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Financial Times, April 22, 2013 |
By Richard Fairman |
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Konzert, Royal Festival Hall, London, 21. April 2013 |
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Jonas Kaufmann, Royal Festival Hall, London – review
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The German tenor’s voice combines a warm sound with brooding emotion, enabling him to encompass Verdi and Wagner with ease |
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Verdi and Wagner are going everywhere in tandem this year. This celebrity
concert was divided equally, half one, half the other, to mark their joint
200th anniversary in 2013 and few tenors could make such a success of that
challenge as Jonas Kaufmann, opera’s star singer of the moment, can.
Then again, there have not been many German-speaking tenors who could sell
out a venue the size of the Royal Festival Hall, and at these prices. The
last who attracted a comparable kind of adulation in London was the Austrian
Richard Tauber in the 1930s, though he sang more popular music (Tauber’s
grave in Brompton Cemetery is still decked with fresh flowers daily).
Appropriately for a noted Parsifal, Kaufmann has his own flower maidens,
who presented him with bouquets at the end. There was not much to celebrate
in the concert’s many orchestral numbers: the Philharmonia was on average
form and Jochen Rieder, the conductor, went from sluggish Verdi to overly
brass-heavy Wagner. Kaufmann, though, only had to open his mouth to remind
everybody why they were there. His voice is not hard and steely, like many
Wagnerian tenors, or over-bright, like some of the Americans and
antipodeans. It has a resplendently warm sound, made for his native German
opera, but still broodingly emotional enough for Verdi.
After warming
up on Luisa Miller, he filled the Verdi first half with his trademark, dark,
romanticism in Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlo. Most interesting of all was
La forza del destino, which he is due to sing for the first time in Munich
later this year: a true Italian tenor would shape the aria with far more
tension in the line than Kaufmann does, but his relaxed, sombre pensiveness
was very affecting in its own way.
The Wagner items were as glorious
as expected. His chosen three extracts were not the obvious ones – why “Am
stillen Herd” from Die Meistersinger rather than the Prize Song? – but
nobody would complain when they were sung with such effortlessly burnished
tone and depth of musicality. Two of the Wesendonck Lieder came as encores
and then “Winterstürme” from Die Walküre. He was sounding tired by then, but
it was gone 10pm and he had given us a generous programme.
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