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The big news at this year's Oregon Bach Festival has been the première of Krzysztof Penderecki's Credo, a massive liturgical work for orchestra and chorus. Given Penderecki's stature and the festival's reputation for memorable performances of large-scale works such as Bach's B Minor Mass, the attention isn't surprising; a last-minute change in the composition--the commission was originally for an entire mass--only added to the excitement. But deserved or not, the hoopla has tended to upstage my own nominee for concert of the year, a recital by the German baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Quasthoff mesmerized the audience last year at the University of Oregon's Beall Hall with a thoughtful and flawless performance of Schubert's Die Winterreise, and the first half of this year's recital featured another pinnacle of the Romantic song cycle literature, Schumann's Dichterliebe. The cycle--settings of poems by Heinrich Heine--allowed Quasthoff to demonstrate once again the beautifully shaped phrases and considered approach to emotional nuance and ambiguity that made his Schubert great. Its relative brevity allowed for the inclusion of additional works that demonstrated other facets of Quasthoff's art. Liszt's Italianate, highly demanding Three Petrarch Sonnets underscored his precision and prodigious technical ability, and Brahms' Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), settings of biblical texts, showed the clarity and majesty--a sort of holy authority--that contribute to his compelling performances of sacred oratorio. Beyond the obvious virtues of Quasthoff's voice--clear tone and diction, superb legato and wide range--is a rich palate of colors and shading; the sound is not always pretty, as with the husky darkness that he brought to bear on passages of Dichterliebe, but it is always apt. His interpretive skill leaves listeners feeling as though they haven't missed anything without knowledge of German or a printed translation (which was just as well, since the program dispensed with the texts of the poems). Both the Liszt and Brahms pieces had precipitous drops from tenor heights, which he negotiated with stunning agility as captivating as anything you've ever seen Michael Jordan do, striking every note precisely on the way down to his solid, supple lower register. Quasthoff has a keen sense of drama, hanging on to notes--and with them, the audience--until he's ready to let go; the long silences that precede sustained and enthusiastic applause testify to his power to cast a spell, even in a large hall (perhaps because of last year's enthusiastic reception, he appeared this year at the Hult Center's Silva Concert Hall, which at 2,400 seats is more than four times Beall's size). And like a skilled actor, he can change character as deftly as his voice changes notes, switching from comedic banter between songs to intense concentration on the music. In Justus Zeyen, he also has an ideal accompanist (and straight man). The two perform exactly in step, and Zeyen's treatment of the piano postludes in Dichterliebe served to attenuate the effect of Quasthoff's singing without drawing attention to itself. For his musicianship, intelligence and interpretive skill, critics increasingly compare Quasthoff to the legendary Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; it will be interesting to hear how age will burnish his voice (he is only 39). His persona is destined to be different; not only is he less formal a singer, without (yet) the operatic career that helped to define Fischer-Dieskau in the public eye, but he was one of the first to suffer the effects of thalidomide, which his mother took during pregnancy. As a result, he stands about 4 feet tall, with short legs and underdeveloped hands attached directly to his shoulders. It is irrelevant to his musical ability, but it makes his stage presence uniquely commanding. Add to that the fact that he's good-looking and radiates confidence; as a woman I spoke to after the concert put it, "Thomas is such a man." For the second year in a row, Quasthoff has given the kind of recital that transcends what we, in our broadcast- and recording-saturated culture, expect of live performance. Amid the excited buzz afterwards were many mentions of last year's concert, and this one should prove the same--not just another performance, but an event to be remembered. "That's one way in which he's like Fischer-Dieskau," a festival musician told me. "You'll tell your grandchildren about having heard him." |
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