Recently I acquired Verismo Arias, the latest offering from Herr Kaufmann. The handsome German tenor - who recently made a sensational debut beside Angela Gheorghiu in a concertized Adriana Lecouvreur - sang excerpts from what I would call ball-breakers: very very heavy material that would have made Joseph Calleja cry.
Light lyric tenor jokes aside, the album is quite an experience. There are familiar extracts from Adriana, Andrea Chénier, La Gioconda & Cavalleria rusticana. There is a very sweet little song, Ombra di nube, which I have heard before only sung by sopranos, one of them the legendary Claudia Muzio. Of course Vesti la giubba is there also, along with Lamento di Federico from L'Arlesiana (which I totally adore from a purely musical basis). The conductor is Antonio Pappano, who had Kaufmann for his (might I say slightly controversial) 2009 Madama Butterfly with Gheorghiu. The orchestra is the greatest in this world, by which I mean the Santa Cecilia Academy Orchestra of course.
I hesitate to call this release a complete success. Unlike Kaufmann's previous releases this oeuvre is an experiment of sort, a baby duck dipping its feet into the waters. As wonderful his instrument is, and as large his resources are, there is something wanting. I particularly find it almost offensive that Kaufmann elected to leave out the crying after Ridi del duol che t'avvelena il cor in the Pag arioso: apart from it's written in the score ('piangendo'), it also marks out an important point which Canio, well, lost his mind. There is also an awkward top B near the end of Lamento di Federico. Ombra di nube is gorgeous, but suffers from an over-coperto-ing of the middle voice.
On the other hand, Kaufmann might be the only spinto voice capable of surviving these ball-breakers since Domingo, but then again Domingo is almost like a freak of nature. The rest are either too routine/full of bad habits (Giordani, Álvarez), too light (Calleja, Jovanovich, Beczala), or plain destroyed (Villazón). Maybe like Cunegonde, it is ignoble to complain. And ''surviving'' is perhaps too harsh a word: there are certainly moments of extreme beauty like the I Lituani rarity, the Vicino a te duet, the opening mamma! of Mamma, quel vino, and the Amor ti vieta. At the end of the day, one must accept that Kaufmann is no Corelli or not even a del Monaco, but certainly in a class of his own.
By the way, the cover is stifling hot! That jacket is to kill for!
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