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Follow the lieder
Thomas Quasthoff, Kiri te Kanawa, and Sheri Greenawald, plus Boston Academy of Music’s La fanciulla del West
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Aficionados of the art-song recital have long had reason to worry. How small the audience has grown. How few singers can handle the subtleties of this repertoire anymore. Take Kiri te Kanawa’s recital last month at Symphony Hall, in the FleetBoston Celebrity Series. One of the world’s best-loved celebrities is now in the process of winding down the brilliant career that was just beginning when I fell under her spell at her American debut — as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro at the Santa Fe Opera, in 1971. Jaws dropped at that effortlessly creamy sound. What a Mozart singer she was! What a Strauss singer she could be! Three decades later, the size of her voice and the radiance of her tone have barely diminished.

Of course, she’s probably more famous for singing at Princess Di’s wedding than for any of her operatic roles (with her new hairstyle, she even looks a little like the late princess). This beautiful, personable, witty New Zealander never turned into much of an actress or interpreter. Words — all those vowels and consonants — never seemed as important to her as that honeyed sound. In her familiar program of Handel arias, songs and a concert aria by Mozart, songs by Strauss, Duparc, and Copland, and sentimental Argentinian love songs, there was never any expectation that she would illuminate a word, a phrase, or an element of style, let alone that she would break your heart. The only question was whether the next diminuendo was going to be as exquisite as the last or the next climactic high note less chancy. And the answer was often enough yes.

She got one of her biggest hands before her first encore, Puccini’s "O mio babbino caro" (which she sang in A Room with a View). But this comic aria about a girl wheedling her father for permission to buy an engagement ring so she can marry the man she loves (she’ll throw herself off the Ponte Vecchio if her "little daddy" refuses) might just as well have been an Ave Maria, it was so piously — so merely — pretty. Still, a couple of years away from 60, te Kanawa looked and sounded phenomenally fit, and if her charm is greater than her musical or dramatic insight — well, so be it. There’s little enough real charm in the world.

Soprano Sheri Greenawald singing Schumann’s Liederkreis ("Circle of Songs") at Boston Conservatory’s Seully Hall was another story. Greenawald, who’s just completing a two-year residency at Boston Conservatory, has sung at the world’s leading opera houses. If she’s never quite achieved superstardon, it’s not from any failure to communicate. The Schumann is more an anthology than a fully connected cycle; each song tells a different story, about love, loneliness, premonitions of death, moonlight, dark doings in the supernatural woods. It’s a rare cycle with a happy ending. Greenawald threw herself into these songs with exhilarating communicative urgency and conviction, changing posture and vocal timbre. She moved freely around the stage, confiding the story, keeping us on the edge of our seats.

She’s sung the role of Jenny Smith in the Met’s famous production of the Brecht/Weill Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; here she brought out the proto-Weill in Schumann, its drama, its razor-sharp ironies. Her full and flexible voice isn’t as ravishing as te Kanawa’s (whose is?), and it seemed too big and boomy for Seully Hall, where Michael Strauss’s heavy hand on the keyboard was not the most helpful sort of accompaniment.

Greenawald shared the program with baritone Victor Jannett, whose attempt at Schumann’s tragic Dichterliebe cycle was as admirably earnest as it was vocally effortful. They ended with a duet: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s "People Will Say We’re in Love." Greenawald was irresistible as she mimed dodging the bouquets Jannett might be throwing — the diametrical opposite of the way in which te Kanawa, one has to admit, was also irresistible.

HOPE REALLY KINDLED for the future of lieder singing at German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff’s first Boston recital (FleetBoston Celebrity Series). Here is a singer functioning on the highest artistic level and at the height of his vocal powers, singing the way you can take for granted only on the great recordings of earlier generations. His recital repeated material from the recent Deutsche Grammophon recording, two of the high-water marks of the entire German song repertoire: the two last song cycles by Schubert and Brahms. The venue was not Symphony Hall but the more intimate Jordan Hall ("What a beautiful hall!", Quasthoff began. "Is everyone in the audience beautiful? I hope so . . . yes!"), and the performance demonstrated even greater directness and spontaneity and nuance, and a broader range of feeling, than you can hear on the CD.

Quasthoff’s conversational patter is significant. His physical deformities (he was a thalidomide baby; he’s well under four feet tall, and his hands and arms are not fully formed) can be distracting when you see him for the first time. So it’s important to regard him as a person (no, better than that, a mensch) rather than a cruel accident of nature. He joked about the on-stage drafts ("It’s so windy, we could sail!") and threatened to deduct $500 from the fee of his pianist, the tall, blond, curly-haired Justus Zeyen. He also felt confident enough to show his darker side: anger flashed at the ignorant disregard for Schubert’s glorious postludes ("Please stop coughing. Not in the last part of the piano — please!"). He warned the audience again before Brahms’s Vier ernste GasŠnge ("Four Serious Songs"). "The tension between the songs is very important," he explained, then immediately lightened the mood: "After the concert you can cough as much as you like. Maybe I’ll join you." That worked. The coughing diminished, though the noisy page turning never let up.

It’s debatable how much of a formal cycle Schubert intended in Schwanengesang ("Swan Songs" — not his own title). But these settings of poems by three of his contemporaries — Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine, and Johann Gabriel Seidl — are among the greatest treasures of the song repertoire. Some, like the exquisite "StŠndchen" ("Serenade") and the exuberant "Abschied" ("Farewell"), have achieved independent popularity. Heine’s "Der Atlas" (the mythical giant who carries a world of pain on his shoulders) achieves a tragic grandeur, his "Der DoppelgŠnger" ("The Nemesis") a sinister melancholy.

As Quasthoff demonstrated at a remarkable master class at the New England Conservatory the following morning, the most important thing about singing, what makes it "easy," is the ability to live in the words, to feel what they mean. Everything he sings — about suffering, or fear, or love, or turning 40 — seems to have an autobiographical overtone, though without ever a trace of self-pity. There was nothing rigid about these performances. Within a single song he could move — with complete musical conviction and integrity — through a wide psychological spectrum, his voice expanding or dwindling, growing chillingly hollow or limitless in power, never losing the musical or emotional line. ("I want to see the colors behind the words," he told the students.) And his mobile, beautiful face is a mirror of his singing. The concluding work of the cycle — "Der Taubenpost" ("Pigeon Post"), the very last song Schubert composed and one of his most endearing — is a love song that turns, in the final stanza, into an allegory of all human loneliness and yearning, a transition Quasthoff captured as fully as I’ve ever heard.

The second half of the program — Brahms’s FŸnf Lieder (Opus 94) and Vier ernste GesŠnge (a setting of texts from Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, and Corinthians composed at the imminent death of his dear friend Clara Schumann) — was more austere, and except for the rhapsodic "Sapphische Ode" grimmer. Zeyen added greater tonal depths to his sensitive but largely monochromatic playing in the Schubert. Quasthoff was solemn, dramatic, heroic, wise. The cheering capacity crowd demanded encores, but what, Quasthoff asked, could follow these songs? "These days at the moment are not easy for all of us . . . But why not be idealistic?" Could we leave the concert and change the world? "Why not?" He gave us Schubert’s irresistible "Die Forelle" ("The Trout" — "this one you definitely know"); an astonishing, heartbreaking, and uncannily idiomatic "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" (ending with a reverberant bottom-of-the-barrel low note); and, most moving of all, to celebrate his "20 years in the music business," Schubert’s "An die Musik," a hymn of thanks to that "dearest art."

PUCCINI HAD SOME NERVE. In La fanciulla del West ("The Girl of the Golden West"), he ripped off one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best tunes — Phantom of the Opera’s "Music of the Night."

Fanciulla had its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910, with Enrico Caruso as the highwayman Ramerrez (alias Dick Johnson), who steals the heart of Minnie, the Girl; and it boasts one of Puccini’s most seductive and harmonically sophisticated scores. It’s a killer on voices and has wrecked more than one. But cheers to Richard Conrad’s Boston Academy of Music for a 10-gallon, two-gun, six-shooting production, with heroic performances by company stalwarts Ellen Chickering (sporting an unfortunate Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? wig) and Ray Bauwens, in some of their most powerfully impressive work, plus David Murray as the villainous "sheriffo" Jack Rance (maybe a little too villainous — almost all of Puccini’s characters here are pretty sympathetic) and a stageful of the seediest-looking prospectors and barflies this side of Sutter’s Mill led by Bryan McNeil and Mark Nemeskal as Nick the bartender. Laura McPherson’s set wittily and touchingly captured the aura of David Belasco’s original melodrama. This was a superb ensemble performance, under the expert leadership of conductor David Daniels and stage director Conrad, whose 1999 production of Puccini’s Il trittico was another of BAM’s best.

Okay, ragazzi, the whiskey’s on me!

(For Jeffrey Gantz’s review of Thomas Quasthoff’s Evening Star CD, see "Off the Record.")

Issue Date: March 14 - 21, 2002
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