Orpheus lives

A small good thing in Quastoff

By J. Mark Scearce

PCA Great Performances presents the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with baritone Thomas Quastoff, April 23, at Merrill Auditorium, in Portland, at 7:30 p.m. Call (207) 842-0800.

MINI MI, MI, MI: Thomas Quastoff brings his angelic voice to Merrill Auditorium.

1.34 meters tall, short arms, seven fingers — 4 right, 3 left, large relatively well-formed head, brown eyes, distinctive lips; profession: singer.”

And so, Thomas Quastoff — described by The New Yorker as “a new god of the concert stage” — describes himself, a Thalidomide baby with a voice worthy of the Thracian bard.

It is said, in fact, that Orpheus moved stones to weep. Should one be capable of suspending what one knows of the world long enough to consider this a unique, yet very real possibility, then and only then can one begin to understand both the beauty of the voice of Thomas Quastoff and the quest that culminates in his standing on stage in Merrill Auditorium Tuesday night.

Let’s face it. Thomas Quastoff is a miracle.

His publicity photos are judiciously cropped to reveal those distinctive lips he knows are his, but also those deep brown eyes, wide-set and piercing. They don’t let you off the hook, those eyes; the voice is that way, too.

Born with little more than flippers for arms, malformed legs, and the torso of a dwarf, Quastoff has the voice of an angel and the probing intellectual capacity to use it like few singers of his generation can.

His ability to communicate text (regardless of language), to lose himself completely in the words he is singing so that he might convey their all-consuming humanity and infinite possibilities, is staggering. And by literally proving a lie the idea that big voices must come from big bodies, Thomas Quastoff stands as both anomaly and affirmative anthem to life.

There is truly a lesson in this for us all.

Making his New York recital debut only three years ago on the Great Performers at Lincoln Center series, Quastoff has since worked with such renowned conductors as Sirs Rattle and Davis, Rostropovich and Rilling.

His Carnegie Hall debut came but two years ago in Britten’s War Requiemýwith the Boston Symphony, and only this fall, returning to that stage in the wake of the September 11 tragedies, did he bring down the house with the ailing Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, even following the popular policeman/tenor Daniel Rodriguez’s performance of “God Bless America.”

The subject of numerous articles in the national press in Time, People, Esquire, Quastoff has also been profiled on CBS’s 60 Minutes. In 1996 he was named professor for life in the vocal department of the Music Academy in Detmold, Germany.

What this miracle-singer will perform while here in Portland is fodder for what he does best: convey his native German, and here it will be Bach in the form of the cantatas 56 and 82.

These church cantatas, written for small forces, were composed within four months of each other in 1726 and 27 for Trinity and Purification services respectively. Bach at this time lived in Leipzig, holding one of the most notable positions in German musical life at the time, Kantor at the Thomaskirche.

Here, Bach devoted himself to church music with a commitment to these Hauptmusic cantatas tied to Sunday services and church feasts, of which there were some 60 a year. Of these sacred cantatas, little more than half survive — that we even have this music is, in itself, another small miracle.

When the PCA Great Performances presents the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with Thomas Quastoff Tuesday night, it will not be the Haydn nor the Ginastera that stays with you. It will be the Bach and Quastoff alone.

Should this, by some freak of the imagination, find you without tickets, then beg, borrow, steal, if you must, but don’t miss this concert. You will never forgive yourself, and even if you could, you shouldn’t. Religious experiences are too few and far between.

This will be one.

Composer J. Mark Scearce can be reached at scearce@usm.maine.edu.