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The Telegraph, 22 Apr 2013 |
Hugo Shirley |
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Konzert, Royal Festival Hall, London, 21. April 2013 |
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Jonas Kaufmann, Royal Festival Hall, review
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The were moments at Royal Festival Hall where opera star Jonas Kaufmann fused lacerating emotional intensity with vocal beauty and power were astonishing, says Hugo Shirley. |
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With acclaimed recent appearances as Wagner’s Parsifal in New York behind
him, and a return to the Royal Opera next month to head a big-name cast in
Verdi’s Don Carlo, Jonas Kaufmann is unusual in being in high demand for
both anniversary composers’ works. He must also be one of only a handful of
singers able to pack out the Royal Festival Hall at inflated prices, his
musical attributes matched, in a manner famously uncommon for tenors, by
dashing good looks and disarming affability.
But in what turned out
to be a long evening, with Kaufmann’s contributions bulked out with sundry
orchestral preludes and overtures from a lacklustre Philharmonia under
Jochen Rieder, it was the Wagner of the second half that came across as the
most convincing.
In the Verdi numbers, Kaufmann could be thrilling in
the declamatory introductions, and his gloriously burnished, baritonal voice
showed itself to be in purring, well-oiled condition right from his first
aria, from Luisa Miller. But Rieder’s leaden conducting repeatedly snuffed
out any real sense of dramatic fire; the laborious churn he produced in
place of the emotional maelstrom that should accompany Simon Boccanegra’s O
inferno! was the worst offender.
The intensity of Kaufmann’s vocal
style, though, also means that he struggles to relax into Verdi’s long
lines, having to opt for leisurely tempos and artful pianissimos instead –
doing so, admittedly, to highly persuasive effect in Don Alvaro’s big aria
from La forza del destino.
After the interval, London had a rare
chance to hear Kaufmann in the repertoire he seems born to sing, but the
first two bleeding chunks only hinted at what the tenor can do in the
theatre. Even so, after a slightly clodhopping, brass-heavy Ride of the
Valkyries from the orchestra, Kaufmann generated plenty of visceral dramatic
energy in Siegmund’s Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater.
Am stillen
Herd, from Die Meistersinger, proved more difficult to animate, especially
after Rieder’s poorly balanced, gloopy account of the Prelude, but in the
longer Amfortas! Die Wunde from Act 2 of Parsifal, Kaufmann was astonishing,
fusing lacerating emotional intensity with vocal beauty and power in a
manner Wagner could only have dreamt of. Despite three encores, taken from
the tenor’s latest Wagner disc, it was this that stuck in the memory, making
one regret the Royal Opera’s recent inability to pin him down for a Wagner
role, and for next season’s Parsifal in particular.
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