Vienna, city of waltzes, operetta, schnitzel and Sachertorte.
Home to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms; Mahler,
Schoenberg, Berg and Korngold; Schiele, Klimt, Schnitzler and
Zweig; Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt and Freud. The polyglot crucible
of modernism, psychotherapy and, courtesy of an embittered art
student who paid rapt attention to the antisemitic rhetoric of
the mayor Karl Lueger, the most toxic political ideology of the
20th century.
In Wien, the unofficial sequel to his 2014
album Du bist die Welt für mich, Jonas Kaufmann could easily
have chosen a programme of songs and arias that offered nothing
more than touristic nostalgia for a place that was never as
liberal as it seemed. There is enough cream and sugar in his
selection of golden and silver-age serenades by Johann Strauss
II and Franz Lehár to satisfy the sweetest tooth.
Yet in
songs such as Georg Kreisler’s satirical Der Tod, das muss ein
Wiener sein, sung in a fair approximation of cabaret style by
Kaufmann to Michael Rot’s wry piano accompaniment and pointedly
placed as an epilogue, there’s a sharpness that interrogates
wilful amnesia. Kreisler, like the composer Hans May, left
Vienna in 1938. His song is a modern-day Totentanz, beckoning
the dancing girls Mitzi, Fritzi and Leopoldine and their suitors
to consider their mortality in waltz time. It’s the best number
on the album, and a fascinating retort to Peter Kreuder’s
ambiguous adieu, Sag beim Abschied leise Servus. Kaufmann brings
a bitter verismo sob to Emmerich Kálmán’s Zwei Märchenaugen, but
the lightness and cool of less fraught material do not come
naturally to him.
Weinberger’s Du wärst für mich die Frau
gewesen and May’s foxtrot Es wird im Leben dir mehr genommen als
gegeben are notably airless and effortful, and for much of the
recital it seems as though Kaufmann’s suit were made of too
heavy a material for dancing. Accompanied by Adam Fischer and
the Wiener Philharmoniker, Wiener Blut, Wiener Blut, the
Uhrenduett from Die Fledermaus, and Danilo and Hanna’s melting
reunion from The Merry Widow, Lippen schweigen, feature fragrant
cameos from the soprano Rachel Willis-Sorensen, sounding rather
more relaxed in this idiom than the leading man. The orchestral
sound glistens like Cellophane. (Sony Classical)
