José van Dam (bass-baritone): Autograph
rec. 1974–1997
ERATO 2564 619049 [10 CDs: 779:06]
The singer known as José van Dam was born into the van Damme
family in Brussels in 1940. The longevity of his career, the extraordinary
versatility of his repertoire and the sheer beauty of his voice are all matters
of wonder. The same goes for the consistency of his singing over fifty years
of performing on the international stages as the world’s leading lyric
bass-baritone.
He made his professional debut in 1960 and formally retired at seventy in
2010; thus this 10 CD compilation celebrates his approaching seventy-fifth
birthday in August 2015. The extracts here are drawn from some twenty-four
complete opera recordings, six oratorios and songs by nine composers, eight
French and one Swiss, all made for EMI over the thirty-three years spanned
by these recordings. His operatic roles encompassed not only all the great
French ones written by Berlioz, Gounod, Massenet, Bizet, Charpentier and Debussy
but also those by Verdi, Mozart, Puccini and Wagner, in which he was outstanding.
However, he never succumbed to the temptation to sing Wotan, which perhaps
partially explains his vocal endurance but also demonstrates how he recognised
the limitations of a large but fundamentally lyrical voice. In addition, the
interview on the appendix disc reveals that he never really empathised with
Wotan’s character or even properly understood his motivation, ruling
him out for van Dam, as he would sing only those roles whose texts he could
fully digest before learning the music. Otherwise, the range of his repertoire
may be gauged from the fact that we hear him in this set singing in opera
spanning over two hundred years, from Rameau to Landowski.
M. van Dam’s English is not entirely fluent and he frequently defaults
into French during the interview, which I found surprising given that he is
clearly such a gifted linguist vocally, singing idiomatically with impeccable
clarity and diction in German and Italian as well as his native French. The
interview and the notes for the operatic roles are the work of Jon Tolansky,
who does a good, if rather reverential, job, and irritatingly mispronounces
words in three languages, such as the name of the composer Saint-Saëns and
“Buoso” in Puccini’s comic opera “Gianni Schicchi”.
As those notes are described as “a glance at the opera roles”,
they briefly provide the dramatic context and there is nothing to help the
listener appreciate the “mélodies” and the tracks from oratorios.
Van Dam recorded frequently and prolifically with conductors Michel Plasson,
von Karajan, Antonio Pappano and Kent Nagano and the bulk of the operatic
excerpts here are from those sources.
The voice itself is intensely beautiful and instantly recognisable. It is
invariably completely steady, with exemplary legato and a remarkable capacity
for subtly graded dynamics. It has amplitude and power and its only relative
weakness is a lack of resonance in its lowest notes; otherwise its tessitura
is such as to admit the successful undertaking of roles ranging from those
for a basso cantante to high bass baritone.
CD 1 encompasses his demonic roles and he characterises each devil differently,
exploiting in particular his ability to impart a suave, sneering quality to
his tone. His assumption of the four villains in Cambreling’s “Les
contes d’Hoffmann” is a tour de force – and a fine contribution
from Rosalind Plowright as Antonia goes uncredited.
By contrast, CD 2, beginning with his patrician account of Agamemnon’s
dilemma in Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Aulide”, permits us to
hear the dignity, restraint and nobility of his singing in roles depicting
suffering fathers, qualities also apparent in the elegant line of the Rameau’s
arias opening CD 4. He even enables the listener to sympathise with that ruthless
old tyrant Philip in “Don Carlos”, even if the aforementioned
dryness in low notes is more apparent here by 1996. Again, it is strange that
his co-singer, Eric Halvarson as the Grand Inquisitor, goes uncredited, but
it is good to have the extended excerpts in French and the passage from Act
IV containing the theme recycled in the “Requiem” rather than
the usual cut version in Italian. The aria from “Louise” recorded
in 1977 preserves his voice in finest youthful estate but comparison with
recordings from the nineties also serves to illustrate how little it changed
over the course of his career apart from some inevitable encroaching dryness
up top. The same comparison may be made between the earliest recording here,
Escamillo in 1974, with the latest, Nilakantha from “Lakmé” in
1997: there is virtually no audible deterioration in quality. Tracks from
“Dialogues des Carmélites” confirm how much Poulenc owed to the
example set by Debussy and demonstrate van Dam’s supremacy in the enunciation
of text.
Pathos is the primary quality of his various portrayals of Don Quichotte on
CD 3. This was a favourite role and he chose Massenet’s version for
his farewell to the stage; he inhabits it with such tenderness and devotion,
especially in the famous “Sérénade” – and it was a neat
idea to present for contrast both the keyboard and orchestrated versions of
Ibert’s and Ravel’s songs.
I especially like the provision side-by-side on CD 5 of extended tracks from
the two versions of Strauss’s most notorious opera: the German “Salome”
and the French “Salomé”. Van Dam is an ideal Jochanaan: young
and virile, the beauty of his voice suggestive of otherworldliness amongst
the decadence of Herod’s court. He is particularly moving in his narration
of the events in Galilee, track 22.The French recording has been overlooked
but I find Karen Huffstodt’s Salome to be remarkably good, her silvery
voice being both reminiscent of Beverly Sills’ and entirely apt to depict
a lascivious teenager.
I wholeheartedly endorse the decision to devote a full 45 minutes to van Dam’s
Golaud in “Pelléas et Mélisande”, as it is epitomises everything
admirable about his vocal and acting skills; the scene where the increasingly
tortured and enraged Golaud forces his little son to spy on the lovers through
the high window is simply terrifying in its emotional intensity. Yet van Dam
is equally adept in comedy, as he proved in his recording of “Gianni
Schicchi”, while in the moving aria from Hahn’s “Ciboulette”
we hear the virtues of singing simply, without artifice.
Three of the remaining four discs are devoted to songs and oratorios and the
last CD to the interview. I would not have said that van Dam’s dark
sound was ideally suited to Berlioz’s “Nuits d’été”
but he always sings so beautifully, even if a certain lightness is inevitably
absent and the limitations of a piano accompaniment restrict the drawn-out
languor the slower songs demand. Nonetheless, this is magisterial singing
and van Dam brings such power to key moments such as “ A lasser le pied
de chevaux!” in “Absence”. The “mélodies” by
Saint-Saëns are undeservedly neglected and are given wonderful performances
here, but all the songs by French composers allow us to relish the more nuanced
and delicate side of van Dam’s art and of course his mastery of verbal
inflection, while the excerpts from his recordings of liturgical music evince
his more overtly demonstrative, hieratic affect.
The seasoned collector who already owns most of the complete recordings from
which this anthology is derived might find a 10 CD set superfluous, but I
imagine that very few will have everything here. Furthermore, it is my experience
that van Dam was not invariably ideally partnered – Thomas Moser’s
Faust being a case in point - so some might prefer to own this compilation
of his finest roles, especially at this bargain price.
Ralph Moore
Disc contents
CD 1: Devils
Berlioz: La damnation de Faust; Gounod: Faust; Offenbach:
Les contes d’Hoffmann
CD 2: Fathers
Gluck: Iphigénie en Aulide; Verdi: Don Carlos; Delibes:
Lakmé; Massenet: Manon; Charpentier: Louise; Poulenc:
Les dialogues des Carmélites
CD 3: Don Quichottes
Massenet: Don Quichotte; Ibert: Quatre chansons de Don Quichotte
(versions for piano & for orchestra); Ravel: Don Quichotte à Dulcinée
(versions for piano and for orchestra)
CD 4: Two Centuries of Opera: Part One
Rameau: Dardanus; Mozart: Così fan tutte; Wagner: Der
fliegende Holländer; Gounod: Mireille; Verdi: Don Carlo;
Gounod: Roméo et Juliette; Bizet: La jolie fille de Perth;
Carmen; Wagner: Parsifal
CD 5: Two Centuries of Opera: Part Two
Strauss: Salome (in German and in French)
CD 6: Two Centuries of Opera: Part Three
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande; Magnard: Guercœur; Puccini:
Gianni Schicchi; Hahn: Ciboulette; Enesco: Œdipe;
Landowski: Le Fou
CD 7: Mélodies: Part One
Berlioz (Les nuits d’été); Saint-Saëns; Gounod
CD 8: Mélodies: Part Two
Massenet; Ravel (Chants populaires; Mélodies hébraïques);
Ropartz (Quatre Poèmes d’après l’Intermezzo de Heinrich Heine);
Poulenc (Chansons gaillardes; Le bal masqué)
CD 9: Mélodies: Part Three; Lieder and Oratorio
Fauré; Martin: Sechs Monologe aus Jedermann; Berlioz: L’enfance
du Christ; Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem; Gounod: Mors et
Vita; Fauré: Requiem; Duruflé: Requiem
CD 10: Interview with José Van Dam
José van Dam (baritone)
Michel Plasson, Herbert von Karajan, Kent Nagano, Antonio Pappano, Sylvain
Cambreling, John Eliot Gardiner, Raymond Leppard, Alain Lombard, Riccardo
Muti, Daniel Barenboim, Cyril Diderich, Lawrence Foster; Michel Corboz, Georges
Prêtre, Julius Rudel, Jean-Philippe Collard, Dalton Baldwin, Frederica von
Stade, Richard Stilwell, Ruggero Raimondi, Felicity Palmer, Patrizia Ciofi,
Roberto Alagna, Margaret Marshall, Agnes Baltsa, Angela Gheorghiu, Régine
Crespin, Teresa Berganza, Thomas Hampson, Natalie Dessay, Thomas Moser, Cheryl
Studer, Richard Leech, Ann Murray, Neil Shicoff, Jessye Norman.
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