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Nearly everything about this new recital from tenor Jonas Kaufmann augurs well for the future, for here perhaps is the sort of German tenor that we’ve all been waiting for. Described as a lyric spinto on his website, it’s a voice that is seemingly perfect for Mozart, the Beethoven Florestan and some Wagner, and this is emphatically what the disc delivers: arias from ‘The Magic Flute’ and Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’, plus some bleeding chunks of Schubert and Wagner (the ‘Walkure’ - Siegmund and Parsifal).
And it’s with Wagner that the Kaufmann story really starts. He grew up with records of famous German tenors and his grandfather played him Wagner on the piano although he’s now ready to admit that it sounded to him like ‘giants shouting’. His major inspiration in the tenor medium was the golden voiced Fritz Wunderlich ‘the last in the royal line’ according to Kaufmann.
Well, not quite…for here is Kaufmann himself continuing the great tradition. The voice is incredible; firm but pliant, perfect for Mozart and positively startling in the great Act 2 aria from ‘Fidelio’. Every so often one can hear echoes of that other great Florestan, Jon Vickers, and the sound of Wagner tenor James King was also evoked for this listener; I doubt that I’ve heard a finer rendition of this Beethoven aria in recent times. Kaufmann once described Florestan as a man who creates his own paradise garden within a prison cell, and hearing this performance one can well believe it.
I said at the outset that NEARLY everything about this recital augurs well for the future. It’s the Wagner that raises the odd concern: not the gorgeously sung Lohengrin excerpts, nor indeed the bold ‘Wintersturme’. The spectre of ‘Parsifal’ looms large at the end of the disc and, no doubt, could be followed in the future by those other Wagnerian heroes, Siegfried and Tristan. Let’s just hope that Kaufman knows when and if to sing them. For the moment though, here are glories for the present: wonderful Mozart and some outstanding Beethoven and Schubert. Oh, and there’s the joy of Kaufmann’s Lohengrin - something indeed prophetic of things to come.