Jonas Kaufmann's Doppelgänger

A new album from Jonas Kaufmann has become something of an early September tradition, but I use the word ‘new’ advisedly here. The recordings which make up this superb Schumann Lieder project have been sitting on ice for some time: just over five years for the bulk of the programme, and three decades in the case of the excerpts from Dichterliebe which form a fascinating postscript to the main event.

Intrigued by the prospect of hearing how one of today’s most distinctive singers sounded at the very beginning of his career – and before the vocal crisis which prompted a complete technical makeover - I decided that the last should be first and skipped straight to the older six tracks…

Informally recorded in 1994 after a Lieder class with Helmut Deutsch (the matchless pianist for the 2020 sessions) which the 24-year-old Kaufmann attended at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, they reveal a bright-voiced lyric tenor with a touch of metal in the sound and bags of musical intelligence – the sort of singer who seems set for a solid domestic career singing Bach’s Evangelists and the tenor roles in Haydn’s oratorios, but certainly not an artist on course to triumph as Siegmund and Parsifal at the Met in twenty years’ time.

I’d happily have listened to Young Kaufmann singing the complete cycle, for there are many attractive qualities here: secure, ringing top notes, an elegant sense of line, and keen (if occasionally over-earnest) responsiveness to words. But perhaps there are signs of trouble ahead: the lower register (now one of Kaufmann’s great strengths) sounds undernourished, and there’s a pressured quality in the upper middle which gives the impression of a voice living on borrowed time…

As recounted in his 2019 biography, Kaufmann would shortly enlist the services of American voice guru Michael Rhodes to embrace a more relaxed, open technique which released the darker, fuller sound that propelled him towards heavier repertoire and international stardom, and the fruits of that process are of course fully on show in the 2020 recordings of Dichterliebe and the Kerner-Lieder (made in camera during the early days of the COVID lockdowns).

Despite being a recent casualty of the virus, Kaufmann sounds in peak vocal health here – all of the qualities which make the voice so special are firmly in evidence, from the baritonal depth and sheer firepower on display in ‘Ich grolle nicht’ (done more in sadness than in anger) and the first of the Kerner-Lieder, the vast dynamic range in ‘Ich hab' im Traum geweinet’, and the perfectly-controlled pianissimos in the final stanza of ‘Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen’.

The mature Kaufmann is rather less forensic in his engagement with text than his younger Doppelgänger, which some might regard as a bug rather than a feature – but I’m reminded again of the late Alfred Brendel’s observation that he preferred to feel a singer’s response to poetry rather than hearing the thought-processes behind it.

Speaking of great pianists, Helmut Deutsch works tiny miracles in virtually every phrase – his imagination and eloquence are so captivating that I’d happily listen to an entire playlist of him performing the postludes in isolation. One reason for investing in the physical product, which includes a DVD of Claus Guth’s extraordinary 2023 staging of Schubert’s Schwanengesang at Park Avenue Armory in New York, is Deutsch’s time-stopping central performance of the slow movement of the Piano Sonata D960 amid the chaos and agonies of a First World War field hospital: how I’d love this man to record these works in full, but he insists in the booklet that it isn’t on the cards…

Depicting the final hour of a wounded soldier’s life, Guth’s chilling production packs a sequence of gut-punches as Kaufmann’s protagonist grapples with his own mortality, the trauma of the front line (his physicality reminiscent of his PTSD-scarred Lohengrin for Guth) and hallucinations of former happiness against a vast backdrop of fellow casualties and ghostly nurses.

With eerie electronic additions by Mathis Nitschke and obsessive riffs on Schubert’s postludes connecting some tableaux, the score takes on an appropriately Second Viennese School quality – Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw came to mind in places. It might be too interventionist for some tastes, but I loved it.