Altering Court of History

When baritone Thomas Hampson sings Mahler and Copland today and Thursday in Costa Mesa with Carl St.Clair and the Pacific Symphony, Orange County audiences will have another chance to hear one of this country’s most admired singers.

His voice has been called “warm and pliant” in The Times by critic Herbert Glass, who also has praised him as an “artful” recitalist and “a superb program-builder.”

Many will remember Hampson’s 1990 Philharmonic Society-sponsored recital at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa and his appearance as Marcello in Puccini’s “La Boheme” in 1987 at Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

Some may even remember his first venture in the role of Figaro. He was a student at USC when he came to Orange Coast College in 1981 to sing Rossini’s Barber with Carole Chardonnay’s Five Penny Opera company.

His five-penny days are long over. Hampson, 42, commands top dollar on the international circuit, singing regularly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Salzburg Festival, the Vienna Staatsoper and La Scala in Rome.

Like many artists, Hampson didn’t start out to be a singer. He was born in Elkhart, Ind., in 1955, raised in the Northwest and schooled at universities in Spokane and Cheney, Wash., majoring in political science.

“I always sang and was very musical while I was studying, but I wanted to study law,” Hampson said in a phone interview last week from Toronto, where he was singing in recital. “But that got turned around quite quickly.”

Music teachers recognized the quality of his voice, and, on their advice, he moved in the late ‘70s to Santa Barbara to study at the Music Academy of the West and then to Los Angeles for further study at the University of Southern California.

“I put myself on a two- or three-year plan to see if it would be a life or a career that would interest me,” he said. “Things started quite quickly. I won competitions. I went to the Merola program at San Francisco Opera in 1980.”

Then Germany beckoned.

“Always in my heart I had wanted to go to Germany, to a repertory house, to learn languages, to learn that kind of repertory and discipline,” he said. “I’ve been asked if I thought I had to go to Europe to make a career. There was never any other consideration in my mind.”

He sang at the Deutsche Oper Am Rhein in Dusseldorf, Germany, from 1981 to 1983, then at other European opera houses.

“I travel a great deal now. I have an office and a library in Vienna. Obviously, I retain my American citizenship. I have a house in Walla Walla, Wash. It’s a big commute.”

As a voice student, Hampson had to struggle with the perennial question--was he a tenor or a baritone?

“Any high baritone in his 20s is always going to have people who think he’s a tenor,” he said.

“ ‘Could I be a tenor?’ is really a question you have to ask yourself. It’s not a matter of the notes you can sing. It’s a metabolic question, a whole energy question. I did play around with the idea.

“I have a high-ringing property. The voice hangs up there. But I have a dark center and timbre to my voice. As I’ve gotten older, that’s gotten stronger,” he said. “The voice starts to fill out. It’s clear I’m a baritone.

“Had I tried to make the change, I’m not sure it would have been successful. The problem with that [high range] is that it can build a kind of stentorian quality to your voice. The minute you do that, you can say goodbye to [Schubert’s] ‘Schwanengesang,’ Schumann and Mahler.”

Not that Hampson wants to be typecast as a Mahler specialist--or a Verdi or Mozart or Puccini singer, for that matter.

“I’ve always been more interested in characters than in Fach [vocal category],” he said. “I’m more interested in the character that confronts me and that I can recreate through my voice.

“I love bringing characters back to life. To have a life where you can actually incorporate characters from Don Giovanni to Hamlet to Werther--that is a great life.”

He says he has now come into “the thrust of my [vocal] life.”

“I’ve always said a baritone’s lifetime is 35 to 55. Now I have enough physical--and I mean physical-spiritual--capacity as an artist, as an actor, a singer, and enough voice to actually handle these characters that come from great literature. That requires vocalism you have to grow into.”

Young singers, he said, are under a great deal of pressure.

“We do in this society tend to look for the younger generation. That’s fine and very exciting and we all have Wunder moments in our youth, which are quite exciting. But the most important thing for an artist is the right to mature.”

*

Some stage directors have told Hampson that they don’t want “stars,” he said. They only want want young singers who are fresh and who don’t bring “their stunts and tricks.”

“I’ve seen the results, and they’re not very successful productions,” Hampson said. “You need people who have done these kinds of things so often that they are really free enough to go to another dimension with a director. That’s just a property of living longer. . . . I’ve been migrating more to artists, conductors and colleagues who are more about swimming in the ocean, not damning it.”

One such composer is Mahler. “If a composer could occupy my life, if I were a conductor, it could be Mahler,” Hampson said.

“[Mahler] said of himself that, after his death, one of the most misunderstood facets of his personality would be his sense of humor. In the ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen,’ there is a self-deprecating humor, a twinkling eye, especially in his understanding of youthful passions.

“I think he understood better than most people the folly of humanness,” Hampson said. “We take ourselves so seriously, it’s scary.

“He understood that very, very well, and the dangers of it too. In fact, one takes themselves and responsibility of life more seriously when one understands with humility our existence on this planet. That’s what Mahler had.”

* Thomas Hampson will sing Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”(Songs of a Wayfarer) and selections from Copland’s “Old American Songs” with the Pacific Symphony led by Carl St.Clair today and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Also on the program: Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. 8 p.m. $8-$48. (714) 556-2787.