One of the biggest talents before the public today, the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff was born on November 9, 1959.

WATCH THE VIDEO NOW: The Singer Thomas Quasthoff (in German)   FREE

Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest bass-baritones of his generation, Thomas Quasthoff has been singing long enough and well enough so that the challenging circumstances of his career are now fully eclipsed by his artistry. So let’s start there — with the artistry.

First, the voice: it is dense, burnished and expansive, yet with a brightness that illuminates its entire range. Then, the immaculate diction and phrasing: Quasthoff’s sensitivity to text and lucid projection give his singing a special aptness for both the intimacy of lieder and the profundity of oratorio. His sound can be sepulchral or tender but is almost always intense, making him a natural for the noble role — Amfortas in Parsifal, King Marke in Tristan, the bass soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth. Yet he is also one of the few classical singers who can sing jazz credibly, and has the recordings to prove it (along with three Grammy awards for recordings of Mahler, Schubert and Bach).

Thomas Quasthoff

As for the challenging circumstances of Quasthoff’s career, they arose from his mother’s taking the drug thalidomide during pregnancy. By the time it was found to cause birth defects, thousands of children, Quasthoff among them, had been born with physical anomalies including truncated limbs that do not develop. New listeners are apt to be swept away by his expressiveness before noticing his range of physical expression is quite literally cut short. And at about four feet in height, where do those reserves of breath and that magnificent resonance come from?

That may be a secret between Quasthoff and his students (he’s a professor of music in Berlin), but as he told Stephen Moss of London’s The Guardian newspaper, “I am in the good position of not being able to make gestures with my hands, so my voice is the only form of expression that I have.” It seems to be sufficient. As Anthony Tommasini noted in The New York Times, reporting on Quasthoff in Beethoven’s Ninth, “When this small man with his commanding voice sang, in Schiller’s words, of godly blessings and nature’s bounty, it was impossible to resist his call. At the end, the audience erupted in cheers.”

WATCH THE VIDEO NOW: The Singer Thomas Quasthoff (in German)   FREE

--Michael Clive