by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I were watching
a download of an operatic concert given in Moscow on January 22, 2006 by
Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón. They’ve been
hailed as the current generation of operatic lovebirds (though they are not a couple in real life, which is probably just as
well after the bitter real-world breakup of the last superstar opera couple, Roberto Alagna and Anna
Gheorghiu) and they certainly lived up to that reputation on this occasion,
slobbering all over doing a long duet sequence from Donizetti’s L’Elisir
d’Amore — which Alagna began by
opening what looked like a quite ordinary can of commercial beer. (The opera is
about a con man who comes to a small Italian village claiming to be selling the
magic elixir of love with which Isolde ensnared Tristan; it’s really just cheap
wine, but the tenor, Nemorino falls for it, with at least mildly humorous
complications.) The show began with the aria “Ah, leve-toi, soleil,” from
Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette (based on Shakespeare’s you-know-what), and almost as soon as Villazón
opened his mouth I found myself disappointed. I remembered this aria from
Florencio Constantino’s acoustic recording from about 1912 and missed the
heroic ring Constantino brought to this aria; instead Villazón sang it prettily
and emptily, making the notes but missing the ardor of the love-struck teenager
Shakespeare and Gounod were writing about. The next piece was a long love duet
from the same opera, and Villazón and Netrebko were pretty much on their best
behavior — at least they didn’t drink or do an open-mouthed kiss on stage — but
their voices were once again pretty bland, though at least part of that may be
Gounod’s fault. (It still seems frustrating that geniuses like Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Debussy
all contemplated doing Romeo and Juliet operas — Berlioz got as far as a 1 ½-hour
“dramatic symphony” and Tchaikovsky as his famous fantasy-overture and a love
duet for soprano and tenor based on the same Big Tune — but the ones who
actually finished Romeo and Juliet operas were relative mediocrities like Vaccai, Bellini, Gounod and
Zandonai.)
Then the conductor — whose name I haven’t been able to trace online
(given that this was a Russian telecast his on-screen credit was in
indecipherable, at least to me, Cyrillic letters) but who’s one of these young
podium flibbertigibbets who probably watched Leonard Bernstein’s Young
People’s Concerts as a boy and thought
Bernstein’s hyperactivity was the way to conduct — did a surprisingly well-phrased performance of the
Intermezzo to Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and afterwards Netrebko came back for the most
successful performance of the night: an aria (probably the famous “Song to the
Moon,” though since this is an opera I don’t know it will have to remain
mysterious) from Dvorák’s Rusalka. Until the last 20 years or so Dvorák’s operatic output has been pretty
much terra incognita,
probably for the same reason it’s been so hard to hear Smetana’s and Janácek’s
operas for so long: the language barrier (not that many people outside what
used to be called Bohemia, then Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic are
trained to sing in Czech, and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride made it to the standard repertoire but for years
only through a German translation), but Renée Fleming has made a personal specialty
of the title role in Rusalka and Netrebko seems ready to rival her in the part. Even that hyper
conductor calmed down for this one and spun an excellent mood from his
orchestra.
Then Villazón came out for another Shakespearean piece — the big
tenor aria “Ah, la paterna mano” from Macbeth (it’s Macduff’s lament that his “paternal hand”
wasn’t present to save his wife and kids from being massacred by Macbeth’s
thugs, and in an opera driven by the baritone and especially the soprano roles
as Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth it’s the only memorable music the tenor gets to sing all night) — at which he was,
once again, O.K. He made the notes and conveyed a modicum of emotion, though at
least part of the restraint may have been Verdi’s fault — in Macbeth, even more than in his other operas, the villains
have far more interesting parts than the good guy, and I suspect Verdi realized
he hadn’t done justice to Macduff’s character because when he revised Macbeth for Paris in 1865, 18 years after composing the
first version for Florence, he rewrote the introductory recitative almost
completely. Then came the big duet from L’Elisir, which as I mentioned above began with Villazón
opening a pop-top beer can and swigging it, ended with him and Netrebko in a
long embrace featuring an open-mouthed kiss, and in between had a lot of
romantic/erotic byplay between them. Ordinarily I applaud opera singers who
don’t let the fact that they’re just giving a concert (in a large,
well-appointed hall with a big organ behind them that wasn’t actually played
during the evening) absolve themselves of the need to act their roles, but
quite frankly I thought the pair were really overdoing it here — and again in
their final number together, the “Libiamo!” duet from Act I of Verdi’s La
Traviata, for which they popped a
champagne bottle (a real one, most likely — as Charles pointed out, even ginger
ale, the usual soft-drink stage fake for champagne, doesn’t froth that much)
and actually sipped it from tall flute glasses in the middle of their vocal lines.
After the L’Elisir number the orchestra
played the entr’acte to Act III of Carmen (the oddly pastoral mood-setting piece for an act full of violent
confrontations between the disgraced-soldier hero, his femme fatale girlfriend, her bullfighter alternate-boyfriend,
gypsy fortunetellers and a company of smugglers taking advantage of a moonless
night to do their thing) and then the duo returned for their most impassioned
joint singing of the night, the Act III Saint-Sulpice duet from Massenet’s Manon. It’s impossible to explain just what this piece
is without summarizing the entire opera; Manon Lescaut is a country girl from
Amiens who’s lured to the big bad city of Paris by the hero, des Grieux; only
she’s followed their by her unscrupulous, greedy cousin Lescaut, who thinks
Manon can make much better use of her charms by going after sugar daddies
instead of sticking herself with the penniless des Grieux. So she does just
that, abandoning des Grieux and their tiny apartment (she even sings a farewell
aria to their dining table — I’m not making this up, you know!) for life as the
(well-)kept mistress of a rich man, and in anguish over this development des
Grieux decides to enter the priesthood. But Manon comes to see him at the
church where he’s studying and this time she seduces him — only she’s also dying of an unmentionable disease and she’s thrown
out of the country as a prostitute and exiled to the French colony of
Louisiana, but before she gets there she drops dead on the road to her
embarkation port at Le Havre. (When Puccini and his librettists set the same story, they actually had
her go to Louisiana, des Grieux in tow, and gave her a spectacular aria, “Sola,
perduta, abbandonata,” before she expires; Massenet’s heroine just peters out
along the roadside.) For once Villazón sang with emotional weight and a sense
of drama instead of just making pretty sounds, and Netrebko matched him for a
more intense performance than any of their other duets or any of his solos.
Afterwards Netrebko sang “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi — radiantly, except for a bad wobble on her upper
extension — and then came the “Libiamo!” duet, which out of context comes off
as a bit of mindless optimism but in context is a desperate attempt by the fatally ill courtesan Violetta
Valery to maintain the “party spirit” when she’s dying, she’s lonely and the
man she’s singing the duet with has offered her a more-or-less respectable sort
of love (not that he’s able to deliver on that, as we find out in the next
act!) as an alternative to her high-class call-girl lifestyle. I don’t want to
sound more critical of this concert than I was — it’s really a nice, enjoyable
half-hour of opera, the sort of thing socially responsible (and largely
publicly owned) European television gives us a lot more of than private, mass-audience,
only-in-it-for-the-bucks, public-interest-be-damned American television does —
but as with so much classical music-making these days, the technique is there
but the emotions are only at a low simmer instead of the full boil you get from
the 78 era artists.
