Call this unfinished business. Jonas Kaufmann won his spurs as
the Royal Opera audience’s favourite tenor when he sang Don José
in Carmen in 2006, but he hasn’t sung a French role in London
since.
The German tenor withdrew from a run of Berlioz’s Les
Troyens in 2012 and plans for him to sing the hero of
Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the Paris Opera last year
went similarly awry. With big, heavy roles such as Verdi’s
Otello behind him and Wagnerian summits to come (Tristan looms,
ominously), it’s unlikely that he will be able to attempt these
characters now or revisit other lyrical French parts that he has
sung with distinction elsewhere.
So here is, instead,
L’Opéra, a grand celebration of 19th-century French opera, with
fine support from Kaufmann’s “home” band, Munich’s Bayerisches
Staatsorchester, and two other star singers, the baritone
Ludovic Tézier and the soprano Sonya Yoncheva. The good news is
that it’s probably Kaufmann’s most thoughtful and effective
album recital since he moved to Sony in 2013. Oh, and for once
the publicity shots don’t make him look like a refugee from the
Boden catalogue.
Most of the men here are dreamers and
chancers, filled with desire or ambition, refusing to face the
hard slap of reality. Here’s Gounod’s Roméo, possibly a little
husky and grave to be the Veronese teenager wild on hormones,
and there’s Massenet’s Werther, sounding a little weathered, but
certainly terminally depressed in his celebrated lament,
Pourquoi me réveiller.
In those very lyrical numbers
Kaufmann’s voice moves a little more creakily than it used to,
and his vocal registers don’t always sound ideally knitted. Yet
there should be no carping at his finely judged phrasing, his
psychological acuity and, when he hits a sweet spot, sheer
seductive swagger. His and Tézier’s searing delivery of the
famous duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers is as good as any you
will hear on record.
For a rarity, by contrast, try the
sweet, sad aubade from Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys or a prayerful
declaration of love from Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon. His encounter
with Massenet’s manipulative Manon (Yoncheva on luscious form)
is frustrating only for its brevity.
As the repertoire
gets heavier, so the album builds to a terrific climax. There’s
something of Kaufmann’s newly acquired Otello in O Souverain,
from Massenet’s Le Cid. A father’s lament from Halevy’s La Juive
has an unbridled ferocity. To finish there’s a double whammy of
Berlioz. First, the haunted, hunted hero of La Damnation de
Faust, and then the pugnacious, self-deluding Aeneas from Les
Troyens. What a pity this role was the one that got away.
