Legend has it that when Bessie Smith, the greatest blues singer of her day, stepped out of the recording booth at Columbia Records having cut her last track for the company, a little-known singer named Billie Holliday walked into that same booth. Something like that has just happened at Sony Classical (which, come to think of it, once was Columbia Records). A year ago and again in April this year, Placido Domingo recorded an album simply called Verdi, though it contains only baritone arias, while last March, tenor Jonas Kaufmann recorded The Verdi Album, the two singers' CDs recently released in that order.
Without forsaking his 130-plus tenor roles (but pretty much without singing them, either), Domingo has, since 2009, sung staged performances of a number of Verdi baritone roles: the title roles in Simon Boccanegra, Nabucco, and Rigoletto, Doge Foscare in Verdi's early I due Foscari, and Germont Pere in La Traviata. Can we expect Falstaff when the 72-year-old reaches 80, Verdi's age when he wrote the role?
Domingo isn't just singing at the lower pitches that come with vocal maturity; he has, he says credibly, completely retrained as a baritone and feels like a student again. None of the 16 selections on his new recording is sung with less than the usual conscientiousness he has brought to his singing over the decades. And he carefully husbands the sound so that he can muster a big, ringing sonority when called for.
The other foot is not going to drop here. This is a CD you can listen to, front to back, with pleasure and admiration. And you can listen to it in one go without the fatigue that so often comes with aria recordings by a single artist in a single range or vocal Fach. In short, this is far from a sad record you wish a favored artist had not made.
Yet, though Domingo can muster big moments as well as small, there's no mistaking that the tone, while distinctively Domingo's, has been robbed of some of its color. And the energy that drove the line, and every note in it, in Domingo's singing at its most potent and virile is, to no one's surprise, diminished. In its place now is stamina, and a commendable integrity. His fellow Spaniard Pablo Heras-Casado, conducting the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, proves both that he is as singer-sensitive a conductor as there is working today �" and that he's likely a potent Verdian in his own right.
The CDs share an item �" the so-called "Friendship Duet" from Don Carlo �" that says what needs saying by way of comparison. In Domingo's, you can practically hear him singing along with the capable tenor Aquiles Machado as Carlo, but the two voices lose their identities in each other sufficiently that only a very clear knowledge of the score tells you who's who.
In his booklet comments, Kaufmann admits that he considered singing both Carlo and Rodrigo, overdubbing the latter, until he decided it was too "self-regarding." Instead, singing with Franco Vassallo as Rodrigo, you hear Kaufmann in the Verdi role that he has plumbed the deepest, partnering �" his real strength �" with Vassallo to produce an infinitely shaded love duet of compelling, then devastating emotional effect.
What remains perhaps the most startling thing about Kaufmann's artistry at what one can only hope is the long arc of its peak is precisely how un-self-regarding it is. He lets it be known that there is nothing in his purview that he cannot do simply by doing it, usually with melting beauty. His "Celeste Aida" handily obeys Verdi's indication that its final note be sung pianissimo and morendo (dying), which is vocally demanding, the more so in context. Kaufmann achieves the effect perfectly without letting it sound hard. (It's the greatest of singers who make it sound easy.) His additional comment, "Physically speaking, the singer should be able to turn up the volume at any moment and transform the piano into a forte," a succinct precis of his own genius as a singer.
What's so impressive in this recital is how little he goes from extreme to extreme on a note or in a phrase, and how integral his conception of a piece is. There are no pyrotechnics for their own sake yet singing of sometimes hair-raising impact. The greatest vocal coaches have seen it as their work to unlock the energy in the vocalist's sound, and it's that torque in a voice of preternatural beauty that gives Kaufmann's singing its singular impact. Throughout, Kaufmann is in ideal synch with conductor Pier Giorgio Morandi and his Orchestra dell'Opera di Parma, who respond with sumptuous, deeply idiomatic playing.
The disc peaks with two Otello excerpts (he says he's now impatient to sing the whole opera but we must all wait three years), not the protagonist's heaven-storming moments but the tortured Act III internal monologue "Dio! Mi potevi scagliar" and the even more agonized music after he has strangled Desdemona. They're not the kinds of pieces another singer would excerpt, but there's the whole of a character, knotted in rage and grief, in each of them. The singing will melt you to the floor.