Feldkirch - Konservatoriumsaal, 27-6-1998
Thomas Quasthoff's recital in Feldkirch left me speechless. It was the best thing that I've ever, EVER, EVER heard !
The voice is stunning, overwhelming, moving - I can't imagine that there is anything that he cannot do.
The first part of his recital was dedicated to early Schubert Lieder (roughly from around 1813). Schubert recomposed some of these songs (like Der Jüngling am Bache and Sehnsucht) some years later. Although these songs are very much unfamiliar (even Quasthoff needed a score), you immediately feel what Quasthoff can do with his voice.
But it was after the intermission that he sang the more popular Schubert Lieder (this time without the score), starting with Ganymed.
Next came Grenzen der Menschheit about which John Reed wrote:
The result is a song of Wagnerian proportions, which can be realised only by a bass of majestic quality and range.
Although Quasthoff is a baritone, he does have the majestic quality and range of a real bass. Immediately from the first descending line when he sings 'Wenn der uralte heilige Vater', you hear that everything is there... sung effortlessly. His lowest notes are real bass notes, no faked ones, they're sung with the feeling that he's still got a lot of reserve down there. On the other hand, he's also got the real baritone sound when he needs it further in the song. By the end of the song, I was in tears...
But, he left no time to recover, following with Prometheus. After the recitative follows that beautiful cantilene... and the tears were there again.
And it goes on: Erlkönig - not shouting 'Gewalt' - when the dying boy sings 'Erlkönig hat mir Leids getan!' he uses just enough rubato on 'Leids' to make you feel that the boy has just died. Next Der Zwerg, again very moving, due to his mezza voce and slow interpretation.
And finally, a short relief when he sings Die Forelle, followed by one of my favourite Schubert Lieder: Der Wanderer - undescribably beautiful. He finished with Der Musensohn.
When he stops singing, a huge applause bursts loose - you'd think that the Konservatoriumsaal will be destroyed in all this violence.
As first encore he sang An die Musik - I thought that he would use his bass voice again when he descends on the second line, but he didn't... he kept his voice light (probably because he can). Secondly he read Abschied von der Erde - a poem to be read over the piano accompaniment (by a young Justus Zeyen, BTW).
Then hell really broke out with a thunderous well-deserved standing ovation...
I left the recital feeling incredibly happy, the joy after having been part of such a recital cannot be described. Thomas Quasthoff could and probably should dominate the Lieder scene for the next thirty years, the same way FiDi did it the last thirty years...
Margo Briessinck
On 6/27 I heard two recitals. The first was by Thomas Quasthoff. I think that this was by far the most sought-after ticket at the Schubertiade, and the Konservatoriumssaal was packed. Quasthoff, accompanied by Justus Zeyen, presented a series of early Schubert songs in the first half of his program (Andenken, Nachtgesang, Der Jüngling am Bache, Lied der Liebe, Die Betende, Sehnsucht), which were written between 1812 and 1814. These are clearly not songs that are terribly familiar to audiences, and they are apparently not all that familiar to Quasthoff either, as he seemed very reliant on the music he had before him. None of them struck me as particularly noteworthy and the performances seemed pretty routine. The second half of the concert was quite another matter. In this half, Quasthoff seemed to have lined up some of the greatest "warhorses" in the Schubert Lied oeuvre (Ganymed, Grenzen der Menschheit, Prometheus, Erlkönig, Der Zwerg, Die Forelle, Der Wanderer [Schmidt], Der Musensohn) and proceeded to take aim at them one after another in a demonstration of his superiority as a Lieder singer. And very impressive it was, too. What distinguishes Quasthoff from most of the younger-generation Lieder singers I have heard is a combination of first-rate voice, tremendous emotional intensity, and considerable acting ability. As Margo pointed out, this is a man who for physical reasons has no choice but to make his points with voice and face alone, and he meets the challenge superbly. Grenzen der Menschheit demonstrated the enormous range of Quasthoff's voice: I have never heard another singer who could do full justice to both the high notes and the low notes in this song. He doesn't have quite the same way with the words that Fischer-Dieskau had, for example, but he was not too far off. He sang a hair-raising Erlkönig, with all four characters beautifully differentiated and realized, and his Prometheus captured the note of savage contempt and defiant challenge to authority inherent in Goethe's text. In both cases, he had obviously taken a page from F-D's book (I could almost tell you which F-D recordings he must have studied), and indeed it seemed to me that the second half of his recital was a demonstration that everything that the Old Man could do, he could do as well or better. I wasn't entirely convinced (would I be?), but I was impressed nonetheless.
A couple of the songs (Der Zwerg, Der Wanderer) were marred by fairly serious memory lapses, but even so the performances were first rate. The one area in which Quasthoff did not present a challenge to You-Know-Whom was soft,sustained singing-- There was no Nacht und Träume or Litanei in the program or among the encores. As a matter of fact, his two encores represented the most well-known (not to say well-worn) of Schubert's songs, An die Musik, and one of its least-known and least-performed, the lovely little melodrama Abschied von der Erde. Actually, given Quasthoff's extensive experience as a reader on the radio, I would have expected more from him than he delivered in this assignment. The Old Man is still way ahead of him when it comes to this little gem. The audience response was more enthusiastic than I have heard for a very long time, and I consider this recital to have been the highpoint of this year's Schubertiade. I am very much looking forward to hearing Quasthoff sing Winterreise in New York City next January.
Celia Sgroi
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