Music Review : The Most Humane Mikado Tells Some Tales

Donald Adams, who brought his one-man show to Ambassador Auditorium on Wednesday, does not give conventional song recitals. That seems natural. He hasn’t exactly had a conventional career.

But it has been, and remains, an extraordinary career--a career notable for its variety and invention, its invariable success, its unfailing integrity, its good luck and, yes, its longevity. Adams is the very model of a modern major basso-sometimes-buffo.

He was born, quintessentially British, in Bristol in 1928. His formative years involved choir duty at Worcester Cathedral, modest service as a military Pooh-Bah and acting in the backwoods of Thespis. His life changed for the first time when he joined the chorus of Englishmen (no French or Turks or Proosians) at the D’Oyly Carte Opera, then still a sacred bastion of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Soon he found himself redefining traditions as an irresistible Pirate King who resembled a blustering puppy, as a booming Mikado whose bloodthirsty cackle suggested nothing more distressing than mild indigestion, and as a Dick Deadeye whose triangularity was more to be censured than pitied.

He left the sinking D’Oyly Carte ship in 1969, but continued with his own Savoyard adventures until the fateful year of 1983. Then, at an age when others might contemplate a dignified retirement, Adams fell into a new career. He began his second life singing what passes these days for grand opera.

Major international houses wanted him for comic duties in Rossini and Mozart. Some gave him serious work, too, in masterpieces of Verdi, Britten and Janacek. He even attempted the massive Teutonic- profondo challenge of Baron Ochs in “Der Rosenkavalier” for Wales in 1990 (the critic Elizabeth Forbes found him “magnificent” as the lovable old scoundrel).

He is surely the only basso in history to have mastered the mock-horrors of “Ruddigore” and also mustered the genuine horrors of “Lulu.” He expresses pleasure that stops short of delirium, however, when recalling his encounter with Berg’s schleimy Schigolch.

His Ambassador recital was a sentimental occasion, more a cheerful reunion with old friends than a formal survey of art songs and arias. Adams set his own standards--lofty, to be sure--and met them with equal parts charm, savoir-faire and old-fashioned showmanship.

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He maneuvered snazzy entrances and exits, musical accompaniment courtesy of his stylish pianist, Theodore Crain. Without benefit of microphone, he told tales on himself (“Ladies and gentleman, tonight I have chosen a very dull subject.” Pregnant pause. “Me.”). He executed some artless little dances. He cracked jokes, mostly dry. He gesticulated, grimaced, pranced, beamed and froze, as the vehicle at hand demanded.

He also sang, with booming, wide-ranging tones that have lost virtually nothing over the decades. He offered object lessons in textual projection, even when the language didn’t happen to be English. With no costumes and no props (well, hardly any), he defined instant characterizations, no two alike.

In addition to sampling his regular collection of greatest hits, Adams offered a few surprises. He simulated a fine Handelian trill by shaking his noble jowls. During a nice old music-hall ditty, he transformed himself into an amnesiac elephant, the best trick of its kind since Zero Mostel became a rhinoceros. He sang folk songs without resorting to phony folksiness. He managed to bring uncondescending pathos to a couple of spirituals, without dropping his British accent.

In trademark G&S; territory, he offered the Mikado’s song, still definitive, and neatly embellished with a flourishing fan. He added excerpts from “Pinafore,” “The Pirates of Penzance,” “Iolanthe,” “Princess Ida,” “Ruddigore” and “Gondoliers.” He confessed special fondness for the last-named because it wasn’t part of his repertory during his D’Oyly Carte years. “Whenever they did ‘Gondoliers,’ ” he recalled, “I had the night off. It became my favorite opera.”

Before sending the crowd home with the quaintly serious Victorianism of “The Lost Chord” (nice pianissimo, nice legato), he showed what he can do with the Italianate patter of both Mozart’s and Rossini’s Bartolo. He can do quite a lot.

Next time, Baron Ochs. Please.