I’ve been waiting for a full programme of French arias from
Jonas Kaufmann ever since I heard his stunning Decca debut disc
Romantic Arias in 2008, and to my mind L’Opéra (out today on
Sony Classical) is the finest recording he’s made since that
auspicious beginning a decade ago. We’ve already had one superb
recital of French arias from a baritonal tenor this month,
Michael Spyres’s Espoir on Opera Rara, and Kaufmann’s
counterpart might just as well be called Désespoir (indeed it’s
literally the last word on the album). The vast majority of the
personalities who spring to life here are either staring despair
in the face or desperately trying not to confront it, whether
they’re roles which the great German tenor has made his own on
stage or characters which he may never sing in future – either
because the operas are so rarely staged or because the moment’s
passed for him to take them on.
Falling squarely into the
latter category are the excerpts from Bizet’s The Pearl-Fishers
and Massenet’s Manon, which feature outstanding contributions
from Ludovic Tézier and Sonya Yoncheva respectively: it’s hard
to imagine even the world’s biggest houses casting a voice of
this size in the light lyric role of the lovelorn fisherman
Nadir, and though Kaufmann did have considerable on-stage
success as Des Grieux (in a chalk-and-cheese pairing with
Natalie Dessay, almost ten years ago) he’s become more closely
associated with the Chévalier’s heftier incarnation in Puccini’s
Manon Lescaut.
But it doesn’t matter. The two Manon
scenes are so vividly characterised that it feels as if years
(and years of considerable emotional turmoil at that) have
elapsed between them: if the soft-focus domestic fantasy of ‘En
fermant les yeux’ glows with naïve ardour, the Des Grieux of the
great Saint-Sulpice scene (in which the feckless Manon bursts in
on her abandoned lover at prayer and begs for One More Chance)
is a different man: bitter, volatile, and implacable until the
very last moment so that the final ‘Je t’aime!’ is wrenched from
the guts in a way that suggests not love but a lust that’s still
tinged with hatred and resentment. It packs a powerful punch,
thanks in no small part to the fragility and sensuality which
Yoncheva brings to Manon’s entreaties.
Likewise, the
famous Pearl Fishers duet becomes far more than a crowd-pleasing
bonbon in the hands of these two great vocal actors, who blend
so seamlessly that one person I played it to thought Kaufmann
had multi-tracked himself in both roles! At one point in the
preceding recitative (included in full) Nadir tells Zurga that
they’ll look back on their love for Leila ‘at the age when
dreams are fading’, and the maturity of both voices sounds as if
they’re doing exactly that here.
But it’s the tantalising
glimpses of roles which may never feature in Kaufmann’s stage
repertoire that are the real plums of this album for me:
Berlioz’s Énee, Meyerbeer’s Vasco de Gama and Rodrigue from
Massenet’s Le Cid bear testimony to a voice that’s ageing quite
spectacularly, whilst Eléazar’s ‘Rachel, quand du seigneur’
(from Halévy’s rarely-staged La Juive) brings some of the most
incredible singing on the disc (which really is saying
something).
Crucially, Kaufmann’s not one to gloss over
the less attractive aspects of these characters, laying bare the
fanaticism of Eléazar, the bullish entitlement of Vasco de Gama
as he fantasises about conquering ‘paradise’, and above all the
self-deluding machismo in the first section of Énee’s great
scene as he struggles to convince himself that he’s Doing The
Right Thing by abandoning Didon and Carthage without so much as
a goodbye-note on the pillow. I couldn’t suppress a wry smile at
the decision to end the album with this crowning jewel, which
expresses the qualified remorse of a man faced with letting down
the people who’ve feted him as a hero: Kaufmann notoriously
withdrew from singing the part at Covent Garden in 2012, and has
no plans to take it on in the future. It’s done so brilliantly
that I experienced one or two ‘inutiles regrets’ of my own - but
how wonderful to have this snapshot of what might have been.
