Kaufmann, your Viennese whirls are dry

WIEN

Jonas Kaufmann Sony

As a rookie tenor, Jonas Kaufmann began his professional opera career in Regensburg in 1993, singing in Johann Strauss’s Eine Nacht in Venedig. He hasn’t performed in this area of the repertory much since, but he clearly has real affection for Viennese operetta, and in the booklet accompanying this new CD devoted to the genre he talks a lot of sense about the style required for it. “The sheer effort of singing can sometimes be effective in opera, but it’s completely out of place in operetta,” he notes. “No matter how demanding the part, it always has to sound relaxed and easy, as if rolling off the tongue.”

Yes, indeed, but that’s just what he doesn’t achieve here. Kaufmann is too mature for this music: focused as he now is on the dramatic heights of

Verdi and Wagner, he can’t descend to the light touch or the seductive smile. Even though he sings throughout with his customary impeccable skill and thoughtful musicality, what comes out is something hearty and heavy-handed. One feels he knows exactly how the music should sound, but the overall effect is fatally academic, and too calculated to charm.

Sony has rolled out the red carpet for this disc: the orchestra on duty here is no less than the peerless Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Ádám Fischer, and the excellent American soprano Rachel WillisSørensen provides classy support in numbers from Die Fledermaus, Die Lustige Witwe and Wiener Blut.

The programme has been nicely selected and arranged too, balancing well-known numbers from those operas with lesser-known material from works by the likes of Hans May, Carl Zeller and Hermann Leopoldi.

More romantic numbers such as

“Zwei Marchenaugen” from Kálmán’s Die Zirkusprinzessin work better than the gayer, lilting waltzes. Kaufmann makes a fair stab at the black comedy of Georg Kreisler’s “Der Tod, dass muss ein Wiener sein”, and I’ll admit to succumbing when he starts whistling in Hermann Leopoldi’s charming late-night cabaret hit “In einem kleinen Café in Hernals”. But elsewhere an excess of artistry leaves the music earthbound.