Avery Fischer Hall, New York - 12 November 1998
I began my weekend in NYC with the last concert in the New York Philharmonic's series featuring Thomas Quasthoff and Inger Dam-Jensen in Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, conducted by Sir Colin Davis.
A point of interest, IMHO, was the decision to treat most of the dialogue songs as duets between baritone and soprano, a practice with which I am familiar from my old Schwarzkopf/F-D/Szell recording, but which I thought was not in fashion these days. Fashionable or not, that's what they did.
The problem is that I'm reluctant to comment much on the performances because the acoustics in Avery Fischer Hall are so awful that I don't know if anything I heard was real. I sat in the center of Row "R" in the orchestra, and from that position the singers sounded as if their voices were coming from the bottom of a well. In addition, the brass sounded so loud that quite often it covered the singers' voices all together.
From what I could hear, both Dam-Jensen and Quasthoff were singing well and made a decent effort to interpret the songs they were assigned. I thought that Quasthoff made the stronger impression of the two. His is a really beautiful voice, intelligently and musically used, and there is plenty of personality there. His Der Tamboursg'sell was simply hair-raising. One thing that I didn't like was the very slow tempo for Revelge. Like most singers these days, Quasthoff would rather die on the spot than make a less-than-beautiful sound, and, with the connivance of Davis, he slowed the tempo down to a crawl every time the music made too great a challenge to either his vocal production or his diction. It kind of took away the point of the song, but it sounded nice, I guess. It certainly made a very vivid contrast to Dietrich Henschel's singing of the same song at the Schubertiade Feldkirch in June, where he was pushed to the limit by Fischer-Dieskau's very fast tempo. Henschel doesn't have anything approaching the sumptuous voice of Quasthoff, but his performance was a lot more strongly characterized and dramatic.
Today I played my F-D/Schwarzkopf version of Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, a song I particularly love, and it struck me afresh how different those two old warhorses were from today's prevailing approach to singing. For good or for ill, both of their voices and respective styles were totally individual and instantly recognizable. I can't think of anyone among the current generation who even approaches that kind of distinctiveness. Oh well, it's a new time and all that, but I miss those old guys, I really do.
Celia A. Sgroi
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