Melbourne Recital Centre
May 31, 2018

Thomas Hampson is a very rare bird indeed: a singer who brings all the musical and emotional power of opera to the world of the art song. During this attractively varied program at the start of his first-ever Australian tour, there was never any doubt that everything Hampson sang, he sang from the heart. His extraordinarily expressive face confirmed that here was a supremely musical communicator who totally inhabited the world of each song.

Thomas Hampson. Photograph © supplied

Presenting his impressive credentials in the area of lieder, Hampson began by plunging himself and the audience into the psychological depths of the six Heine settings from Schubert’s Schwanengesang. Hampson tellingly brought out the vein of painful self-realisation that runs through these settings. The proud but unhappy Atlas was a memorable curtain-raiser, matched in intensity by the spectral Doppelgänger that ended the bracket. In between came a carefully shaded exploration of the many moods of lost love; the softer outpourings of Ihr Bild and Das Fischermädchen contrasting with the grimness of Die Stadt and the sad evocation that is Am Meer. It was not only the physically powerful...