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Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Thomas Hampson sings at Emory
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Recital Review
— Baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg, Tuesday at Emory University’s Emerson Concert Hall. www.emory.edu/arts
Singing is as much about language as it is about as music. When it comes to operatic voices, American audiences sometimes forget that equation. Instead, we’re addicted to the beauty of tone, the shapely lines, the super-charged melodies.
It’s easy to understand how we got this way. When an Italian tenor or German soprano sings in their native tongue, the performer intuitively understands the texts — whereas a monoglot American audience, by default, thrills to the glamorous sounds. We pick up the emotions, even if we can’t understand the words.
All this came to mind Tuesday evening when American baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg delivered a recital of German, Czech and American songs at Emory’s Emerson Concert Hall.
Hampson is among the smarter, more stylish baritones in the world. As he approaches 50, his voice remains large, open and distinctively rugged, of fine-grained oak. His preparation and attention to nuance, in any language, is fastidious.
Robert Schumann’s “Stirb’, Lieb’ und Freud’â€? (“Die, Love and Joyâ€?) — one of six Schumann songs that opened the program — was indicative. It’s a covert, almost whispered ballad about a pious girl set to take religious orders, and her secret suitor whose heart is breaking.
Hampson sang it with compassion and depth. When the maiden speaks the title words, the baritone slipped into a well-placed falsetto, rolling each syllable in his mouth, bringing it to the tip of his tongue, and carefully dropping it out of his mouth. He put the words way out the front, to the extent that if you weren’t following the line-by-line translation in the program booklet, you might mistake his text shaping for vocal mannerisms.
With the score in hand, he sang Antonin Dvorak’s seven “Gypsy Songs� in Czech, again with clean diction and superb musicality. He didn’t have the notes/texts fully internalized. Was it surprising that he couldn’t cut loose and find carefree joy for “Struna naladena� (“The Strings are Tuned�), a Bohemian honky tonk where the climactic line is “Join the dance!�
All matters concerning debatable style in foreign languages evaporated after intermission: six songs by six composers, all set to Walt Whitman texts, followed by a group of American folk tunes.
Rutenberg, for his part, was best in Leonard Bernstein’s neurotic “To What You Said,� teasing out the anguished chords at the beginning, supporting the singer as a full partner, exploring the music in close rapport.
And when Hampson serenaded us with “O Shenandoahâ€? and “The Boatmen’s Danceâ€? — in Stephen White’s chintzy arrangement of the former; Aaron Copland’s echt-Americana version of the latter — it was easy to feel we’d never heard these classics more convincingly sung, at once opulent and plain-spoken. Such is the combined power of language and music.
On the Web: Thomas Hampson’s Website is www.hampsong.com
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