In his third solo CD for Decca, a brave, dedicated and
altogether arresting piece of work, Jonas Kaufmann offers a
programme of late-Romantic Italian opera arias. (Verismo Arias
is its title, a shorthand categorization of the entirely
post-Verdi and non-Puccini selection, though the less catchy
Arias by the Giovane Scuola would have been much more accurate.)
This choice of material constitutes a bold progression.
Kaufmann's first Decca CD, Romantic Arias, sung in Italian,
French and German, provided a showcase of his roles current and
potential (or at least feasible); his second, all in his native
language, was sited in what could fairly be called his ‘home
territory' of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner.
This latest, in contrast, embodying a repertory and, by
extension and implication, a voice production and artistic
approach not commonly associated with even the most versatile of
German tenors past and present, signifies ‘something different'.
According to the Kaufmann interview-portrait serving as Decca's
booklet essay, he plans to take on Chénier at some future date;
when this notice appears he will be in the middle of playing
Maurizio in Covent Garden's new Adriana Lecouvreur. For the
rest, the CD represents a series of steps in unfamiliar
directions, taken boldly and with complete confidence and
conviction.
The ‘default' tenor of this repertory, and in fact the
‘creator' of three roles instanced here-Cilea's Federico
(L'arlesiana) and Maurizio, and Giordano's Loris (Fedora)-was,
and through his records remains, Caruso. In our day only Plácido
Domingo has performed in the theatre, rather than just in the
recording studio, a large number of the operas on Kaufmann's
bill, and among the Italian or Italianate tenors currently in
giro on the world stages only Salvatore Licitra can be said to
possess by natural right, and in spite of obvious technical
shortcomings, the sort of spinto voice implied by the disc's
contents. Does voice, in this sense, really matter? Yes, it must
do-at least to those whose inner ear may have conditioned itself
to expect the incomparable shine, warmth and slancio of Caruso's
delivery whenever, say, ‘Vesti la giubba', or Chénier's
Improvviso, or ‘Testa adorata' (from the ‘other' Bohčme, one of
Caruso's most glorious records) is essayed. Throughout this CD
the noticeably darkened tinge of Kaufmann's timbre, in
comparison even with his own Romantic Arias self of a couple of
years ago, may well ‘throw' die-hard traditionalists. Likewise
his unfamiliarly intense way of addressing dark moods and
sentiments, his unfamiliar willingness to explore a wide range
of p, mp and mf shades and nuances, and his slow-burn approach
(that of a born Lieder-singer?) to the build-up of a whole
piece, especially well demonstrated in his unhurried, infinitely
poignant unfolding of Federico's ‘E la solita storia'. Is there
something disconcerting about Turiddu's drinking song in this
muscular, slightly unsmiling account of it? Does Kaufmann deny
us something of the unforced lyricism that makes listening to,
say, Bergonzi's ‘La dolcissima effigie' or, in our own day,
Joseph Calleja's version, such a smile-on-the-face experience?
Is there sufficient rapt romance in this ‘Cielo e mar'?
For me, any such initial question-marks simply got discarded
on repeated listening, above all because the sheer originality,
versatility and freshness-the excellence-of what Kaufmann
creates in every piece demands from the listener a comparable
willingness to bring fresh ears to the listening. He takes
nothing for granted, does nothing ‘traditionally'-well, apart
from the peal of harsh laughter after Canio's ‘Bah! sei tu forse
un uom?', which I'd have preferred excised-yet because his
intelligence, theatricality and instinctive grasp of word and
note enable him to dig below the surface of each character, I
found myself putting aside preconceived notions and rejoicing in
the singer's manner of encouraging me to do so. Plainly the
warm-hearted, impassioned quality of Pappano's conducting and
the vitality of the Santa Cecilia orchestral playing were of
incalculable benefit; the CD's totality gives an impression of
mutually and corporately inspired music-making that is light
years distant from the plodding routine usually associated with
recital discs of this sort. (Pappano evidently also aided in the
choice of such attractive rarities as the Refice and Lituani
items, although I wish that the space devoted to the two vacuous
Mefistofele numbers had been allotted instead to something from
Iris and Zazŕ.)
In the end, the disc's most thrilling aspects are the
expansiveness, the athletic going-for-gold of Kaufmann's singing
style as represented here: he commands the vocal substance not
simply to lay out an aria performance along the broadest lines
but unfalteringly to bring it to a broadly sustained climax, the
tone carrying both the line and the emotional content to the
intended peak every time. Zandonai's ‘Giulietta! Son io'
launches the disc; I know it from Del Monaco's stentorian 1950s
reading and Alagna's lightweight but eloquent recent one, but
had no idea that its sequence of repeated ‘Giulietta mia!' cries
could be made so grandly and wrenchingly powerful. The
bitterness and vehemence of ‘Vesti la giubba', the violent
denunciations of the Improvviso middle section, the unstinted
heroism of the final Chénier duet (in which Kaufmann's
generous-toned if somewhat generalized Maddalena is Eva-Maria
Westbroek) all become ‘authentic' in a way that only a true
front-rank artist can make them. What I wrote in these columns
(November 2009, pp. 1396-8) of the second Decca recital disc
requires repeating: ‘the programme rewards all-the-way-through
listening in a way few recital discs I know can match'. That
Kaufmann has done it again is an outstanding achievement indeed.
