Having just completed four performances in the title role of "Il Barbiere
di Siviglia" next door, in the War Memorial, Thomas Hampson gave a recital
tonight in Herbst Theater, looking and even sounding a bit tired.

And yet, the concert was quite wonderful, one of the best of the dozen
recitals Hampson has given here during the 24-year history of Ruth Felt's
San Francisco Performances.

"And yet" may be wrong. "And so" could be closer to the truth.

Tonight, as ever, that big, flexible, powerful-and-gentle, full-of-lights
voice was there, along with Hampson's intelligent, passionate, colorful
delivery, superb phrasing, crystalline diction, expressive love of music.

What was missing, probably due to the fatigue, was the swagger, the pushing
of the voice where it doesn't need it, the occasional "really big show"
bit.

And all was well with the world.  Hampson and "world's finest accompanist"
Craig Rutenberg provided two hours of music that will linger in memory
for a long, long time.

The program, as is always the case with Hampson, was varied, intriguing,
unusual, rewarding - recital whose most familiar portion was Hugo Wolf
songs to text by Eduard Morike.

The very first song, "He who has recovered addresses hope," gave a
miniature picture of the entire evening.  Hampson opened with quiet,
simple, unaffected phrasing, then hit the forte passage with *almost*
too much power, pulled back, continued in a restrained, sincere manner,
the voice floating above the magic carpet of Rutenberg's accompaniment.

"At daybreak" and "At midnight" kept building the atmosphere started
with the first song, but a break came, with the simple, direct, funny
performance of "A country walk," followed by the childish bluster of
"The drummer-boy," the latter given with charm, instead of going "cute,"
which a more robust Hampson may be tempted to do.

"On a walk" and "In spring" were glorious, Hampson and Rutenberg fusing
voice and piano seamlessly.  There is temptation in "Im Fruhling" to
play excessively with the voice, to be "singerly" about it, but Hampson
resisted the easy way out, and the result was grand, his phrasing of the
concluding line - "Alte unnennbare Tage!" - lingering on, still heard
even through the applause marking the end of the set.

(Rutenberg provided a similar sensation with almost every song: he stopped
playing, but the music continued.)

 From Liszt: "In the Rhine, the holy river" and "Poisoned are my songs"
(both to Heine's poems), then "Your eyes," "Gusting are the winds," and
the crowning piece of the set: the brooding, deep, passionate "Three
Gypsies," a mini-oratorio with musical and textual surprises one after
the other (the latter conveyed clearly in Emily Ezust's translation of
Ludwig Rellstab's poem).  Besides Hampson's involved and affecting
interpretation, Rutenberg proved that somebody neither Gypsy nor Magyar
can out-syncopate the best of the natives, can make the piano sound like
a huge cymbalom.

Hampson's lifelong service in the cause of the American art song was in
evidence for the entire second half, the singer outdoing himself in
presenting songs both obscure and worthwhile.

A collection of songs to texts by Walt Whitman featured not only Ned
Rorem ("As Adam Early in the Morning") and Bernstein ("To What You Said,"
with its piano solo that gave Rutenberg a star turn), but also such
echt-rarities as Charles Naginski's "Look Down Fair Moon," Henry T.
Burleigh's "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," and William H.  Neidlinger's
"Memories of Lincoln."

The recital concluded with a group of American art and folk songs, from
Edward MacDowell's "The Sea" to Copland's riotous "The Boatmen's Dance."
In the middle of that group, "Shenandoah" came closest to the entertaining,
but excessive Hampson of the Razzmatazz, but even here, restraint and
good artistic values prevailed.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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