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| Opera News, February 2006 |
| WYNN DELACOMA |
Sound Bites: Jonas Kaufmann
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  Jonas
Kaufmann’s name didn’t mean much in Chicago when Lyric Opera gave a 2001
concert to preview its upcoming season. Most of the 30,000-plus opera fans
who filled the vast lawn in front of the Petrillo Music Shell in downtown
Grant Park probably showed up for the evening’s stars: Ben Heppner, Renée
Fleming and Susan Graham. But listeners started diving for their programs
the minute Kaufmann strode onstage and unfurled a searing performance of
Federico’s lament from Cilèa’s L’Arlesiana. His singing was supple and
resonant, his tone velvety on the edges but steely at its core.
“It was really so thrilling,” the Munich-born Kaufmann recalls. “It was a
perfect late-summer evening. The skyline of Chicago was behind the crowd,
and the sea — I’m sorry, I should say the lake — was right there. I had
never sung for so many people before. It was incredible.” Two weeks later,
he made a successful U.S. opera debut as Cassio in Lyric’s Otello.
Now thirty-six and comfortably based at Zurich Opera, Kaufmann makes his
Metropolitan Opera debut on February 4 in La Traviata opposite Angela
Gheorghiu. He has a repertoire that defies conventional boundaries. Last
season he bounced from Cassio in Paris to Flamand in a concert performance
of Strauss’s Capriccio in Edinburgh; Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione
di Poppea and Tito in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, both at the Zurich
Opera, to the king’s son in a concert version of Humperdinck’s Die
Königskinder at the Montpellier Festival.
“I don’t have any special repertoire,” said Kaufmann. “I’m very happy that
I’m able to do such wide repertoire with this voice. I’m only following my
voice. If I specialized in anything, it would annoy me a lot.” Married with
three children, Kaufmann fights very hard to balance his professional and
private lives. “The professional life can benefit a lot from a sane private
life,” he says. “You maybe don’t like your colleagues in a production.
You’re not happy with the musical part of your life. But I can go home and
play with the children and forget all that. At the point where you go home
and change the nappies, it forces you not to be a diva.” |
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Photographed by Johannes Ifkovits
in Hallein, Austria
Grooming by Evelyn Rillé
© Johannes Ifkovits 2006 |
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