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The Spectator, Aug 25, 2001 |
by Michael Tanner |
Schumann: Four songs from Opus 35 and Dichterliebe Opus 48; Liszt: Three
Petrarch Sonnets (1838 versions); Richard Strauss: Six songs
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Edinburgh 2001, the first week
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Queen's Hall |
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One
of the most appealing features of the festival is the possibility of
spending each evening at a large-scale musical event, and each morning
(except of course Sunday) at the Queen’s Hall. (…)
Fine as the quartet mornings were, the two peaks of the week in the Queen’s
Hall were song recitals. In the first a young German tenor Jonas Kaufmann,
new to me and to everyone I have spoken to, created a sensation with his
hypnotic, indeed overpowering reading of Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe’,
accompanied ideally by Helmut Deutsch. A pupil of Hans Hotter, he sings with
the same directness and art-concealing art, a comparable warmth of tone
though of course in a different register. This amazing cycle, always fresh
and susceptible of new layers of irony, struck so many notes of pain, all
the more chilling for the unaffected delivery, that if Kaufmann had been a
less remarkable phenomenon it would have been tempting to leave it at that.
As it was, he revealed a quite different kind of mastery by his rapt
delivery of Liszt’s three Petrarch Sonnets, showing a Carreras-like warmth
of tone, opening up to magical effect. It’s astonishing that a major
recording company has not yet taken Kaufmann up and packaged him; no doubt
that will happen soon.
The other song recital (…) |
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