by Janet I. Wasserman © 2001
NOTE: What follows are two (re)views of the same program for reasons that will be apparent in the first paragraph.
On Thursday evening, January 4, the New York Philharmonic, led by Kurt Masur, was broadcast live from Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall over 230 stations, in a program featuring Swiss composer Frank Martin's Sechs Monologe aus Jedermann and Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem. Martin set parts of Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's Jedermann to chromatic, sometimes dissonant, and strikingly beautiful music sung by Thomas Quasthoff in what was probably the first time Quasthoff was heard in a national broadcast in the United States. Quasthoff also sang the baritone solo in the Requiem. This same Philharmonic program - the Jedermann is the Philharmonic's premiere - was repeated on the following two evenings at Lincoln Center. I had the pleasure of listening to the Thursday broadcast and attending Saturday's performance. Nothing can quite equal the mesmerizing power, beauty and directness of Quasthoff in person. What I heard broadcast on Thursday evening was a tantalizing Vorspeise for the following Saturday.
Quasthoff's vocal ability to ring out in near-tenorial tones and then plunge into the bass range of his marvelous voice suited the material exactly. Here was Jedermann crying out in high-pitched fear and terror that he must die, and then, finally at peace with himself and his salvation, accepts the verdict that resonates deeply in his darkened bass and then ends quietly in his middle range. This was declamatory singing, which resounds from the tortured emotive depths of Jedermann. Since the broadcast listener did not have the benefit of the text, Quasthoff's clear and precise German had to suffice for those who understand the language but have never read Martin's adumbrated text of Hofmannsthal's Jedermann, which Hofmannsthal subtitled Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes. Quasthoff's singing was extraordinary; only in the fifth monologue was there a momentary rough patch. Except for this single moment, this was a performance to be savored and remembered. One cannot be unmoved by the profound message of Everyman's commentary on the meaning of life and death. Everyman's/every man's agony and final submission was transformed by Quasthoff's extraordinary vocal and vivid portrayal.
During the broadcast intermission, the commentator met anonymous members of the audience to ask for their impressions of the first part of the program. The comments regarding Quasthoff were: "spectacular", "great", "dazzling", "diction is unbelievable", and, "a voice of the century". In the second part of the program, Quasthoff's baritone and Heidi Grant Murphy's soprano solo contributions to the Requiem, while very brief, were beautiful, but this is, after all, truly a work for chorus. Brahms had complete mastery of choral composition and singing even at the relatively young age during which he composed this work. The two choruses - the New York Choral Artists and the American Boychoir - performed splendidly as did the orchestra. Masur is ever the Brahms exponent, and his interpretation of Brahms is always an hommage.
Quasthoff's dramatic fervor as Everyman arises from a mature understanding of Martin's and Hofmannsthal's intentions. Quasthoff's musical and linguistic intelligence shine through his sonorous voice, his passionate comprehension of the words, his facial expressions, and the emotion-driven movements of his head and torso. Watching and hearing him sing is a gift in which the audience is in the presence of ineffable artistic creation. In addition to hearing the broadcast, as wonderful as it was, seeing and hearing Quasthoff in live performance is, usually, measurably superior in terms of acoustical warmth, direct emotional transmission, and complex interplay of audience, conductor, orchestra, and performer.
The broadcast performance featured Quasthoff's voice, heard in the immediate foreground through my speakers from his own microphone, unlike my hearing his voice from the thirty-third row orchestra of Avery Fisher Hall. This is not unlike listening to his voice on a CD where, again, it is in the immediate foreground and the accompaniment is at times in the background. Obviously, broadcast and recording engineers alter the balance and dynamics between voice and orchestra (or voice and piano), in a way that we appreciate in terms of clarity. In the concert hall Quasthoff is live and present but his voice comes from a distance. Here the orchestral dynamics are balanced against the singing in the time-honored tradition of live performance in a hall, we hope, with very good acoustics. There is always this tradeoff between the broadcast and the live performance. But I would not have deprived myself of hearing Quasthoff twice in one week.
During the concert hall performance, the participants - singer, conductor, musician, and audience - are the sole existing universe of complicit, and happily so, music lovers. When the performance is over the participants assume independent roles of departing singer, conductor, musician, and audience. The experience of Quasthoff singing, and acting, and responding with such moving grace to applause, and, finally, the memory of it all as we leave the concert hall surpass all comment.
In his January 1 review of Beethoven's Ninth, with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic on the previous evening, The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini, listing the performers, wrote "and the great bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff." Tommasini wrote other notable words of praise for Quasthoff but the critical appellation "great" - perhaps the first time in print anywhere - is not only appropriate but also deserved. Bravo Tommasini. A marvelous start of the new millennium for Thomas Quasthoff.
Allan Kozinn in the New York Times (January 8, 2001)
[...]
Martin's setting is concise and dramatic, and Mr. Quasthoff sang it with the kind of power and suppleness that kept the spotlight on the profound and quickly changing emotions in the text.
[...]
Mr. Quasthoff sang as evocatively here [in Brahms' Requiem] as in the Martin, and Heidi Grant Murphy brought a light, sweet, nicely focused sound to "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit."
[...]
Martin Bernheimer in the Financial Times (January 9, 2001)
... the real hero of the evening didn't seem to be the enlightened routinier on the podium but the inspired soloist Thomas Quasthoff. The German baritone brought ringing tone, expressive point, a broad dynamic range and heroic pathos to the sparse Romantic bombast of the Martin songs - written in 1943, orchestrated in 1949 and performed by the Philharmonic for the first time on this occasion. Masur provided clean, self-effacing accompaniment.
Apparently tireless, Quasthoff then brought the same extraordinary powers of imagination, concentration and vocal resource, plus added degrees of mellowness, to the Requiem. This was glorious singing.
[...]