Rising Mezzo Offers Strong, Fresh Style

After years of the tyranny of the high voice, sopranos and tenors aggressively elbowing in front of lower-voiced colleagues, mezzos and baritones have finally gotten their revenge. The brightest new stars in opera of the ‘90s have been the Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli and the Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel. More mezzos--Lorraine Hunt, Olga Borodina and Jennifer Larmore--are also among the quickest-rising and most impressive of the current generation of singers.

And now we have the mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager, whose recital Tuesday, offered by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County at the Laguna Beach Artists Theater, came in the wake of a very loud buzz emanating from Vienna, London and Seattle, where she recently sang in “Der Rosenkavalier.” She appears next at the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan. And Sony Classics, which has signed her to an exclusive contract, has turned its publicity machine on her entrancing new disc of songs by Mahler (Gustav and his wife, Alma) and Korngold.

The hype is that Kirchschlager, who is 31 and was born and trained in Salzburg, is no less than an Austrian Bartoli. The reality is that she is an Austrian Bartoli, if one allows for the fact that “Austrian” means something very different from “Italian.” A Viennese specialist, she shares practically no repertory with Bartoli, except for a couple of Mozart roles. Her voice is heavier, creamier, stronger. She is a less fancy singer but just right for the music she sings.

What Kirchschlager does share with Bartoli, however, is important--a sense of freshness not just of voice but of approach to the music. She sounds as connected to the songs she chooses as any MTV singer-songwriter. And that music, the music of an empire trying to keep going long past its time, is fascinating to come to afresh.

The program, much of which is reproduced on the new Sony CD, included early songs by Gustav Mahler and songs by his much-younger wife, who never developed her promise as a composer under her domineering genius of a husband. These are songs by morbid late-19th century Viennese Romantics who eagerly anticipated a liberating modern century.

But Kirchschlager also gave a powerful demonstration of just what a contradictory place Vienna of the 20th century was to become--a city central to forging the newest ideas in Modernist art and science, while trying to keep its waltz, whipped cream and its emperor. Berg’s Opus 2 songs, from 1909, showed that harmony was already thought too confining to express the sheer grotesqueries of the world. Four songs by Richard Strauss indicated just how deeply the glow of 19th century harmony was embedded in the Viennese sentiment. And Erich Korngold, who was represented by songs he wrote after moving to Hollywood, reminded us that Viennese Romanticism got a curious new life in film scores.

Kirchschlager’s performances--abetted by a stellar accompanist, the elegant and utterly secure Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and heard in an intimate, fine 478-seat hall--were no less than a revelation. She is utterly true not just to pitch and vocal tone, but to the essence of word and meaning. She is a grounded performer. She stands and sways, as if completely inside each song. Dark music is dark; funny songs are funny. Dramatic character is neither exaggerated nor ignored. That may sound the obvious way a singer should approach her material, but it is surprisingly rare in this repertory, where schmaltz and schlag are so often applied to hide Vienna’s troubled (and most interesting) side.

The art song, supposedly a dying art, has a new and important star, and one strongly suspects that opera does as well.