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Jonas Kaufmann’s ascent to the position of the leading German
lyric-dramatic tenor has been surprisingly gradual. I first saw him in
Edinburgh in 2001, giving a Lieder recital in the Queen’s Hall, and was
immediately astonished that I hadn’t heard of him before. For the next few
years, I heard him there in more recitals, and in concert performances of
Der Freischütz, Capriccio and culminating as Walther in Die Meistersinger in
2006.
With Kaufmann there is never any risk of overdramatisation,
yet he is essentially a dramatic artist, and from the first note of Müllerin
he was the young miller, even to the extent of sounding slightly tentative
about embarking on his wandering, while extolling it. This great cycle has
the singer — and the accompanist, here Kaufmann’s regular partner Helmut
Deutsch — moving between two poles: the restlessness of the journey into
life and love, and the hypnotic pull of the stream, itself moving but
enticing the wanderer to immerse himself in it and finally to drown himself,
a kind of proto-Isolde, though more physical and less metaphysical.
At 40, Kaufmann evidently feels that his days of singing this cycle are
numbered, but at present he still brings a miraculously youthful tone to it,
whether being briefly exultant in possessing the fair maid, raging against
the intrusive green huntsman, or abandoning himself to easeful death: the
last is most impressive of all. Kaufmann sings in the softest of head
voices, risking inaudibility, but casting a spell the like of which I
haven’t encountered in the concert hall or opera house for a very long time.
It is a testimony to the seriousness with which he and Deutsch take their
art that there were so many telling small differences between this
performance and their CD of the same work, released earlier this year.
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