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The New York Times, 31 October 2011 |
By ZACHARY WOOLFE |
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Recital, Metropolitan Opera, New York, 30. Oktober 2011 |
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A Fast-Rising Opera Star in a Solo Setting
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In Friedrich Rückert’s poem “I Am Lost to the World,” the narrator sighs
that the world “has heard nothing from me for so long,/That it may very well
believe that I am dead.”
That isn’t Jonas Kaufmann’s problem. At 42,
Mr. Kaufmann, the German tenor who sang Mahler’s setting of Rückert’s poem
during his first New York recital on Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitan
Opera, is one of the busiest and most celebrated singers in opera.
His career has developed with extraordinary speed. As recently as 2004, he
was singing minor parts like Cassio in a Paris production of Verdi’s
“Otello,” and it was just last year that New York audiences really seemed to
take notice of him, in a revival of Puccini’s “Tosca.” Luciano Pavarotti’s
first recital at the Met presented by the company occurred after he had been
singing in New York for 20 years; Mr. Kaufmann made his Met debut in 2006.
The swiftness of his rise to prominence speaks both to his great
talent and to an art form decidedly lacking in bankable stars, particularly
male ones. Mr. Kaufmann has quickly become a key component of artistic plans
at the Met and other major companies, so there was widespread concern in
August when he announced that he would be undergoing surgery to remove a
node from his chest.
He recovered without a hitch, and on Sunday,
accompanied by the pianist Helmut Deutsch in a program of Liszt, Mahler,
Duparc and Strauss, his voice sounded intact: dark, burnished and steady. He
floated Strauss’s “Morgen” with exquisite control.
Mr. Kaufmann’s
quirks have also remained. His voice still has a hooded, covered, slightly
burred quality that can be dusky and mysterious, making it sound as if the
tone were being drawn out by force of masculine will. It’s an exciting
effect, particularly when clarion high notes sail out, but it grows wearying
in large doses. With his diction murky and phrasing dull, he sounded
uncomfortable in five Duparc songs, and he was strongest in a smoothly
winning closing set of six by Strauss. (Four of his five encores were
Strauss songs too.)
Last season, as an impassioned Siegmund in “Die
Walküre,” he occasionally faded against Wagner’s huge orchestra. But on
Sunday Mr. Kaufmann’s sound projected perfectly to a spot in the standing
room at the back of the Met’s family circle level.
What he did not
project was the command of intimacy and nuance that is to be expected of
serious recitalists. Mr. Kaufmann is tremendously appealing, but his
emotions are not complicated; he is happy or sad or angry or peaceful, but
rarely a subtle mixture of those.
Even from the 12th row of the
orchestra level, he seemed earnest but remote. Genial and sincere, feet
planted firmly, with his long, curly dark hair, Mr. Kaufmann really does
approach the Romantic ideal; not for nothing is he inserted into a Caspar
David Friedrich painting on a 2010 album cover.
As Romantic heroes
like Cavaradossi and Don José, Mr. Kaufmann is dashing, and his voice is
always beautiful. But the song repertory requires an authority and a
specificity that he does not yet provide.
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