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Opera News, December 2014
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ERIC MYERS |
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Jonas Kaufmann: “You Mean the World to Me” |
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Germany
was a great mine for musicals during the early-talkie era, when
a spirit of insouciance and experimentation dominated. An army
of fine songwriters — many of them Jewish — was recruited from
theaters, cabarets and operetta stages to provide scores for
newly-minted film-musical stars such as Lillian Harvey, Willy
Fritsch, Joseph Schmidt, Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth.
Jonas Kaufmann pays loving tribute to those days, as well as to
the heady twilight of the operetta era, in this delightful CD of
songs written between the wars for stage and screen by Franz
Lehár, Mischa Spoliansky, Robert Stoltz, Ralph Benatzky and
others. A labor of love on all fronts, it features some numbers
in their original orchestrations and, when none could be found,
new ones created in relatively faithful period style by Andreas
N. Tarkmann. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin was brought
in to back up Kaufmann, stretching or reducing the number of its
players according to the specifics of each song. Their love of
performing this music shows in their spirited playing and the
idiomatic conducting of Jochen Rieder. After all, what’s notto
love? These are irresistible tunes, delivered by Kaufmann with
warmth and panache.
Most selections are sung in the
original German, although a few of the most popular are in
English; Lehár’s “Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss”and “You Are
My Heart’s Delight”and Benatzky’s tango “It Would Be Wonderful
Indeed” are among them. At the end of the disc, as an encore,
Kaufmann sings “You Are My Heart’s Delight” in French, as “Je
t’ai donné mon coeur.”
It’s a pleasure hearing Kaufmann
render many of these love songs in a gentle croon, crescendoing
to a fuller sound only for emphasis. He shows this to full
advantage in Lehár’s sweet “My Little Nest of Heavenly Blue,”
from Frasquita,here sung in an English translation by 1930s
radio musicologist Sigmund Spaeth.
The title song of
this CD was written by the great tenor operetta star Richard
Tauber. It came from Tauber’s operetta Der Singende Traum, and
it is a gem, with a lovely, gentle melody that is enhanced by
the sweetness of Kaufmann’s delivery. “Das Lied vom Leben des
Schrenk,” from Eduard Künneke’s Die Grosse Sünderin,allows
Kaufmann to pull out all the operatic stops in a swashbuckling
aria originally written for Helge Rosvaenge.
Kaufmann is
joined by soprano Julia Kleiter for three duets, the most
charming of which is “Diwanpuppchen,” from Paul Abraham’s Blume
von Hawaii. He is clearly enjoying himself here, cutting loose
with “Doo doo doo” nonsense syllables in this sprightly
syncopated foxtrot.
The best track on the album is
Emmerich Kálmán’s haunting “Grüss mir mein Wien,” from Gräfin
Mariza, a nostalgic, waltz-time love song to Vienna and its
charms. Written in 1924, it expressed a longing for a Vienna
that had simply ceased to exist after World War I. Kálmán, of
course, was unaware of the devastation that was still to come.
Today, the song stands as the farewell to an entire era, and
Kaufmann sings it with great affection and real tenderness.
Kaufmann has said he wants to record more of this kind of music.
Let’s hope he does, and soon.
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