Thomas Hampson

A few days ago a man by the name of Albert Imperato left a message on my phone urging me to write about a unique concert taking place in San Jose by Thomas Hampson, the internationally renowned baritone.

Intrigued, I returned the call to learned more about the famed singer’s collaboration with the Library of Congress to celebrate the history of creativity in America.

Described once as tall, charismatic and as square-jawed as the Marlboro man, Hampson possesses a rich, affecting voice and empowers his singing with interpretive depth and intelligence.

I had just enjoyed his performance of Mozart’s aria “La ci darem la mano” on the PBS 30-year retrospective of “Live from Lincoln Center.”

So, it was a double pleasure to find myself in conversation with the baritone shortly thereafter about his 11-city “Song of America” tour.

Hampson, a passionate champion of American song, explores a repertoire that extends from the 1700s to the present day.

“The tour is really the visible element of my work with the library in the continuing development of their music division Web site, specifically American concert song,” Hampson said. “I have been working with them over the years to put together a cross referenced database of songs that have been recorded, songs that have been written, anthologies that have already been printed. My dream is to have things that are already available in the public domain available for download and even an online streaming library.”

Hampson sees these songs as a “diary of America becoming America.” He found a collaborative soul mate in Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, whose unprecedented national program, “Creativity Across America,” fit perfectly with Hampson’s vision of preserving and showcasing this great treasure of Americana.

“Jim Billington is passionate about the Library of Congress being the people’s library and not just some huge government institution,” said Hampson. “That’s why the tour developed so much momentum so quickly. At every concert site there are advanced teams that come in and work with the community to help serve the needs and interests of that community.

“And they are traveling with priceless manuscripts that you can see at the concert. My idea is that you can actually teach American history through song. We’ve had some wonderful educational outreaches along those lines.”

Hampson said this widely acclaimed project is the first of several such tours that will take place over the next few years.

Programs include unfamiliar concert songs of well-established American composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, as well as in the songs penned by lesser-known, but yet equally influential composers, including Harry T. Burleigh, Arthur Farwell, and Elinor Remick Warren.

There are Psalm settings, hymns, folksongs, cowboy songs, war songs, African-American spirituals and much more.

“Mr. Hampson conveys the idea of an oral tradition that it is his mission to pass on, with the closed-eyed intensity of a blind poet when he is singing and the zeal of an evangelist when he is addressing the audience about its cultural heritage,” wrote Anne Midgette of The New York Times.

The “Song of America” has been wonderfully successful according to Hampson. He has appeared with this material on widely received programs such as “Good Morning, America” and National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition.”

“I can really feel the enthusiasm that audiences have for this repertoire: they understand and are connecting with the storytelling the composers and poets have presented them with and they are seeing this music as a narrative of their own experiences,” said Hampson. “This has been an uplifting and entirely positive experience for me.”

Hampson, who is no stranger to our region, confesses to being an avid golfer with a fondness for the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament. He has appeared at Sunset Center Theater in Carmel and thrilled AT&T volunteers with his singing as well.

The San Jose performance of “Song of America” takes place at 8 p.m. Saturday at the California Theatre.

Tickets and information are available at the Opera San Jose Box Office at (408) 437-4450. The ticket includes a post-performance reception. GO!

During a recital at the Holland Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, internationally acclaimed baritone Thomas Hampson will give listeners a structured overview of the American song.

He will talk about how the song has progressed since the 1700s until the present, touching on everything from Psalms settings to African-American spirituals.
And he will demonstrate.

The program has all the makings of a music history class. But Hampson, a lifelong champion of the American song, says it most definitely is not. There won’t be any preaching, soapboxes or finger-wagging.

“You’re not coming to this concert to be lectured at or told what to think,” Hampson said from New York City, where he is performing at the Metropolitan Opera.

Rather, the concerts on the “Song of America Tour,” which began in November, offer gentle exposure to music that has made America what it is today.

“Song in America is such a huge subject, and a wonderful reflection of our culture,” Hampson said. “Our stories are to be found in our songs.”

The “Song of America Tour” grew out of Hampson’s many hours in the archives at the Library of Congress. Poring over scores by composers such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland and others, Hampson became increasingly aware of the treasure that was in the library. So he decided – along with Librarian of Congress James H. Billington – that more people should know about it.

At every stop, Hampson has performed recitals – not classes – that take listeners through a series of songs by American poets and composers. Along with the performance, the Library of Congress offers displays of rare objects.

During Hampson’s performance in Omaha, holograph manuscripts of works such as Louis Armstrong’s “Gully Low Blues” and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” will be exhibited in the Holland Center’s lobby.

“After this experience, (audience members) will hopefully feel better about themselves,” Hampson said, “and clearer about how proud we can all be about what we call this American experience.”

He has lived in Austria for years, logs substantial time in London, and for most of the year lives out of a suitcase while appearing on the world’s leading opera stages and concert platforms.

Despite the peripatetic existence and long expatriate status, few artists have done as much for the cause of American song than Thomas Hampson. The celebrated baritone has recorded discs devoted to Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, settings of Whitman poetry and composers ranging from Charles Tomlinson Griffes to Deems Taylor.

In collaboration with the Library of Congress, Hampson is now embarked on an 11-city tour that charts the rich legacy of homegrown vocal music from psalm settings, hymns and spirituals to the present day. His “Song of America” tour comes to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach Sunday evening.

Speaking from London, Hampson’s enthusiasm for American song remains palpable as he speaks of the wealth and depth of our vocal heritage. The singer emphasizes that this is not a didactic or academic exercise, but populist in the best sense of the word.

“I don’t see this as a finger-wagging project or condescending,” Hampson said. “I truly believe that this celebration of the American spirit is as much in our poems and in our composers as anything in the popular medium and that they can live very happily side by side.”

The baritone’s take on this vast repertoire has evolved over several years, and he sees it as a “storyboard of American culture.” For Hampson, immersing himself in two centuries of American vocal music has made him view our tradition as a fascinating continuum.

“It’s become very clear to me that looking at American culture and especially American song, it’s more worthwhile looking at periods of development in our history than searching for our Brahms or our Schubert,” Hampson said. “If you slice off American history every 10 or 15 years you’ll be able to tell that story through the poems and through the different kinds of songs that remain.”

Hampson stressed that unlike Europe’s lied tradition, the populist element in American song was embedded in the nation’s cultural fabric from the start. “Drawing a nice clean line between popular song and concert song is just impossible,” he said.

The decade of the 1860s was a time of particular cultural ferment, with the nation headed into Civil War and Stephen Foster’s songs achieving the height of their popularity.

“You have iconoclastic composers like Stephen Foster that embody so much of the Irish, parlor, porch-singing song tradition of Robert Burns and Thomas Moore,” Hampson said.

“But at the same time, Foster sort of plants the root of American song right into the soil. Because with the minstrelsy and with the parlor songs and the ballads, we’re coming out of the English tradition and we’re going into the vaudeville tradition and the musical theater tradition.”

Hampson thinks that America’s cultural traditions are deeper and more profound than is generally credited across the pond and characterized by a firm sense of individuality and Realpolitik.

“If you look at the poets and their stories and you look at the composers and their songs, it’s people thinking about what it means to be an American and what it means to be in America or be an artist in America. All these things tie together in the song repertoire like in no other culture I know; you don’t find Brahms writing what its like to be a German,” he said.

Though the core of the program is similar, elements are altered for each city and stop. At Kravis, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser will participate in a pre-concert roundtable and Hampson will perform a new work, A Heartland Portrait by Stephen Paulus, set to Kooser’s texts. Hampson said another reason for bringing the recital to Kravis is in part a public thank-you to Palm Beach philanthropist John Kluge, whose financial support of the Library of Congress has been instrumental in this project.

Hampson has always been in the forefront of technology to advocate vocal music and his art, from his own pioneering Web site (hampsong.com) to his ongoing collaborations with the Library of Congress. The singer is helping to create a mass database for the Library of Congress Web site, with American songs, composers and other information extensively cross-referenced. “If it’s in the public domain I think you should be able to just grab it off the Web,” Hampson said. “I think there should be a free listening library, too, and it should be streamed so people can listen and become aware of this music.”

In his view, the Internet has vast untapped potential for re-introducing America’s songs into the home in the same way that sheet music on the parlor piano served to entertain and enlighten families in the 19th century.

“It’s helping people who want to know more simply get into the music and get into the composers,” Hampson said. “When I was growing up, I checked records out of the public library and that’s how I learned about music. I think we’ve left that part of public awareness and accessibility behind. I think that was a mistake and I think new technology can just take us in leaps and bounds back into people’s homes and lives.”

Hampson will present his “Song of America” program at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Tickets are $15-$80. There will be a pre-concert discussion with Hampson, Kooser and Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. Also, Hampson will present the lecture “Creative America” at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Cohen Pavilion of the Kravis Center. Tickets are $25. Contact kravis.org, 800-572-8471 and 561-832-7469.

Lawrence A. Johnson can be reached at ljohnson@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4708.

True, it has long presented concerts in its Coolidge Auditorium, but this is something else. On Thursday, the American baritone Thomas Hampson arrives at Carnegie Hall, the next stop (after a performance Tuesday at the Ordway Theater in St. Paul) on his tour “Song of America.” The tour, which began in November in this suburb of Kansas City, Kan., and is presented by the library, is meant to draw attention not only to the extraordinary collection of American music among its vast holdings but also to its flourishing Web site, which registered nearly four billion hits last year.

“We are probably the world’s largest provider of dependable, high-quality educational cultural material on the Internet,” said James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. The site offers free access to more than 10 million documents, books and other items. It will soon include an audio component that will feature a variety of singers performing American songs, and Mr. Hampson is intimately involved with that project as well.

“Tom is not only a great artist,” Dr. Billington said, “but he is a great maven – if that’s the right word – of the collections of the library. Over the years, he has impressed our curators with his curiosity and his interest, and we seemed to hit it off on this idea that maybe we take the song of America and give it back to Americans.”

Mr. Hampson participates in several events in each city. Here, in November, he made a speech and sang unaccompanied at a reception at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Donald J. Hall Sr. (he, the retired chairman of Hallmark Cards).

The next morning, he visited the new home of University Academy, an elementary and high school for urban children (built entirely with private money and so successful that all seniors go on to college). While addressing the students, he demonstrated the power of singing without a microphone with “High Row the Boatman Row,” and the assembly roared its approval. He also observed as dozens of students procured copyrights for sculptures, essays, poems and musical compositions.

Later that day, he gave a master class with four promising singers. He dropped by a Library of Congress seminar for local teachers on how to use the Web site as a resource to encourage creativity, and shared his thoughts on the value of education, exposure to the arts and the importance of understanding our artistic heritage. The concert itself drew a large crowd.
These activities fit right in with Mr. Hampson’s longstanding interest in American vocal music. He has made several recordings of it, including the new companion disc, “Song of America,” from EMI Classics. With his recital programs, he said, he wants to show how “music is one of the great powerhouses of creativity in America.”

“What I want to make sure,” he added, “is that we, say, have a listen to Sam Barber, have a listen to John Duke and to Virgil Thomson; and no, you can still enjoy ‘Shenandoah,’ and it’s O.K. to listen to them in the same hour; and yes, Jerome Kern was a great composer, and Cole Porter was one of the most brilliant Americans who ever walked the face – all those sorts of things.

“The body of this repertoire is about the American experience and the American development, the American psyche,” he continued. “It is always song and storytelling. It is always linked up to a particular school of thought at a particular slice of time in the various epochs and generations that make up the American experience. And you can hear that.”

For all of that, Mr. Hampson is not the tour’s only attraction. The library is also displaying groups of 20 or more treasures from its collection in some cities. Concertgoers here saw manuscript pages by Gershwin, Louis Armstrong and Stephen Foster as well as first editions of songs, photographs and letters of historical interest. The range and variety are intentional, and they reflect the nature of Mr. Hampson’s programming.

“My particular expertise is in what I would call the concert song, which I prefer as a phrase to ‘art song,’ because ‘art song’ can be somewhat off-putting,” he said. To him, a concert song is different from – though not necessarily better than – a Jerome Kern song. “The issue is really a poem or a poetic form being willfully set to music,” he explained. “There is a musical interpretation; augmentation; expansion; enlivening, enriching manipulation; distortion of the poem. And the minute that happens, it’s really obviously no longer the poem, nor is it a musical element either. It’s a song.”

Baritone Thomas Hampson has often visited Philadelphia with American song on his mind, if not in his throat. So it is with his Sunday Kimmel Center concert, but with much bigger matters on the periphery.

Titled the Library of Congress Song of America Tour, the recital arrives with a kiosk of manuscripts by Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti and others from the library’s holdings as well as a preconcert lecture by James H. Billington, the official librarian of Congress. In conjunction with all this, EMI has released Hampson’s compact disc Song of America. Though both concert and CD come with a nod to the nation’s famous repository of some 130 million items, the central idea on Hampson’s mind is preserving the possibility of curiosity.

“We’ve lost our way,” Hampson declared the other day, “by not making music available to the general public and students – as it was when I was starting out.”

That idea falls strangely into a world where duplication of pop-music CDs and free downloads threaten the music industry. But much of what Hampson is referring to hasn’t been mass-market fodder for decades or longer. This music, however, is essential to a cultural identity. His Sunday program ranges from Stephen Foster music written in the 1860s to Charles Tomlinson Griffes songs from 1918.

Few American singers have achieved as much European success and artistic credibility as Hampson. He’s based in Vienna, where he lives with no less than the Countess Andrea Herberstein. Earlier in life, he was among the few Americans to pass muster with the ultra-severe retired soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who teaches German art song as a calling at least as high as the priesthood.

Yet Hampson, 50, doesn’t hesitate to return to “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair.” He hasn’t lost his accent from his native Spokane, Wash. – or forgotten all of what happened before he became one of the world’s great Don Giovannis. One key stop on that route was Spokane’s public library; he took home a dozen LPs at a time.

“Where do you do that today? And in what quantities can you do that today? What are the restrictions?” he asks. “I want to make a Web site for American music and poetry… with downloadable musical archives and biographic information. The notes [to the songs] are in the public domain. Why aren’t they available?”

Hampson did fine without resources such as the Library of Congress for some time – mainly through luck. He’s the kind of singer who learned more on his feet than in the conservatory, first earning a political science degree from Eastern Washington University and later studying at UCLA without matriculating.

“If I could do a tour with enough money to get from place to place, I was your man,” he recalls.

Then there was that fateful 1982 engagement at the Santa Fe Opera when he stumbled upon three filing cabinets of American music in an Albuquerque antique shop.

“I started pawing through it, and asked what he [the shop owner] would want for the whole lot of them. I gave him a hundred bucks, and you’d think I’d just handed him a house,” he says. “That afternoon I drove back in my little rental car stacked with boxes of sheet music. I had everything from Lou Harrison to David Diamond to early Samuel Barber scores… . ”

Such accidental repositories are vanishing in high-rent cities, which makes the Library of Congress a more crucial resource, at a time when the institution is attempting to change its image as the Fort Knox of libraries (full of riches but hard to penetrate). How that might come together with online access to the music remains to be seen.

Hampson has no lack of Web presence, with www.hampsong.com and the “I Hear America Singing” site (at www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas). However, a significant step is fostering an appreciation for American song that’s lasting and appropriate.

Looking for the American version of Schubert, he says, isn’t the point: “That’s a knee-jerk defensiveness to European culture. What’s fascinating is the prolific-ness of American songwriters. The downside is that there’s such a big risk to fail involved. The disparity in quality in any of our composers can be pretty wide… .”

In other words, the work has to be judged as a collective rather than individual output – and one that was probably more in touch with social and political changes than with European composers. Irving Berlin was the best example; he was a virtual chameleon who embodied dance crazes from ragtime to the twist.

The thought that American songwriters shouldn’t be judged for not attempting greatness at every turn is fairly radical. But even the best American songs require leaps into a distant cultural mind-set – which often means looking beyond heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentality.

“I don’t want to run away from that,” says Hampson, “but I think that because of the sentimentality, some of the real messages of these songs are lost. There’s a lot of pain of displacement in those songs. And that’s always made great song material.”

Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at 215-854-4907 or
dstearns@phillynews.com Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/

davidpatrickstearns.