MUSIC REVIEW : Hampson: A Recital Without Compromises

It wasn’t all that long ago that Thomas Hampson was the pride of the Music Academy of the West and the joy of the USC music department. Now he is justly celebrated on the stages of the Metropolitan Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Vienna Staatsoper and La Scala.

His recitals fill concert halls from London to Lisbon to Vienna to Zurich. Costa Mesa, however, is another matter.

Half of the 2,994 seats in the Orange County Performing Arts Center might have been embarrassingly empty for the baritone’s local debut on Tuesday, had Erich A. Vollmer, executive director of the sponsoring Philharmonic Society, not made a bold and generous move. When James Galway, the indisposed virtuoso of the golden flute, failed to appear for a date here last week, Vollmer offered any disappointed patron the compensation of a free ticket for Hampson.

About 1,300 presumably disappointed patrons took the impresario up on his offer. That sort of opportunity isn’t likely to recur when Hampson sings here again.

He conquers audiences as effectively as Attila the Hun conquered nations. Hampson achieves his victories, however, in a far more benign and civilized fashion.

That should not imply that he does so the easy way. Hampson doesn’t condescend to his public. He doesn’t indulge in artistic compromises. He doesn’t make concessions to popular taste. His stubborn integrity, coupled with a lofty aesthetic vision, demands a certain degree of intellectual effort on both sides of the footlights.

He sings opera on the concert stage only under duress. On this occasion, he selected two arias as program bonuses, both of which flirted with obscurity. “Rivolgete,” the alternate showpiece Mozart wrote for Guglielmo in “Cosi fan Tutte,” unexpectedly enlivened the first half of the program; “Pierrots Tanzlied” from Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” was added near the end. There were no Great Baritone Hits in earshot.

Hampson devoted the bulk of the evening to the song literature. Even here, he steadfastly avoided hackneyed choices. Repertory cliches do not interest him.

Like all informed zealots, he made the unfamiliar seem inviting, the esoteric fascinating. Sophistication, he kept reminding us, need not be forbidding.

He is, of course, an extraordinarily persuasive tour guide in uncharted territory. He is tall, slender, handsome and charming--some might say charismatic. He commands vocal resources that are exceptionally suave, pliant, sensual and wide-ranging. (The range, may be a bit more impressive at the incisive top than at the breathy bottom, but Hampson knows how to mimimize the inequity.) Most important, perhaps, he has taste, wit and imagination.

To this singer, the text obviously means as much as the music. His diction is exemplary in Italian, German, French and, yes, English.

Hampson is a thinking baritone--a rare genus for which the contemporary model remains Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. As such, the 34-year-old American also is a thinking person’s baritone.

He couldn’t make the vast spaces of Segerstrom Hall seem ideal for an art predicated on subtlety. No one could do that. Nevertheless, he projected his subtle art into the wide open spaces with remarkable focus and immediate impact. It is amazing what a little--no, a lot--of honesty, conviction and communicative flair can do.

To open the festivities, he offered four seldom-performed Italian songs by Schubert, arresting fusions of bel-canto lyricism and Germanic introspection. In the subsequent Mozart aria, he revealed comic flair in happy harmony with musical finesse.

He etched the delicate poetry of six Schumann Lieder with careful dynamic strokes. Surveying disparate “Wunderhorn” settings by Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss and Mahler, Hampson demonstrated why his recent recording of this material deserved the Grand Prix du Disque.

After intermission, he explored some sadly neglected Americana: the clever irony of John Duke, the romantic nostalgia of Vittorio Giannini, the salon sentiment of Richard Hageman, the period folksiness of Charles Wakefield Cadman, the delicate shimmer of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and the rugged pathos of Walter Damrosch.

The superb kitsch of the Korngold aria, which capped the evening as one of two ultimate encores, has long been a Hampson specialty. It is doubtful that Richard Mayr, the great Austrian bass-baritone for whom it was written, sang this dreamy music so seductively. It is even more unlikely that Mayr could have caressed the final phrases with such exquisite pianissimo tones.

At the piano, Armen Guzelimian proved himself more than a sensitive accompanist. He complemented Hampson, technically and interpretively, as a worthy partner.

Incidental intelligence:

* The appreciative audience included one noisy baby--the noisiest to mar an Orange County performance since the Opera Pacific “Traviata.”

* A notice printed boldface in the program magazine requested the audience to “please reserve applause for the end of each group of songs.” The request was ignored during much of the recital.

* Hampson and Guzelimian will repeat the program tonight at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. That is a hint.