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The Gazette, January 31, 2014 |
By Arthur Kaptainis
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Tenor Jonas Kaufmann has range
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Opera singer enjoys both dramatic and lyrical roles
MONTREAL — “I’m afraid that Regietheater is too wide a field to discuss in
interviews properly,” Jonas Kaufmann was saying — or writing, this being an
email exchange — from somewhere over the pond. The subject I had proposed
was the way-out-there opera productions common in Europe and, increasingly,
elsewhere.
“We all know those productions that seem to be the
operatic version of ADD or ADHD: attracting the attention of public and
press at all costs. On the other end there are, if seldom, those productions
that really deserve to be called innovative: everything is different, but
seems quite logical and convincing to a degree that you wonder why nobody
has put it this way before.
“Between those poles there is a big range
of every sort of quality. If you are lucky, you have a director who respects
the music and does justice to the work.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I do
not vote for ‘traditional’ productions. In fact, I prefer the unconventional
ones, but on the basis of RESPECTING (Kaufmann’s capitals) the music and
using its energy instead of wasting it on creating a ‘scandal.’ ”
Probably the top German-speaking tenor in the world — not that he confines
himself to his mother tongue — Kaufmann will be heard in a program of opera
arias Sunday at 2 in Salle Wilfrid Pelletier with the Orchestre
Métropolitain under conductor Jochen Rieder.
There will selections by
Bizet, Mascagni, Massenet, Ponchielli, Puccini and Wagner. But no laboratory
rats committing suicide en masse — as there were in a Bayreuth production of
Wagner’s Lohengrin starring Kaufmann in 2010 — or photos from the Baghdad
prison known as Abu Ghraib, which loom large in a production of Verdi’s La
Forza del Destino (with Kaufmann as Alvaro) that closed three weeks ago in
the tenor’s hometown of Munich.
Kaufmann cordially declined an
invitation to criticize either production.
“I don’t think that the
Abu Ghraib pictures (the Austrian director) Martin Kusej showed in his Forza
production are anti-American (this being the interpretation of many
observers),” he commented. “They are a symbol for the horrors of the abuse
of power, and that’s part of the story in Verdi’s opera.”
If the
tenor’s position on the subject seems nuanced, it might be characteristic of
a singer who works not in black and white but with light and shade.
Montrealers will recall Kaufmann’s moving treatment of Schubert’s song cycle
Die Schöne Müllerin last January in the Maison symphonique. He makes Lieder
part of every season and refers to art song as “the royal class of singing.”
Yet he reaches his greatest public with opera. Kaufmann takes the title
role in a run of Massenet’s Werther at the Metropolitan Opera in March. The
Verdi Album was a major release on Sony last year. It included two
selections from Otello, an opera whose title role is usually classed in the
heavyweight heroic category rather than the light-heavyweight division that
Kaufmann dominates.
“I consider myself as a tenor who is capable to
sing lyrical roles as well as dramatic ones,” he says, I mean writes, with
finality. “I feel at home at those roles which require both qualities, like
Don José and Werther, Siegmund and Parsifal, Don Carlo and Alvaro. Otello
will come in about two years. I can’t wait.
“Siegfried? Well, we’ll
see.” |
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