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The Daily Telegraph, August 04, 2014 |
Steve Moffatt |
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Jonas Kaufmann gives Schubert’s Winterreise the operatic treatment |
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Singing
sensation Jonas Kaufmann is coming to Australia for the first time this
month and Australia is rightly excited.
At 45 the German tenor is in
his singing prime and his stellar rise has been marked by wise choices in
the roles he tackles. As a result he is equally at home in Wagner as he is
in Verdi or the verismo and bel canto roles, as two of his recent album
releases attest.
That said, as a lieder singer I find his latest
release, Schubert’s Winterreise, a little disappointing. These 24 songs —
some of the bleakest ever written (notwithstanding Leonard Cohen) — plot
with uncanny insight a lonely lovelorn wanderer’s battles with nature’s
hostility and his ultimate descent into madness.
Wilhelm Muller’s
verses, and Schubert’s masterly settings, are a series of short psychodramas
which speak intimately to the listener, so much so that it’s only three or
four songs into the cycle when we realise that the hero is barking mad.
Kaufmann treats these songs too operatically for this reviewer’s taste.
The intimacy seems lost, somehow, in the grand vocal gestures. The phrasing
is perfect — perhaps too perfect — and the diction cannot be faulted. Helmut
Deutsch’s sympathetic piano accompaniment is hard to fault.
But what
the album lacks is that sense of poetry that truly great lieder specialists
bring to Schubert. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau set the benchmark impossibly
high with his many recordings in the 1950s and ‘60s (his later ones are less
impressive), so it is unfair to compare anything that has followed with his
work.
Although probably the best recordings are by baritones,
Schubert’s keys suit the higher voice and several top tenors, Peter Pears
among them, have conquered this Himalayan masterpiece.
There are a
couple of fine recent recordings that I would buy before Kaufmann’s Sony
Classical album. Check out Austrian baritone Florian Boesch’s recording with
Martin Martineau. In my book this is the singer who comes closest to
Dieskau. Matthias Goerne’s recording with Alfred Brendel is also superb.
That said, Kaufmann is one of the greats who has been justifiably
compared with the younger Placido Domingo. His two concerts at Sydney Opera
House concert hall should be highlights of the musical year.
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