{"id":1220,"date":"2018-10-10T00:34:48","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T04:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1220"},"modified":"2018-10-10T00:34:48","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T04:34:48","slug":"jonas-kaufmann-vs-the-orchestra-of-st-lukes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/10\/jonas-kaufmann-vs-the-orchestra-of-st-lukes.html","title":{"rendered":"Jonas Kaufmann vs. the Orchestra of St. Luke’s"},"content":{"rendered":"

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My father, who grew up on the Lower East Side, probably never heard opera until \u2013 like other Jews of his generation facing American quotas — he went to medical school in Vienna in the 1930s. His only prior exposure to full-throated singing, I imagine, came in the synagogue: cantorial tenors.<\/p>\n

When I was very young and precociously amassing LPs of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, my father collected recordings of the operetta tenors from his medical school years, singers whose high temper and juicy high notes connected with Jan Peerce singing \u201cKol nidre,\u201d or Richard Tucker in the Yiddish songs of Goldfaden. Richard Tauber and Joseph Schmidt were his favorites. So I grew up with songs of Vienna and Berlin ringing in my ears.\u00a0 And they\u2019re still there.<\/p>\n

Jonas Kaufmann, who must be today\u2019s most celebrated operatic tenor, commands a wide repertoire in German, Italian, and French. But for his Carnegie Hall concert last Friday night, Kaufmann presented selections from his 2014 \u201cBerlin album\u201d — \u201cYou Mean the World to Me.\u201d<\/strong> <\/a>I read in the Carnegie program book that this cross-over CD \u201cmade it onto the pop charts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having never heard \u201cYou Mean the World to Me,\u201d I looked forward with excitement and mild trepidation. I imagined that a brainy singer \u2013 and Kaufmann assuredly is that \u2013 might bring self-conscious artistry to this repertoire, now nearly a century old. I was expecting something a little synthetic.<\/p>\n

But Kaufmann made no attempt to sound like Tauber or Schmidt \u2013 any more than they had sounded like one another. Instead, he gloriously found his own way into the tradition they embodied.<\/p>\n

Certainly Kaufmann\u2019s chocolate tenor is darker in timbre, and heftier in weight, than the instruments once associated with \u201cDein ist mein ganzes Herz\u201d or \u201cWien, Wien nur du allein.\u201d But it rings on top. And it\u2019s wonderfully susceptible to the crooning head voice that was a Tauber signature.<\/p>\n

We heard selections by Lehar and Kalman, by Ernst May and Tauber himself, by Robert Stolz and Mischa Spoliansky \u2013 songs composed between 1925 and 1933 for operetta and for early talkies. Somehow, the bewitching Tauber combination of spontaneity, intimate charm, and vocal fireworks was renewed. The evening climaxed with a heroically robust rendition of \u201cDein ist mein ganzes Herz.\u201d Kaufmann made the songs his own.<\/p>\n

The dimensions of this feat were inadvertently magnified every time the singer departed the stage, and we were left alone with the Orchestra of St. Luke\u2019s conducted by Jochen Rieder. Never have I heard so clueless a performance of a Central European waltz as the St. Luke\u2019s treatment of Lehar\u2019s divine Ballsirenen<\/em> from The Merry Widow<\/em>; a lilt was not even attempted. But the evening\u2019s nadir was the waltz from Giuditta<\/em>. Whatever time was allotted to rehearsing this number (surely very little) would have been better spent inviting the instrumentalists to audition Hilde Gueden in \u201cMeine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss\u201d via youtube (I am perfectly serious). They showed no more familiarity with the pertinent style than they might have performing an Indian raga or a Javanese gamelan number.<\/p>\n

My wife, who is Hungarian, said she would have preferred \u201cthe Budapest postal workers\u2019 orchestra.\u201d We were both reminded of hearing the Kronos Quartet attempt Bartok back in the 1990s: a harbinger of things to come. Musical performance devoid of context.<\/p>\n

So it was a weird evening at Carnegie Hall. Rarely have I listened to an orchestra with such discomfort. Never have I responded to a tenor with such gratitude.<\/p>\n

The penultimate encore was a classic Old World torch song: \u201cDon\u2019t Ask Me Why.\u201d I\u2019m not claiming that Jonas Kaufmann\u2019s performance eclipsed my father\u2019s Greta Keller LP. But it was damned good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  My father, who grew up on the Lower East Side, probably never heard opera until \u2013 like other Jews of his generation facing American quotas — he went to medical school in Vienna in the 1930s. His only prior exposure to full-throated singing, I imagine, came in the synagogue: cantorial tenors. When I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-jG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1224,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions\/1224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}