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The Sydney Morning Herald, August 11, 2014 |
Peter McCallum |
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Konzert, Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, 10. August 2014 |
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Jonas Kaufmann's golden voice unleashes a whole world of emotion
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***** |
Perhaps it is unfair, as the publicity for this concert did, to say that
Jonas Kaufmann is at the peak of his powers. One wouldn't want to imply it
was all downhill from here. Nevertheless, it was clear from the glorious
mahogany-coloured opening notes of Recondita Armonia (appropriate “hidden
harmonies”), the opening aria from Puccini’s Tosca, that this was one of the
great singers of our time.
Kaufmann’s tenor voice is transparently
clear with honeyed tone and the most beautifully burnished finish. It is
neither craggy nor over-light, neither overly dark nor meretricious, neither
unduly pinched nor stentorian. It sits in the ideal centre of these extremes
with impeccable smoothness.
Yet there is much more to his art than
the superb sound. Kaufmann has extraordinary control of both supremely soft
notes (as in his second aria from Giordano’s much excerpted, rarely
performed opera Andrea Chenier) and resonantly forceful sounds (as in Vesti
la giubba from Pagliacci, which closed the first half). He moulds the lines
into shapes that seem to span a great arch from the first note to the last.
In La vita e inferno, from Verdi’s La Forza del destino, Kaufmann etched
this great picture of despair with sincere dramatic intensity of unforced
integrity. He rose to the final note in a mood of whispered defeat but
before it concluded, the tone had swelled to a mood of fierce defiance – a
whole world of emotion on a single A flat.
Kaufmann began the French
arias of the second half in more subdued reflection, singing la fleur que tu
m’avai jetee from Bizet’s Carmen without releasing the incendiary passionate
moments that had inflamed the Italian operatic numbers of the first half.
Yet the exquisite softness in Pourquoi me reveiller from Massenet's Werther
did nothing to hide the noble sound – if anything it accentuated it.
Each vocal number was framed with a cognate orchestral excerpt, sometimes
from the same work. Though a program of excerpts is necessarily fragmented,
the logic was cogent. Particular highlights from the Australian Opera and
Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Jochen Rieder, included the clarinet solos
from Peter Jenkins in the Verdi and in E lucevan le stelle from Tosca, sung
as an encore, and Laura Hamilton’s eloquently precise Meditation from
Massenet’s Thais.
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