Working with voice students has Quasthoff singing life's praises.

Byline: FRED CRAFTS The Register-Guard

JUST BACK from observing three of his top voice students in W.A. Mozart's opera "Le Nozze di Figaro" at the Music Academy in Detmold, Germany, Thomas Quasthoff is a proud papa. The students have done well, and the teacher is in an expansive mood.

"I love to teach, and I love to work," Quasthoff says, excitedly, one thought morphing into another, "and to share music with my students, which is wonderful, and to see and to realize that my view of music-making is reaching their heads and their hearts.

`Well, I think this is a wonderful gift that I have in my life."

Gifts abound around Quasthoff: Music. Prodigious talent. A sublime voice. A rarefied international singing career. A university position. Life lately has been bountiful for the German singer, and he is most appreciative.

A renowned bass-baritone in demand by top conductors and orchestras at concert halls around the world, Quasthoff's existence is anchored - centered, really - by his ongoing teaching duties at Detmold, where he is `professor for life.' It is a position he never imagined would come his way, and one for which he is extremely grateful.

"It's a very important feedback that you get from working with young people, because they're very straight,' he says in the deep, resonant baritone that has thrilled concertgoers for years. `If you do things wrong, they will look at you and say, `Tommy, you are wrong,' and so you are forced to think about your life: `Is my way of handling people OK or is it not OK?' '

Perhaps because the hour is nearing midnight, Quasthoff is in a engagingly reflective and open mood. His thoughts flow in long sentences, punctuated by dramatic pauses in which he collects himself, then starts anew.

For a man who guards his privacy ferociously, he is remarkably open when the subject of teaching is raised.

"My life has changed a lot in the last six years that I teach here in Detmold," he says. "I'm much more balanced, much more relaxed, much more enthusiastic in working with young people."

Of course, Quasthoff has a job on the side.

Ranked among the leading bass-baritones in the world - many would argue he is the best - he sings with the top orchestras, conductors and artists, among them the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The credits roll on.

In recital, he has performed at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Toronto and Atlanta and at the Ravinia, Tanglewood and Mostly Mozart festivals.

Overseas, he has sung with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. And he frequently sings in major recital halls in Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg, Paris, Amsterdam and London.

Even he admits, it is quite a life.

For those who cannot catch him in concert, there are his recordings for the BMG, Haenssler, EMI-Electrola, Phillips, Bayer and Deutsche Grammophon labels. His recording of Gustav Mahler's "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" won the 1999 Grammy Award for best classical vocal performance.

Quasthoff had a major career in Europe before he made his North American debut at the Oregon Bach Festival in 1995. But coming to Eugene at the invitation of his longtime friend, Helmuth Rilling (`He's a big hero for me," Quasthoff says), opened many more doors.

One testament to Quasthoff's popularity in Eugene is the way his July 6 and 13 recitals sold out not long after tickets went on sale. Those lucky enough to get tickets will experience one of the best singers of this generation up close, doing what he does best.

What, one might wonder, is it like for Quasthoff to be on a stage, singing with such grace, power, emotion, charisma and impact?

"When I am singing," he says, "I feel completely happy. It's my world. I get to express myself with my own voice; to touch people with it is the most beautiful thing.

`I love it very, very much."

QUASTHOFF IS surprisingly open about his "world," its nuances revealed like the unfolding of a flower. Backstage, before a performance, he tries to stay relaxed.

"If the dress rehearsal went very well, I'm happy to perform," he says. "I'm a little bit nervous. I'm warming up and I'm enjoying it.

`It's a beautiful thing to share music with friends or with musicians. About all this I'm thinking."

Once on stage, Quasthoff becomes fused with the music.

"I try really to live my roles as I sing," he says. "Most of the time, I'm thinking about the content of the music, and that's it."

While Quasthoff is singing, he is fully present and attentive, but in times of rest, his eyes close and his head bobs to the beat.

"I really try to be in the music," he says. "I mean, if you are in a situation like we are, as artists - to be on stage and to listen to music like Bach, like Mozart, like Schubert, like Brahms - what can be nicer? It's amazing."

Which is ultimately why he sings. Quasthoff puts it this way.

"I think God gives me the talent to do it. I think I have something to say musically and intellectually and emotionally. And I have a voice, which I think is able to show around.

`Other people are having sport or baseball or playing the piano. My way of expressing is singing - and I love it."

Quasthoff has an uncommon talent for communicating a composer's intentions. Audience members are often so moved by his singing they can be seen dabbing their eyes. Sometimes, he himself also gets emotional, as he did recently in a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic.

Singing with the orchestra he rates as the best in the world is, Quasthoff says, like being given "a warm coat on a winter night." It is, he says, "the most incredible, beautiful, richest thing you can have. And at that moment, my feeling and the feeling of the audience was the same: `Please don't let it end.' '

But every concert does end, and afterward, Quasthoff's adoring fans mob him to express their gratitude. He, however, is often still in the throes of the performance's emotional high and isn't quite ready for the adulation.

"For example, after (Franz Schubert's) `Winterreise,' I need an hour for myself to really be in this world again," he says. "I never could go in my hotel room, close the door and be alone, because you build up during a concert so much tension and you have to calm down. And the best thing to calm down is to stay with friends and life - have a beer or something."

But usually, that particular diversion has to be put on hold.

"In America, you have, excuse me, that bad tradition of receptions, which I don't like very much; these official things where you sit like an animal in the zoo and 50 or 60 or 70 people are coming and say, `Thank you, it was great,' and you have always to say, `Thank you very much; it was very nice.' It can be a little bit boring.

`I know that it's important, but I'm honest enough to say that I don't like the official celebrations after the concerts very much. To hang around with my friends, where I have not to choose and think about every word that I say, I prefer much more."

But Quasthoff accepts receptions as part of the arrangement of getting to "make music with an orchestra and to touch the hearts of the people." Chalk it up to the price he pays for fame.

"If somebody would have told me 15 years ago that I would be a permanent guest of these orchestras and these festivals, like in Eugene, or Helmuth Rilling, I definitely would have said, `You're completely crazy. Maybe it's time to have brain surgery.'

`I sometimes have to bite my finger to realize if it's really real or not. Sometimes, I have a little bit the feeling that this is a film, and I don't know the director, but the theme of the film I like very, very much."

BECAUSE of his achievements in overcoming disabilities (he stands the height of a desktop as the result of his pregnant mother taking the drug known as Thalidomide), Quasthoff is often held up as a role model. He greets the mantle with a jeer.

"Really, my word," he says. "Martin Luther King is a much bigger hero than I will ever be in my entire life."

Still, this remains the heart-tugging angle the media often have taken in profiling Quasthoff. Quasthoff hates that, and as a result, has become notoriously reluctant to be interviewed. Quasthoff gets worked up about the news media: "I love to be in the public doing singing. I don't like to be in the press when I'm not singing. You can imagine, especially with my disability, here in Germany the yellow press tried a lot to write articles about me, to come into my home and to write this tragic blah, blah, blah.

`I said, `Oh, no. You can do this maybe with (the blind Italian tenor) Andrea Bocelli, but don't do it with me. I'm a serious artist, and I don't want to give a place for you to look into my privacy, because my privacy is a very holy thing, and I don't need to publish this in any kind of newspaper.' Very simple.

"I want to be judged as an international artist that I am, and about the quality of my singing, and not about my disability."

As a result, Quasthoff by his own admission turns down `99 percent" of his interview requests - particularly those from popular magazines.

"What people are reading these kind of magazines?" he asks. "People who are interested in the life of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Beatrix. Definitely, after reading an article like this, they will not buy one CD more of mine.

`I don't want to have one journalist in my house. Really, no."

Quasthoff pauses a long time, then says, "I'm now 42, and I have in my past time had very difficult years, very difficult years. And I'm now on a level where I say I only want to enjoy my life, and I want to live together with other people.

`That doesn't mean it has to be only musicians. But I want to share my life with people who are nice, who are relaxed, who are enjoying life immensely."

So said, Quasthoff confides that he intends to slow down a little. Sing fewer concerts. Choose his projects carefully. Pace himself better.

"I hope to sing, well, 15 more years, then we will see."

At the moment, though, Quasthoff is ebullient with "all these different emotional and intellectual things: opera, music, concert music, private life, my family, and my brother, and my friends, and my students to work with.

`It's a very rich and beautiful life, so I feel very gifted and very happy."

Arts reporter Fred Crafts can be reached by phone at 338-2575 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

THOMAS QUASTHOFF

WHAT: German bass-baritone performs at the Oregon Bach Festival

WHEN/WHERE: 8 p.m. June 28 (Silva Concert Hall) in J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor; 8 p.m. Tuesday (Silva Hall) with conductor Jeffrey Kahane; 8 p.m. Saturday (Beall Concert Hall) with pianist Justus Zeyen in a recital that will be repeated at 8 p.m. July 13 (both are sold out); and noon July 10 (Studio One) in a free Let's Talk question- and-answer session

TICKETS: Hult Center box office, 682-50003

GUARDLINE: To hear music by Quasthoff, call GuardLine at 485-2000 from a touch-tone phone and request category 3733.