a handful of songs.

There were: “Santa Baby” (Joan Javits/Philip Springer), sung with a very Eartha Kitt-like purr and a few moments of very un-diva-like pole dancing in front of the on-stage Christmas tree;  “The 12 Days of Christmas,” in which she got through only five days before acknowledging that she couldn’t sing any more for reasons unexplained; and her finale, “The Christmas Song” (Mel Tormé/Bob Wells), which she sang simply, sincerely and, as is her style, intensely.

She also used a deeper, more natural voice for a gospel turn on “Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” a traditional African-American spiritual in which she “got down” à la Tina Turner with some rhythmic thigh slapping.

Asking her audience, rhetorically, why a Puerto Rican lady is so in love with classical German music, she answered her own question, saying it was because she had spent seven years studying in Vienna as a young woman. She made it clear how much she enjoys that music, swaying with the rhythms and completely lost in the melodies.

During the classical portion of her show, she sang: an uplifting “Laudate Dominum” by Mozart and also his “Ave Verum”; “What Child Is This?” (by William Chatterton Dix, written and sung to the tune of “Greensleeves”);   and a snippet of “O Tannebaum” (Ernst Anschutz).  She donned a halo and angel wings to sing “Vom Himmel Hoch” (Martin Luther) — in keeping with German Christmas tradition, she told the audience.  Accompanying her during the classical section was Victoria Kirsch.

With David Arana taking over as pianist for the rest of the show, Migenes sang a series of familiar Christmas carols, including “Silent Night,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” “The First Noel,” and a truly magnificent “Angels We Have Heard on High,” with its “glorious” chorus.  If it isn’t blasphemous to say so, Migenes also sang the hell out of “O Holy Night.”

While acting reserved and refined during her serious songs, Migenes showed her down-to-earth side between songs, telling one tableful of diners, “I’ve sung in the great halls of Germany and Renaissance churches but never before with people eating ice cream in front of me.”

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
December 20, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org