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Was vanity behind the loud bark of "Bravo!" that broke the precious
silence at the end of Jonas Kaufmann's performance of Die schöne Müllerin at
the Wigmore Hall? Having never done it myself, I've often wondered what
drives people to shatter that moment of extended connection, to be the first
to make a noise. Whatever the motive, this was a particularly crude fracture
of a mood that Kaufmann and his pianist, Helmut Deutsch, had worked hard to
establish, meticulously colouring and pointing each of the 10 songs that
chart a descent into shame and jealousy, from fleeting triumph to abject
despair.
Kaufmann's rich, complex, baritonal tenor is bigger than
those we usually hear in Schubert, and though he thinks delicately, the
masculine gleam and heft of his sound made the music and the venue seem
Lilliputian. No matter the sincerity of his singing, the easy (and minimal)
use of gestures, the exquisite observation of punctuation, the directness of
expression, he is too heroic to convince as a shy, impetuous boy, too
glamorous for a miller's daughter to turn down. Odd to see such advantages
turn to disadvantages in the first half of the cycle, though Schubert, whose
looks were less swoonsome, might have smiled at the irony.
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