Pleasure and perversity were both present in this wildly uneven concert, in which Canadian tenor Ben Heppner joined forces with Christian Thielemann and the Royal Opera House Orchestra for a programme of Wagner chunks with arias by Beethoven and Weber thrown in. Once associated with a formidably wide repertoire embracing Mozart, Janacek and Britten, Heppner has gravitated towards heroic German roles of late, often with hair-raising results.
His voice is not quite that of a traditional Wagnerian Heldentenor. A colossal sound, it is capable of cutting through the densest of orchestral textures and soaring upwards with a noble, ringing ease. There's a fluency of movement and brightness of tone far removed from the almost baritonal quality of many Wagner interpreters.
He is often vividly dramatic, though his chosen format occasionally hampers him. Wagner extracts provide opportunities for spectacular singing, but you sometimes miss the spacious exploration of character and the sustained probing of the human psyche.
Walter's Prize Song from Meistersinger, hurled out in almost visionary ecstasy, perhaps showed Heppner's Wagner at its best. Siegmund's Winterstürme was urgently sexual, though its abrupt ending leaves you hanging in emotional mid-air. Tristan's delirious ravings were painful in their intensity, but Lohengrin's narration revealed a weakness in Heppner's method - in place of genuine soft singing, you're conscious of a scaling-down of tone, which leads to an absence of genuine mystic fervour.
The excerpts from Weber and Beethoven, which analyse character with comparative brevity, were very much the high points. Florestan's monologue from Fidelio was viscerally done, the contrast between physical suffering and nobility of soul superlatively captured. The swivelling between elegance and terror in Max's aria from Der Freischütz was equally riveting.
Thielemann was an unfailingly sensitive accompanist, though things got rather strange when he was left to his own devices in the orchestral numbers that separated the arias. He took the prelude and Liebestod from Tristan so slowly that it seemed to be not so much about orgasm as chronic detumescence. Only in the Lohengrin prelude - real mystical-erotic stuff - did he really strike form.
The encores, however, were fabulous as the pair plunged into Richard Tauber territory. Heppner sang the closing scene of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt with exquisite beauty, while Thielemann exposed every shivery, erotic flicker of the remarkable orchestration. After that, You Are My Heart's Delight from Lehar's Land of Smiles brought the house down. Thielemann finally abandoned his Prussian prancing for relaxed, echt-Viennese sexiness.
