The Brainy Tenor Par Excellence

Brain, of course, is Bostridge's middle name, this super-intelligent singer lacking only expressions of crude passions that some misguided composers included in their works. The good news from the packed (2,500-seat), wildly appreciative Usher Hall is that all organs are now full engaged in the tenor's performance, he is running on all cylinders.

Bostridge has even overcome the one problem bothering some listeners, the sameness of delivery. In a rich, rewarding program — of Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge, eight Schubert songs, and Faure's wonderful, rarely-performed La bonne chanson — there was more variety and shifting colors than I ever heard on many previous occasions. All that is added to what we already know and treasure: the musical accuracy and clear diction, which came through brilliantly in the Housman poems and Verlaine's French text.

The unforgettable high point of the recital was the Schubert-Goethe Meeres Stille, Bostridge giving voice to silence, to the vaguely menacing, perhaps uneasy, possibly redemptive "calm at sea." Music, poetry and performance combined to stop time and weave a magnificent spell over the hall.

Attention Must Be Paid: the Belcea

Bostridge's intelligence was also at work in selecting his collaborators. Julius Drake was the exceptional pianist, having the Schuberts to himself, and playing as the fifth member of the Belcea Quartet in the other two works.

The remarkable young violinist Corina Belcea engaged three colleagues from the Royal College of Music less than three years ago, forming one of the finest of the new-generation ensembles. Laura Samuel is second violinist, Krzysztof Chorzelski is the violist, and Alasdair Tait is the self-effacing, but sensational cellist. Belcea is aggressively (but not excessively) present in the performance and Tait is virtually invisible, including his playing, which is gloriously transparent.

Then there was the matter of encores, a strange business, indeed. The first encore was a reprise of the brief, charming Housman, Oh, when I was in love with you, no problem there, but . . . The second (and final) encore was also a repeat from the Vaughan Williams cycle, the lengthy, quiet, subdued Brendon Hill. The performance was utterly beautiful, the quartet's contribution never better, but this double repetition was probably a first in many years of concert-going, and subject of some conspiratorial speculation. Did the BBC-TV director need a "retake" of those songs?

Kaufmann: an Exciting Voice from Munich

No encores, alas, for Kaufmann's recital. It is part of the festival's "radical" new series of late-night concerts in Usher Hall. Starting at 10:30, programmed strictly for an hour, and using a large donation from the Royal Bank to set all ticket prices at 5 pounds, it's a wonderful series, except for its unimaginative name ("Classical Music Every Night for 5 Pounds"), and it brings hundreds of new listeners to great classical music.

Kaufmann, a 33-year-old from Munich, with pop-star looks, hair to rival DeYoung, performed Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, a song cycle that fits the hour-long format exactly. Accompanied by Viennese-born, Munich-resident Helmut Deutsch (the piano cradling and uplifting the voice), Kaufmann exhibited focused, warm intelligence, passion appropriate to the songs, and a very interesting voice. Or voices. Three of them.

There is a velvety lyric tenor on top, a hint of steel beneath, and somewhere in-between or on the side, a high baritone. Normally, when you hear a singer with "voices," it can drive you up the wall. Kaufmann has successfully integrated them and what is obvious is a beautiful lyric voice, used superbly, and then some of the other stuff if you bother to analyze it.

Perhaps the only reason I paid much attention to the exact nature of the voice was a startling item in the bio note. Along with Tamino, the Berlioz Faust, Barber of Seville, etc., it said there, in print: "Otello in Chicago." Between that note and my ears, I trust the latter more and I'd suppose the writer must have meant "in Otello," probably Cassio. Over the weekend, correspondents from Chicago confirmed that Cassio it was, an excellent one.

Urmana: Rich Voice, Plain Talk

Just as her singing is true and on the mark, Violeta Urmana's response to questions is unhesitating, straightforward. What's the right word for the over-busy opera director? It doesn't matter: "stupid is stupid." Is she a dramatic soprano or a mezzo? Yes, meaning both. She gives new meaning to "zwischenfach" or in-between (voice) specialty. She is not in-between, she easily encompasses both. The kind of voice she uses and cultivates depends on how she feels, on the phase in her career.

San Francisco's memorable Brangaene and today's reigning Kundry (four major productions in the past couple of years, including the Salzburg co-production she is singing here, at the festival in Edinburgh) started her musical career in Lithuania as a pianist. She also attended opera workshops as a non-singing student, taking copious notes she is using even now, Urmana began singing as a soprano, switched to mezzo soon after that, and now that "Eboli is the only remaining role of interest" to her, she is going for the dramatic-soprano repertory with a vengeance. She did in the past sing coloratura mezzo roles, but feels today that Rossini, the most important composer of the genre, is "too mathematical." Did she mean "mechanical"? The translator nodded, but Urmana stayed with her original statement. Mathematical Rossini? Interesting.

In a conversation with the audience at a Royal Museum event on Friday, Urmana, a resident of Munich now, spoke in German, her words translated by event host Henrik Schaefer, after a festival-assigned translator stalked off stage when challenged from the audience for his mumbled mistranslations. Schaefer, Claudio Abbado's assistant conductor with the Berlin Philhamonic, continuing to work with Abbado after the music director left that job, then did a splendid job, in flawless English and not mumbling in the least.

Urmana's plans are clearly outlined for the next seven years, culminating in a Ring Brünnhilde, in — so help me — 2009. She will continue singing Wagner, but she refuses to become a "German specialist." On her schedule: the Forza Leonore, Lady Macbeth, Aida, a concert Gioconda, "maybe Norma."

What's the most difficult thing about singing Kundry, one of opera's most demanding roles? Waiting for nearly an hour and a half to sing two words at the end. She paused after the laugh the remark received and added thoughtfully: "In a way, that wait may be a form of what the character sings: `Dienen, Dienen,' a kind of service." When Urmana said she finds it easy to "slip in and out" of various Parsifal productions, I asked if it was really easy to "slip into" Harry Kupfer's complicated Berlin Staatsoper staging, bordering on Eurotrash. Both Urmana and Schaefer were puzzled by the term. (I remembered, too late, that German measles are called the French pox in that country, so "Eurotrash" may be called something less close to home on the Continent.)

When "too busy, as in Amfortas riding an ever-moving mechanical platform" was offered as clarification, Urmana said: "Aha. You mean stupid direction. Yes, stupid is stupid." She did not "appreciate" Gotz Friedrich's direction, she volunteered the information. warming up to the topic, Urmana added that "some directors have not enough talent and too much power." Can a singer with her current status make a difference? Not really, she said, but whatever the circumstances, "we just need to do the best we can." I have never seen her in a performance where she did less than that, her remarkable optimum participation, no matter what curves the director might have throw at her.

(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.)

©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved