Close to 11 on this stormy night, the San Francisco Conservatory of
Music was still packed.  Few left even now, in the fourth hour of Thomas
Hampson's voice master class - an event without a break.

And now, a stir ran through Hellman Hall.  The quiet, well-behaved,
fascinated audience suddenly became transformed into a stadium crowd at
the climatic moment of the home team's playoff game.  The crowd leaned
forward collectively, rooting intensely for Sarah Viola to hit the high G
in Schubert's "Gretchen Am Sprinnrade" on pitch and with the "right tone"
Hampson has been hammering into her through a dozen repetitions by now.

The ball landed in the end zone, a cheer went up almost simultaneously with
the voice, Hampson beamed. . . but the young soprano from Eugene rebuked
herself angrily, as if she carried the ball for the Ducks and some upstart
California team blocked her way.

A hug from Hampson and the continued applause didn't make much difference to
Viola.

By the time she was done lifting a chair during the aria ("to help keep
your ribs out"), got rid of her shoes ("so you won't lean forward"),
pressed her cheeks together with the back of her hands ("to force the air
upward, but keeping your shoulders high, which you don't get if you use
your palms"), told to ignore the audience ("to hell with them"), and
witnessed an intense discussion between Hampson and pianist Steven Bailey
about the sound of the spinning-wheel - Viola was about as shell-shocked
as a quarterback after a dozen concussions.

One thing though: she might not have realized, but everybody else -
cheering lustily - certainly has: what seemed impossible 40 minutes ago,
her getting that note right, did happen.

Enjoyable theater as Terence McNally's "Master Class" may be, the drama
of a Meistersinger working with students is far more intense and moving.
Vocal master classes, in my experience, are never about the "star" (if you
listen to Callas' classes, you will find none of the preening and carrying
on McNally ascribed to her), and this is especially true about Hampson.  He
cares passionately about the music and his young charges.  On one hand, he
uses intelligent, self-deprecating humor (talking about his golf game, for
example) to put the young people at ease; on the other hand, he is involved
in the class with a serious, almost scary intensity.

In fact, as the baritone was circling Patricia Barboza (a soprano from
Concord, originally from Pakistan) working on Mahler's "Ich atmet' einen
linden Duft," he corrected her posture, led her around, sang to her,
towered over pianist Satoko Leisek, pressed in first his own cheeks, then
hers - a bizarre image sprang to mind.

Hampson at his most intense (which is pretty much all the way through class
and don't be fooled by the banter and smiles) and most effective, resembles
a Filipino faith-healer reaching into the guts of their "patients" with
bare hands, removing the "bad part" and seeing the sick rise and walk away
in glowing health.  The big difference, of course, is that the Manila
"surgery" is a terrible hoax and Hampson's work is real, with lasting,
beneficial effect.

Heather Clemens (from Moss Beach) and Elizabeth Amisano (from Elmira, New
York) went through the same hour-long, "instant fix" Viola and Barboza
experienced.  In the heat and light of Hampson's furious involvement, they
all improved drastically, internalizing, using basic information they might
have heard hundreds of times before.  Here and now, the manipulation took
place in the guts.

Thursday's master class was both similar to and different from his
Wigmore Hall appearance I attended in November.  In London, he worked with
brilliant young singers, at the beginning of promising careers.  In San
Francisco, the four sopranos were all more in need of a voice lesson than
a final push before appearing in Wigmore Hall themselves.  The Hampson
method was the same, the transformation from weak to good much more
noticeable, more dramatic, more impressive.

Impressive too is how little Hampson tries to impress the audience, how he
deflects the young singers' hero worship.  At the beginning of the class,
the "star" disappears, the working-teacher taking his place.  He wants no
attention on himself.

Where should the attention be? Hampson's mantra is simple and powerful: H
- B - S.

Over and over, he tells singers and their accompanists, he pleads, he
yells, he repeats: H to hear the opening note, the phrase.  B to take a
breath.  S to Sing.  If you know where you want to go, you can't get there,
he says.  Must hear what you want to sing.  To the pianists, he repeats all
evening long: wait until you "hear" the singer hear the music inside, and
only then begin to play.  He stops them: "Did you hear what she was
hearing?" Many times, when the answer is "no," Hampson says: "Exactly.
Because she didn't hear it either."

Breath, obviously, is at the heart of the physical end of the singer's
triptych (the others are "the spiritual," meaning the inexplicable magic of
music and "the emotional"), and I have seen, here and elsewhere, Hampson
improve breathing technique "instantly," time and again.

He has some standard tricks - holding the chair is his favorite - and he
has a knack for explaining principles with great economy, but it is his
understanding of the students, his empathy and physical/total involvement
that makes the difference.

Along with the physical and practical, Hampson's emphasis on the text, the
poetry, the meaning, the idea - the sources of music seems to communicate
as well and as effectively. He tells the singer to breathe through the
nose AND mouth, while warning her that "German romanticism must never be
sentimental.  . . it's all about release." Hear the music, he says, then
touching her face: "breathe into THIS space."

Hampson's advice to focus on the beauty of the scene depicted in the music
is simultaneous with the observation that "projection" is for physical
objects, the task before the singer is to make the voice vibrate the right
way.  Goethe's unhappiness with Schubert ("the song is no longer the poem,
it 's something new and different") is mentioned even as he is explaining
that the voice goes sharp with too much air pressure, flat because of
muscle tension.  Through it all, he urges the singers - often in vain - to
enjoy what they do, to acknowledge every little success, "not just remember
the inevitable failure. . .  find the pleasure that's inside the music
you're singing."

Hampson practices the spiritual-emotional-physical synchronicity he
preaches.

Janos Gereben/SF
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