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Presto News, 11 September 2015 |
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Jonas Kaufmann sings Puccini |
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I'm
writing this week's newsletter on the way to London for what must be one of
the most eagerly-awaited Last Nights of the Proms in recent memory, thanks
to a very special guest singer: the German tenor Jonas Kaufmann in his first
major appearance at the festival, who will crown the proceedings with his
long-awaited 'Nessun dorma'. It just so happens that his new album of
Puccini arias, recorded with Antonio Pappano and his Santa Cecilia
Orchestra, is released today...
I don't think I can recall another
new release which has received quite so much air-time in the Presto office,
and not solely from my speakers (a few days after it arrived I was on the
verge of rationing one of my colleagues to one track per day, and that only
as a treat once deadlines had been met!).
The roughly chronological
selection of arias (including music from all of Puccini's operas barring
Suor Angelica, for the very good reason that it contains no male roles) is
split fairly equally between roles which Kaufmann has made his own over the
past decade, and those which he's never sung on stage. Unlike his recent
Verdi album, which featured several teasers of things to come, most of the
latter are things he's unlikely to take on in a full production – the early
operas Le Villi and Edgar get relatively few outings anyway, and few
casting-directors would hire him as Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi these days
(the role's typically cast with an emerging lightish lyric tenor, though I
love the hot-headed, slightly sardonic impetuosity that Kaufmann brings to
his swaggering paean to the new, upwardly-mobile Florence).
There are
also a couple of roles which he's more or less retired from his stage
repertoire: it's good to have his mature takes on Ruggero from La Rondine
(one of his breakthrough roles) and Rodolfo (clearly a bit of a player here
– his suggestion that he and Mimi skip pre-Christmas drinks with friends in
favour of an early night comes off with the wry charm of one who knows he's
pushing his luck). But where the disc really scores is in the true spinto
roles in his current repertoire: the red-hot love-scene from Manon Lescaut
is if anything even more scorching than it was at Covent Garden (the DVD of
this production is out next month, incidentally), and Dick Johnson's baleful
farewell to life and to Minnie from La fanciulla del West is also one of the
stand-outs. And what of 'Nessun dorma', the aria which Kaufmann has regarded
as a sort of holy of holies until now? Well, on this evidence Calaf could
well be his greatest Puccini role of the lot, and the snapshot we get here
left me itching to hear him sing it complete.
Kaufmann may be an
artist capable of immense interpretative subtlety, but as with his earlier
discs of Verismo and Verdi he never short-changes in terms of the
heart-on-sleeve theatricality that so much of this music demands. But this
is no broad-brush one-size-fits-all sentimentality, and everything is done
in the service of characterisation: the sobs in the voice as Pinkerton bids
farewell to his glorified holiday-home in Japan underlines the feckless
naval officer's melodramatic self-pity, and the breathless sotto voce as Des
Grieux gets smacked by Cupid's arrow in the first track catches the young
student's naïve ardour to perfection.
You'd have to try pretty hard,
I think, not to enjoy this disc immensely, at least if you modify your
memory to erase any traces of Pavarotti (or indeed any of Kaufmann's
brighter-voiced contemporaries such as Joseph Calleja and Roberto Alagna) in
this repertoire: Puccini's tenor writing is often associated with a rather
more 'golden' sound than Kaufmann's essentially coppery one, but once you
adjust to that everything's glorious. Roll on tomorrow evening, when
Kaufmann will surely share Calaf's triumph.
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