Hampson Exudes Poise, Power

Thomas Hampson had the briefest lapse late in his luminous recital, Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, momentarily forgetting a line in an encore, shrugging it off with a grin. In a way, it was a humanizing moment, a hint of flaw, in a performance that came off as almost too ideal. The baritone has a commanding presence, a singer at the top of his game. An opera star, he also gives art songs authoritative and sensitive readings.

With Sunday’s program split between the music of Schubert and Mahler, and a second set of strictly American songs, Hampson demonstrated both his traditional and adventurous instincts. He’s confident enough to be casual, even occasionally down-to-earth, onstage. At one point midway through the concert’s first half, he noticed texts in the audience and asked that the lights be brought up, attending to listener comprehension.

Several songs were based on texts of Walt Whitman, from the rambling slave saga of Henry T. Burleigh’s “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” to the cerebral miniatures of Ned Rorem’s “As Adam Early in the Morning” and Bernstein’s moving “To What You Said.” Other Americana included William Grant Still’s jazz-tinged “Grief,” the wistful “Shenandoah” (arranged by Stephen White) and Copland’s jaunty “The Boatmen’s Dance.” Earlier, Hampson sailed handily through songs from Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” beautifully accenting the entwined themes of love and battle. Here, as throughout the recital, pianist Wolfram Rieger played with exactitude and subtlety.

Despite his advocacy of American songs and the desire to unearth buried indigenous treasures, in one sense Hampson saved the best for first. His readings of songs from Schubert’s “Schwanengesang” proved the afternoon’s early highlight. He expressed a wide, focused range of Schubertian emotion: melancholic depletion marked “Ihr Bild,” fragile jubilation in “Das Fischermadchen” and roiling indignation in “Der Doppelganger,” all without ruffling his built-in poise.