A new album from the operatic tenor focuses this year on mostly
favourite German Lieder
Just as the song of the cuckoo
announces the arrival of spring, so a recital disc from Jonas
Kaufmann tells us Christmas is on the way. The shop tills would
not ring as loudly if there wasn’t a new recording from opera's
most saleable tenor.
In a change of tack, Kaufmann's main
offering this year is not opera, but a recital of mostly
favourite German Lieder. This is not a new area for him by any
means, but it might become a rarer event as he moves into the
heaviest operatic roles.
Early on, Kaufmann said that he
found singing Lieder difficult until he realised that they
simply had to be sung naturally, without artifice. That approach
underlines much of what he does here, voicing the beautiful poem
of Strauss's “Allerseelen” with an unforced poetry and telling
the little tale of Schubert's “Die Forelle” with an easy smile,
nicely accompanied by Helmut Deutsch's rippling waters at the
piano.
The downside is that the voice does not move as
fluently as it did. Perhaps those Verdi and Wagner operas are
already taking their toll, as there are rough edges where
Kaufmann's tenor strives to engage with grace and beauty on a
small scale.
The programme is planned, and performed, as
a gradual withdrawal into the most intimate world of song. It
ends with Schumann's silvery “Mondnacht”, Brahms's once
overfamiliar “Wiegenlied”, Wolf's heartfelt “Verborgenheit”, and
finally floats off into the ether with Mahler's “Ich bin der
Welt abhanden gekommen”, a closing vision of eternal peace.