San Francisco tenor Nicholas Phan to perform at Schroeder Hall

Critically acclaimed lyric tenor Nicholas Phan, 38, of San Francisco is equally at home on the operatic and the recital stage, where he uses his exquisite tonal purity and subtle palette of dynamics to enliven arias and songs alike.

As the founder and artistic director of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, Phan also has championed vocal chamber music, rescuing the genre of art song from the endangered species list.

“Of all the art forms, it’s the most human because it relies on the human voice,” he said of the art song repertoire. “Out of all the ways the voice can express itself, song is the most intimate and vulnerable and personal. It has the power to bring audiences together to be moved.”

Phan will raise his crystalline voice to perform a series of Schubert songs at 3 p.m. Saturday at Schroeder Hall during the first half of a program presented by Valley of the Moon Music Festival concert series. After intermission, festival founders Tanya Tomkins, cello, and Eric Zivian, fortepiano, will gather a few musical friends to present Schubert’s beloved String Quintet in C Major.

Throughout his short career, Phan has garnered all kinds of awards, including NPR’s Favorite New Artist of 2011. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2009 on three hours’ notice, performing the tenor solo in Haydn’s “Creation” with Helmuth Rilling and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

“It was a galvanizing moment,” he said. “I had never sung the piece in German before, and I’d only performed it once in English, so it was basically a new piece.”

For this weekend’s recital, Phan will perform three sets of Schubert songs that represent some of the composer’s favorite themes: springtime, Greek mythology and a piece about a young man leaving home and going off to sea.

“There are over 600 Schubert lieder,” Phan said. “In the days before we had recordings, composers would get famous by writing for the household.”

These days, with eight recordings to his own name, Phan has become a vocal phenomenon, hailed by the New York Times as a “major new Britten interpreter” and the Boston Globe as “one of the world’s most remarkable singers.”

Here are excerpts from an phone interview with Phan from his home on a hilltop overlooking Castro and Noe valleys.

Q: You started out on the violin. When did you switch?

A: It was a gradual transition ... when I started playing in orchestra about age 11, I realized you could make music with other people, and I caught the music bug. At 14, I auditioned for “The Music Man,” and the drama bug bit. I went to Interlochen Music Camp at age 15, and I realized that I wanted to be a singer, not an actor ... It was a calling. This was my instrument.”

Q: How much does a singer depend on voice vs. training?

A: There’s a great deal of technique and training that goes into it, but you gotta have the instrument ... so I feel lucky to have what I do inside my body. And I tell students often that technique is for bad days. That’s what’s going to get you through it.

Q: What have been the biggest breakthrough moments in your career?

A: I was really lucky and made my professional debut with the Chicago Symphony under Zubin Mehta. They were doing (a concert version) of Berlioz’s (opera) “The Trojans,” and they needed a tenor to sing this aria with a very high, exposed C ... I was 23 at the time and still in school at the Manhattan School of Music on the Upper West Side.

Q: Tell us about the Schubert songs you will be singing in this concert.

A: What’s great about the songs is that they were the first to lift the simple song into high chamber music. The piano writing is so sophisticated compared to what came before, and I’m very excited to collaborate with Eric.

Q: You’ve worked a lot with period instruments like those played by the musicians from Valley of the Moon Music Festival. How does that change the sound palette?

A: Things become more transparent, and phrasing becomes clear, because of the limitations of the period instruments ... there’s an intimacy there that makes the music more personal in a way, and that’s perfect for Schroeder Hall ... there’s no better place to hear this music with these instruments than in that gem of a hall.

Q: What is the challenge of singing these songs in German?

A: I really try and communicate as directly with the audience as possible when I perform songs like this. On the opera stage, there is a fourth wall, and you have to portray the story and you have to act. This is a much more intimate, direct form of communication, and that’s why I’m so passionate about it.

Q: Why do you think art song is an endangered art form?

A: Part of the reason it has suffered is the challenge of the text. When I was growing up, there were always liner notes you could refer to for a deeper understanding. Now we stream music, and swipe right or left like we’re on a dating app, and our interaction is not the same as it used to be. A song requires your ears and your eyes to take in a text. When that’s not there, it kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

Staff writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 707-521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @dianepete56.