A Magnificent Voice That’s Up to the Musical Challenge

There are ills in modern concert life. The art song recital appears to be dying for lack of listener interest. And we’ve lately witnessed the triumph of the sympathy vote over musical accomplishment in audiences’ admiration for troubled pianist David Helfgott and blind tenor Andrea Boccelli.

Now comes the antidote. Thomas Quasthoff, who sang his first song recital program in Los Angeles Thursday night at UCLA’s Royce Hall, cannot help but attract audiences inspired by his plight. The human interest story of the German baritone who suffered the effects of thalidomide has been much told in the media. His singing, however, is more inspiring still.

A description of Quasthoff’s performance must begin somewhere--with the voice or the singer’s presence or his interpretation. But to separate or prioritize these elements is to misrepresent. The voice is magnificent; Quasthoff’s rapport with his listeners feels almost one-to-one; and his unveiling of the poetic and musical content of the songs by Brahms, Liszt, Debussy and Ravel proved unfailingly convincing.

But the truly remarkable aspect about Quasthoff’s art is that these qualities appear indivisible. The voice, which descends down deep into bass territory with strength and rises to the high baritone range with buttery smoothness, is magnificent, but its beauty is never abstract. One senses that the word, its meaning and emotion, compels the tone, that beauty of sound is almost an unintended byproduct of expression.

And yet Quasthoff’s musicality is so utterly sound he is also able to transcend words. Evidence of this was found in Quasthoff’s choice of songs and of accompanist. The pianist, Justus Zeyen, Quasthoff’s regular partner, is a superb chamber music player. It could be argued that Liszt’s settings of three Petrarch sonnets and Debussy’s of three Villon ballads are more interesting piano music than they are vocal music. Quasthoff’s and Zeyen’s performance didn’t refute that in an exquisitely gauged partnership. Quasthoff regularly deflected applause Zeyen’s way.

The nine songs of Brahms’ Opus 32 are fairly typical examples of a melancholy German Romanticism. An insecure, hypersensitive poet quivers before the very prospect of love. “I Creep About” is the title of one dark and stormy song. The set ends in lush, sensuous lyricism with the thought that even death would be wondrous in love’s arms.

It is just such sentiments that make the modern art song recital so difficult, especially when the language and content are foreign. Brahms’ music has not dated as the poetry has, but the texts cannot be ignored in song. Quasthoff’s achievement is to make these texts live through music. He is, above all, a descriptive singer telling tales. He sits on his platform and sways, holding listeners in a trance.

In Liszt’s rhapsodic love songs (the composer later scuttled the sung texts altogether and turned them into some of his most popular piano pieces), Quasthoff seemed to have a marvelous time with the sheer extravagance of the melodramatic operatic gestures. Occasionally he strained for effect, but the result was nonetheless riveting. It obviously won’t be easy, but a way needs to be found for him to sing opera.

The more subtle French style of Debussy and Ravel suited him equally well after intermission. He gave Debussy’s metaphysical embellishment of Villon’s 15th century ballads a transfixing radiance. The unsigned and very good program notes called Ravel’s “Don Quichotte a Dulcinee” the most ingratiating set on the program by a long shot, and so it was.

It is tempting to romanticize the wistful twilight aura of these three love songs of Don Quixote because they were Ravel’s last compositions. But, in fact, Quasthoff emphasized just the opposite. Quixote, the most hopeless lover of them all, seemed here the most hopeful, Quasthoff giving a playful vividness to the music’s underlying dance rhythms. The last is a drinking song, and he sang it as if becoming increasingly the sloppy drunk (yet, in a wonderful bit of musical acting, never allowed the sloppiness to affect musical correctness).

An evening of love-lorn longing was drowned in drink, and resulted, miraculously, not in morose self-pity but a sense of letting go. One leaves a Quasthoff recital wiser.