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The Guardian, 27 February 2014 |
Andrew Clements |
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Jonas Kaufmann dials it down |
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Even
shelves heaving with Winter’s Journeys should find space for Kaufmann’s,
which he is touring around Europe. (He visits the Royal Opera House on April
6.) This striking new version combines the vocal endowment of a heroic tenor
such as Jon Vickers, the relish of the German text of a Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau, and the heightened sense of drama captured by Brigitte
Fassbaender on her controversial EMI (now Warner) recording, with the
composer Aribert Reimann as her pianist. Certainly Kaufmann’s Schubert can
be “operatic”: his final note in the last song, Der Leiermann, swells into a
cry of anguish, rather than fading into resigned acceptance of death. But
there is sensibility and even charm here — the lilt in his voice in
Frühlingstraum (Spring’s Dream), the breathless anticipation of The Post —
as well as weariness (Rast), loneliness (Einsamkeit) and disillusionment
(Täuschung). Few tenor versions of this great cycle are sung with such depth
of tone, so wide a spectrum of colours or such a poetic a response to
Müller’s texts. In Deutsch, Kaufmann has an ideal travelling companion. He
tells us as much about Schubert’s state of mind when he wrote what he
described to his friends as “terrifying” songs as Kaufmann does.
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