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New York Classical Review, Jan 21, 2018 |
By Eric C. Simpson |
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Liederabend: New York, Carnegie Hall, 20. Januar 2018 |
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In a highly anticipated return, Kaufmann hits his stride late in Schubert cycle
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Saturday night saw the long-awaited return of Jonas Kaufmann to New York.
The superstar tenor has been among the most bankable box-office names of the
last decade, but his decision to spend more time with family in Europe led
to a string of awkward cancellations, and, eventually, an absence of several
years from American stages.
He returned to Carnegie Hall Saturday
night in one of the most anticipated performances of the season: giving
Schubert’s first great song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin, with Helmut Deutsch,
one of the most celebrated lieder pianists of the last half-century. It was
a memorable recital in the end, but proved to be a tale of two halves.
Quite simply, it took the first ten of the twenty-song cycle for
Kaufmann to warm up. It’s in this first half that Wilhelm Müller’s poems
establish the relationship between the miller, our narrator, and the
miller’s daughter whose love ultimately leads him to despair. They are vital
to the audience’s immersion in the work, yet Kaufmann’s accuracy in these
early songs–especially the first, “Das Wandern”–was suspect, and nothing
seemed to come easily to him. It felt as though he was trying to force his
voice into a lighter shade that doesn’t come naturally, and it wouldn’t
cooperate. He was able to work well with contrast in songs like “Der
Neugierige,” pitting a plaintive half-whisper against insistent passion; but
many attempts to float high soft notes caught in his throat.
Yet this
was still a performance worthy of its billing. Even when he struggled
vocally, Kaufmann’s dramatic engagement with the text was admirable.
“Morgengruß,” a tender song of courtship, showed wonderful hints of humor as
he tried to win the heart of the woman he admires. “Mein!” developed from a
fluttering of excitement into a manic explosion of joy.
But even more
crucial to the success of this reading was the change in his voice as it
progressed; over the second half of the cycle, Kaufmann delivered an
extraordinary musical performance, the sort that anyone familiar with his
career surely came expecting. At last, the full, dark-hued voice that is so
unique among tenors was sounding at its best, and began to serve the music.
“Mit dem grünen Lautenbande” found his obsession growing more detached from
reality, manifesting as full-throated, passionate devotion, turning
immediately into the frantic envy of “Der Jäger,” an outburst of frustration
at the miller-maid’s fascination with the hunter.
Taken as a set, the
final three songs of the cycle are as crushing as anything in Schubert’s
oeuvre, alternately fatalist and consoling. Kaufmann drove the cycle home
with amazing emotional weight, sounded totally broken in “Trockne Blumen”:
the “Ach” that begins the second verse was almost spoken, conveying a world
of grief in a single syllable. “Der Müller und der Bach” gave us a tearful,
sighing summation of the miller’s journey, followed by the spellbinding
lullaby of “Des Baches Wiegenlied.” This was Deutsch’s finest work, too–all
evening he played with glowing sound and musical sensitivity, creating
excitement, tension, and tenderness. But the gentle rocking of the final
lullaby was exquisite.
It’s in the nature of a cycle like this that
many of its songs can stand out in any given performance as its emotional
core. In Kaufmann’s rendition on Saturday, that role fell to “Die liebe
Farbe,” wherein the narrator’s obsession with the miller-maid turns into a
fatal obsession with the color green. In Kaufmann’s rendition, it was here
that we first truly heard signs of the deep grief that was to come. His
voice in this song was at its best: robust, lyrical, colorful, unleashed at
its full weight in the second verse, almost like a Wagnerian hero, only to
be completely overcome by emotion.
Having waited several years to
hear him again, the Kaufmann faithful wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d had
an encore. There were four, in fact, all by Schubert.
“Der Jüngling
an der Quelle” was like a second lullaby, tenderly sung, featuring soft
weaving in the piano. “Musensohn” was a lively contrast, and the immortally
cheerful “Die Forelle” was sung with sparkle, featuring perfect, gurgling
little scales in the piano. Finally came “Der Lindenbaum,” in a stoic vocal
rendition.
At the risk of being a killjoy, as enjoyable as these
encores were, they were out of place. A performance of Die Schöne Müllerin,
like its sister cycle Winterreise, is not an ordinary song recital. It is a
journey complete unto itself, and the emotions that linger with the audience
as they leave the hall are a major part of its force. To follow it with a
string of encores dispels that magic, and only dulls the impact that the
artist has spent more than an hour working to create.
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