Ollmann's return

A baritone back at the old alma mater

by Doug Hubley

Kurt Ollmann performs July 21 at 8 p.m. in the Crooker Auditorium at Brunswick High School.

With a range of repertoire that extends from Mozart to cowboy songs, baritone Kurt Ollmann knows that versatility often equals employability -- but sometimes an unbalanced musical diet. That's been the case this year as Ollmann has found himself singing an awful lot of Broadway.

"I'm actually longing to do music that's really great art," he says. So Ollmann's appearance Friday evening at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival comes along at a good time for him. Accompanied by pianist Donald St. Pierre, the 43-year-old Ollmann will sing Dichterliebe ("A Poet's Love"), a collection of poems set to music by 19th-century German composer Robert Schumann. The program also includes a Mozart quartet and music for solo piano. For the former, an ensemble featuring violinist Lewis Kaplan, who is the festival's co-founder and artistic director, tackles Mozart's Quartet in G minor for Piano and Strings, K. 478. For the latter, longtime festival mainstay Emma Tahmiziàn performs etudes by Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, and Scriabin.

Ollmann has a long history with and affection for the Schumann piece, which he describes as difficult, covering a lot of ground in terms of emotion, pitch, and dynamics. Maybe the difficulty is part of the appeal. "It's wonderful to go back to Schumann," he says. "Just to sing `Some Enchanted Evening' for me, right now, seems less rewarding than to sing `Ich grolle nicht' from Dichterliebe" -- referring to the segment in the German-language piece in which the lovelorn singer stoically says, "I won't complain," even though he's obviously ready to bawl like a big baby.

Not wishing to altogether dis the show music that helps put bread on his table, Ollmann explains that his appreciation of Broadway material lies as much in the audience response it draws as in its musical qualities. "The element of communication with the audience is a big reward and a big challenge, and an important part of what we do," he says. "So sometimes the ability to connect with people in a piece like `Some Enchanted Evening' justifies it in a different way."

Composed in 1840, Dichterliebe is one of Schumann's most beloved works. The texts were written by Heinrich Heine, the German lyric poet, who was a contemporary of Schumann. In true Romantic style, Heine's poems weave idealized natural imagery, folk myth, and a dab of the old storm 'n' stress into a tale of doomed love. The literal meanings of the poems wilt under our ironic gaze. In fact, Heine's tendency toward tongue-in-cheek excess may be at work here as, for example, the narrator finds relief by heaping his unhappy passions into a big coffin and dumping it into the Rhine. (That'll show her!)

Poetic irony or not, Schumann treats it all seriously and pulls it off. In typical fashion, Dichterliebe embraces such classical virtues as balance and concision -- covering 16 texts in about 25 minutes -- while still attaining lyrical beauty through surprising turns. It's not all the singer's show, either -- some of the most inventive music is for solo piano.

Ollmann's performance at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival on Friday evening is a homecoming of sorts. He comes from Wisconsin and lives in Santa Fe but graduated from Bowdoin College. The late Robert Beckwith, a Bowdoin music professor and the other co-founder of the summer festival, was an early supporter of Ollmann's singing career. Ollmann sang his first-ever Dichterliebe at Bowdoin the spring he graduated.

Ollmann became a protégé of the late Leonard Bernstein in 1983, when he participated in the production of Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place. Then, when the famed composer-conductor recorded his West Side Story for a 1985 Deutsche Grammophon release, Ollmann joined a big-name cast to sing the role of Riff (the equivalent of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet). The record's success propelled Ollmann into the major leagues, not only in the operatic world, but as an orchestral soloist and recital performer. Equally at home with Baroque music like Monteverdi's and contemporary work like Ned Rorem's, Ollmann also finds his interests straying beyond the typical art-music pale.

"When people say that I'm convincing in a variety of styles, that's a compliment," Ollmann says. "I guess I feel like a storyteller when I'm singing. And you just get the vernacular down" through exposure to different forms.

"If I just let myself relax and respond to a cowboy song, I find that I have all sorts of notions about style for that music in my ear, just from hearing it," he says. "You obviously have to bring who you are to the music, and it isn't literally about imitating, but in an unconscious way, that's really what we're doing.

"That's what style ends up being. You know what Ethel Merman sounds like, and it's not that you try to sound like Ethel Merman, but the fact that you know how she sounds informs how you sing Cole Porter." Ollmann adds, with a laugh, "I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was singing like Ethel Merman, of course, unless it was at a dinner party."

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.