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Limelight, October 7, 2018 |
by Clive Paget |
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Konzert, Carnegie Hall, New York, 5. Oktober 2018 |
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YOU MEAN THE WORLD TO ME (JONAS KAUFMANN, CARNEGIE HALL)
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Despite some melting moments, Kaufmann's Viennese fancy leaves you wanting more. |
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Anyone not sated by the agreeable sugar rush of Carnegie Hall’s gala opening
on Wednesday were offered a healthy dollop of Viennese schlagobers for
dessert last night courtesy of star tenor Jonas Kaufmann and a program of
operetta favourites. With the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the
capable hands of Jochen Rieder there was much to enjoy, not least the
idiomatically delivered overtures and waltzes that punctuated the recital,
but the soufflé was marred by a few questionable ingredients and, too often,
the soloist’s determination to croon when most of his audience were longing
for him to let rip.
Thomas Voight’s excellent program notes,
extracted from Kaufmann’s 2014 Sony CD of the same name, promised a
thoughtful survey of the turbulent period from a heady 1920s Berlin up until
the moment when the Nazi Anschluss put paid to the careers of a whole
generation of operetta composers, many of whom were forced to flee abroad as
Jewish exiles. Comparisons, it suggested, would be made between the careers
of Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán and Robert Stolz through the hits of their
golden-voiced tenorial champions, Richard Tauber, Joseph Schmidt and Jan
Kiepura. Of equal interest would be the way quintessential German light
music merged with the American musical sound as the genre transitioned from
stage to screen. Kaufmann’s program had elements of all of those, but with
roughly half of the CD on display, it was hard to avoid the feeling that a
case of pick-and-mix had left us with a ragbag of sweetmeats.
But
that was only half of the problem. Before he began, Kaufmann explained that
the period-looking microphone plonked centre stage was to help capture the
sounds and styles of the times, suggesting many of these songs were written
for radio or the silver screen, but that was certainly not the case with
works like Countess Mariza, Paganini, Frasquita, Giuditta – the first opera
to premiere at the Vienna State Opera – and The Land of Smiles, all clearly
composed to be sung by opera singers in full voice. Instead, Kaufmann
over-used this source of amplification to prop up the voice in songs, many
of which would have benefitted from a more ballsy sound.
Of course,
Kaufmann is Kaufmann, and the instrument retains its power and lustre,
though a comparison with his own CD shows how the voice has darkened over
five years. Stylistically it’s a game of two halves. When he lets himself
go, such as at the end of a song like Grüß mir mein Wien from Kálmán’s
Gräfin Mariza, or the upbeat sections of Girls Are Made to Love and Kiss
from Lehár’s Paganini, it was hard to fault him. The tone here was glorious
with a his trademark burnished virility to the sound and blazing top notes.
Elsewhere, the tendency to croon over high-lying passages in particular,
felt like an excuse. What in the opera house can feel like a
tastefully-deployed occasional vocal choice, here verged on mannerism, and
with it so frequently on display, one couldn’t help but notice that it
wasn’t always as seamlessly connected to the rest of the voice as one might
like. The acid test is a comparison with his role models. Tauber, for
example, only very occasionally uses a light falsetto to make a point, but
generally the tone is supported no matter the dynamic or tessitura. The
butter-smooth Schmidt sailed effortlessly over the high notes. Kiepura, with
his laser beam top, clearly didn’t know what a dimmer switch was. A lounge
singer approach to My Little Nest of Heavenly Blue from Lehár’s Frasquita
and Stoltz’s Im Traum hast Du mir alles erlaubt from the intriguingly named
Liebeskommando were all well and good, it’s just that there are other
singers who can do this as well, if not better.
Kaufmann certainly
doesn’t lack passion, singing insightfully of “flirting looks” and
“mysterious alleyways” with a knowing look. There’s nothing wrong either
with a little husk in the tone to boost the erotic charge of Du bist die
Welt für mich from Tauber’s own operetta Der Singende Traum. But the
audience’s reaction to his thrilling, all-bets-off entry into Freunde das
Leben ist lebenswert! from Lehár’s Giuditta was an indicator of what they’d
really come to hear. Ditto the impressive, full-toned Dein ist mein ganzes
Herz from The Land of Smiles with which he closed the official program. The
four encores – the third of which was not exactly called for, while the
fourth was sung to a half empty auditorium – involved some textual slip-ups
and were sung with the aid of an iPad.
Jochen Rieder was an
impeccable accompanist throughout, coming into his own when given his head
in the orchestral numbers. The broad Hungarian swing to the Gräfin Mariza
overture with its perky czardas rhythms was given just the right amount of
swagger. The music for the ball scene in The Merry Widow was as airy as a
strudel, while the waltz from 1935’s Giuditta with its Technicolor scoring,
Mediterranean castanets and sensual main theme showed what a short hop it
would be to the classic Hollywood sound of the 1940s.
One never likes
to diss a great artist. Kaufmann clearly has a sweet tooth and genuinely
cares for this music – as do I. He sings much of it well, but too often
there was a sense of a singer on cruise control. To paraphrase Nanki-Poo in
The Mikado, modified Gemutlichkeit.
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