America's finest: Thomas Hampson returns to San Francisco

Homecoming:
Cover story in the November issue of Opera News

Thomas Hampson, whose European opera career has outpaced engagements in his native country, is now appearing with more frequency in U.S. opera houses. This month, San Francisco Opera welcomes the baritone's first stateside Macbeth; later this season, he’ll sing Germont at Lyric Opera of Chicago and Don Carlo in the Met's Ernani. DAVID J. BAKER listens in.

Thomas Hampson is on the move. After twenty-five years, his powerhouse career shows no signs of slowing down, as he vigorously explores new ideas, new roles and interests that range from Mahler to Broadway, from golf to podcasts. The current season is shaping up as something of a turning point for the fifty-two-year-old American baritone, who has been based mainly in Europe and is now "moving his center of gravity back over the Atlantic."

More surprising, in musical terms, is his opera repertoire for the 2007–08 season. These days his calendar reads like a page from the biography of Leonard Warren. After last season's Met Boccanegra, he returns to the house in March for his first Carlo in Ernani. Before that, Chicago will hear him as Giorgio Germont, and this month he appears at San Francisco Opera as Verdi's Macbeth. Hampson may not be the first name that pops up when one thinks of a Verdi baritone, and the singer himself, conscious that his is an essentially "lyric voice," is careful to avoid what he calls "real tub-thumping Verdi."

Never prone to speaking in sound bites, the baritone can hold forth on Verdi by the hour. He did so in an interview last summer between appearances at Tanglewood and Ravinia, where he performed American and German songs — repertoire that many would consider his artistic home base. Yet Hampson has been hard to pigeonhole since his early days as the kind of bantam-weight middle-range voice that some call a baryton martin and others a "lazy tenor." He laughs at that charge. "As secure as I am with a G, a G-sharp is a planning issue. And an A is a sleep-ruining, oh-my-god-why-did-I-get-myself-into-this situation."

Most of his repertoire choices, no matter how some listeners feel about them, cause him no such sleepless nights. It's true that his voice, larger now, can encompass more shadows to contrast with his early tenorial brightness. Undeniably, too, he is always worth hearing, even in a perilous stretch such as his recent outings as Wagner's Amfortas — to cite another composer not closely associated with the Hampson timbre. He took on Busoni's Doktor Faust almost as an experiment, and even his Simon Boccanegra sometimes suggested a trumpet performing in the trombone range.

What makes him so rewarding in opera is the same artistry he brings to lieder — the command of music as a language, the sense of line and color, the range of effects, a detail such as the soft high F on the word "figlia" in the Boccanegra–Amelia duet. Much has been written about his intelligence and curiosity, but such praise can seem left-handed in the world of opera, which often prefers more visceral excitement. In fact, in his Mozart roles, the Rossini Figaro or Posa in Verdi's Don Carlos, for instance, Hampson is a marvel of dramatic intensity.

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