Quasthoff’s powers mystify and amaze

Thomas Quasthoff, one of the great singers of our time and certainly one of the most remarkable of any time, is not a force of nature. Or maybe he is. It’s all very confusing.

This German bass-baritone has an extraordinary power to move audiences through music. He is a complete artist. His voice has the kind of presence that holds a listener in its spell. Words are perfectly articulated, their meaning delivered from his psyche to yours with the intensity and immediacy of a deep stare into a lover’s eyes. His range of expression is the range of human experience.

He’s very smart. His personality is large. He’s gregarious and sharp-witted, but with an edge that keeps him interesting. He’s fearless. He’s not afraid to clown around onstage when appropriate or scold a less-than-serious audience when that’s appropriate. He speaks his mind. He’s lovable, but I would not like to find myself on his bad side.

As his legion of devoted fans well knows, he’s physically disabled. The child of a mother who took the tragically injurious morning-sickness drug thalidomide during her pregnancy, he stands 4 feet tall. His legs and arms are not fully developed. His head and chest are fully developed. He is ready proof that you don’t need limbs to be a great singer, that you don’t need a complete body to be the complete artist.

You don’t need the limbs, but you do need to acknowledge their loss. You need to compensate.

As he said in Opera News last year, “If you have a disability, you’ve got to be a little bit better than the others. Because if you’re on the same level, they’ll take the better-looking one.”

Quasthoff finished a brief residency at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night by singing Bach’s death-embracing cantata “Ich Habe Genug” (I Have Enough), as well as three Mozart opera arias, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Over the weekend, he had appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic singing Mahler songs about the deaths of children. Sunday afternoon in REDCAT, he lightened up and offered a jazz concert in an intimate setting.

All of it was magnificent -- so magnificent, in fact, that Quast- hoff nearly defied believability. In Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” he insisted we not flinch from harsh reality. He was the voice of distraught parents, the embodiment of incomprehensible loss. There was no acceptance of death in his performance, and little compensation.

The long, long silence he and conductor Christoph Eschenbach enforced at the end of the cycle was the quiet of John Cage’s “4’33”.” Awareness of our surroundings was so heightened that every fidget, every creak of the floor, became a happening. Death, Quasthoff revealed in his profound performance, is what makes us alive.

In the Bach cantata, Quast- hoff gently rocked in his chair as he sang, with flowing lyricism, some of the most exquisitely resigned music ever written. There seemed an almost Herculean effort to avoid the extremes of pathos in this performance, which Jeffrey Kahane conducted with an unusually light touch. Where, one could not help but wonder, does Quasthoff find such spiritual serenity? How many times in a difficult life must he have said, “Enough”? How does he compensate?

The jazz recital, for which Gabriel Kahane (Jeffrey Kahane’s son) was the pianist, offered no explanations, just more amazement. Quasthoff sang standards: “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Stella by Starlight,” “Moon River,” “My Funny Valentine,” etc. He used a microphone, and used it as well as Sinatra.

He was not a classical singer singing jazz but a jazz singer singing jazz. His scatting was phenomenal. He is on as intimate terms with Louis and Billie and Ella and Frank as he is with Bach, Mozart and Mahler.

And yet that intimacy is mysterious. It’s so intimate. He becomes them. When he sings like Armstrong, he sings like a super Armstrong, gravel on the surface of a modern Autobahn. He was playful, although I thought his humor -- an “Autumn Leaves” as Boulez might have written it, for instance -- sometimes mean-spirited. And he embraced a huge variety of styles, all with the accent in exactly the right place. His rapport with his versatile and impressive young accompanist was a joy to witness. It was a wonderful show. But he never really revealed which voice, which personality, is Quasthoff’s.

That is the Quasthoffian enigma. He is acutely aware of the danger of sentimentalizing his disability. He won’t do it. He insists that we accept him for his voice, his artistry, his depth, his soul. And we do -- happily, avidly, with enormous gratitude.

But it is also hard to escape the feeling that Quasthoff has found his way in this world through escape. He can be all the things he’s not supposed to be, including, as he proved in his jazz recital, the romantic, dashing leading man. We accept all that, and we fight the urge to feel sorry for him.

After all, he’s better and more successful at what he does than most of us are at what we do, much more loved than most of us are.

And yet what tricks nature plays. It’s all very confusing.