Virtuosic van Dam unleashes compassion, heart
September 26, 1998

By Richard Dyer

Seiji Ozawa wanted to celebrate the opening of his 25th-anniversary season by conducting a favorite artist in music long associated with both of them. The Belgian bass-baritone José van Dam first came to the BSO in Ozawa's third season and has collaborated with the music director on several occasions since in Milan, Paris, and Japan, making a memorable return here last year. His concerts this week are his only American appearances this season and his tribute to Ozawa, who, as everyone knows by now, has been laid low by a virus.

Cancellations help create young artists, as van Dam knows, and as Ozawa knows too -- his own BSO debut in 1964 was as a replacement for Pierre Monteux. Opportunity knocked on the door of the 34-year-old French conductor Emmanuel Villaume, who has built a substantial career following early successes at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and South Carolina. Villaume learned of his engagement late Wednesday afternoon; a Paris music store, alerted by phone, stayed open late so that he could run in to buy some scores.

Villaume is a tall stringbean of sweeping flamboyant energies that served some aspects of the all-Berlioz program better than others, but he gave a worthy account of the music and of himself, and he served van Dam well. One formed a positive impression, and a desire to hear him again under less unsettling circumstances.

The program was peculiar but compelling -- many of the orchestral episodes from "Romeo et Juliette" (but not the most famous, the "Queen Mab" Scherzo) and the choral finale with van Dam as Friar Laurence. In the middle of these were four of the songs from "Nuits d'été," which fit in because all are as passionately concerned with aspects of love as Shakespeare's play about star-crossed lovers.

Villaume began nervously, which meant that the orchestra sounded insecure and unbalanced in the quiet music of "Romeo alone" and "Melancholy." But by the time of the "Grand festivity at the Capulets," Villaume and the players were on home ground. The later excerpts from "Romeo" went better; Villaume and the orchestra gave us a vividly passionate account of the love scene, plenty of atmosphere, agony and ecstasy in the tomb scene, and a noble paean to reconciliation in the finale.

Van Dam's claim to be the greatest singer before the public today rests on an ideal balance among achievements of voice, technique, diction, imagination, musicianship, and human understanding. Villaume was inspired by this, not intimidated, and summoned detailed, responsive, and intelligent accompaniments. To listen to clarinetist Thomas Martin collaborate with van Dam in quietness was a privilege.

Van Dam has recorded the six songs of "Nuits d’été" twice, but no single male voice can encompass all of the with equal success any more than the female voice can; he chose the four that work best in his voice, which, as the years pass, has become more baritone than bass. He was wonderful in all of them, and supreme in "Au Cimitiere," and in "Le Spectre de la rose," in which he matched Regine Crespin's perfumed languor in vocalism even more poised and plangent. "Villanelle" had a wonderful lightness and point, and the seductive invitation of "L'Ile inconnue" reminded us of what a Don Giovanni van Dam as been. For Friar Laurence's scene van Dam summoned resonant moral authority, narrative interest, and an expansive, embracing compassion that tore at the heart.