Even among operaphiles, Alfred Lortzing isn’t exactly a household name, but this latest disc from German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff could make him one. Most of Evening Star — 40 minutes out of 66 — is devoted to arias from Lortzing’s Zar and Zimmermann ("Tsar and Carpenter"; 1837) and Der Wildschütz ("The Poacher"; 1842), and to hear Quasthoff sing these numbers, you’d think they’d been written by Mozart, or at least Rossini. With a rich, soft voice that never seems to strain, he’s by turns hilariously buffoonish and touchingly earnest (and more three-dimensional than Gottlob Frick on the EMI recording) as Zar’s Burgomaster van Bett, who’s trying to prepare an amateur choir to give "Rooshian" tsar Pyotr the Great a rousing send-off; he also triumphs in the act-three aria in which Pyotr wishes he could be a child again, with a ravishing turn on "Denn irdische Größe erlischt wie ein Traum" ("For earthly greatness fades away like a dream") that even Hermann Prey didn’t equal.
In Der Wildschütz Quasthoff is the schoolmaster Baculus, an on-the-cheap Figaro who doesn’t trust his fiancée Gretchen to go see the Count. We hear the lovebirds arguing (Quasthoff dueting with a wonderfully Susanna-like Christiane Oelze); later Baculus is dazzled by an offer of 5000 thalers to give up Gretchen (you have to love a composer who can rhyme "Christ" with "Kapitalist"). Shifting gears, Quasthoff revels in the Count’s apostrophe to the goddess Joy. There should be a Lortzing opera in his future — and in Boston’s.
The remainder of the disc brings Lysiart’s tortured-lust aria from Weber’s Euryanthe, Hermann’s greeting to the knights and Wolfram’s "Abendstern" (from which the CD takes its name) aria from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and Morosus’s final monologue from Die schweigsame Frau ("The Silent Woman") — all equally beautiful, if less revelatory. Christian Thielemann and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin accompany with lieder-like sensitivity, and Anselm Gerhart serves up that modern rarity, liner notes with insight. At the end, Morosus decides that music is even more beautiful when it’s over. He’s obviously never heard Quasthoff sing.
(Click here for Lloyd Schwartz’s review of Thomas Quasthoff’s Jordan Hall recital last Friday.)
