La Donna Mobile
2006-02-12 23:13:59 UTC
In today's Sunday Times. As the registration process is pesky I shall
post the link
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2030251,00.html> and the
article:
"The newest romantic
With his Latin looks and athletic acting, tenor Rolando Villazon was
born to sing the anthems of doomed youth. By Hugh Canning
When Rolando Villazon made his Covent Garden debut in Offenbach's The
Tales of Hoffmann, just two years ago, few in the audience could have
realised what a treat was in store for them -- or that they were
witnessing the emergence of arguably the finest young operatic tenor of
our time. Even I was surprised. Eight months earlier, the now
33-year-old Mexican had appeared for the first time in the UK, at
Glyndebourne, singing a likeable Rodolfo in David McVicar's modern-dress
La bohème. He got a good, but hardly overwhelming reception from the
British press. So, did we get it wrong? Nobody who was at Covent Garden,
on January 22, 2004, will forget the little dance of triumph Villazon
did at his tumultuous curtain call, jumping up and down like a delighted
child given the run of the world's largest toy shop. He was clearly as
surprised as the rest of us. "Yes," he says, when we met in France in
January, "but something changed in the eight months, I think,
technically. My voice felt different."
His voice, an unusually dark but typically Latin-sounding lyric tenor,
slightly reminiscent of the young Placido Domingo's, but with its own
"imprint", had not seemed especially powerful at Glyndebourne, yet he
managed to fill the much bigger Royal Opera House without apparent effort.
In purely vocal terms, I thought at the time, nobody had sung Hoffmann
at Covent Garden with such allure and charisma since Domingo; but
Villazon's portrayal of the drunken, besotted, fantasising poet was
quite unlike that of the singer he says is his idol and early mentor. He
is slighter of stature, elegant of figure and, by lyric-tenor standards,
an uncommonly athletic actor. Indeed, he has the perfect physique for
the doomed young romantics: Rodolfo and Alfredo, in La traviata, his
first big roles in his native Mexico City in the late 1990s; Massenet's
Werther and Des Grieux, in Manon; and Gounod's Faust and Roméo.
"I love to sing at Covent Garden," he says. "My first big break was
Paris, and that got me to other houses, because theatre managements
heard about a tenor in Paris. But Hoffmann at Covent Garden was, well,
'Pow!' My career exploded after that, and it coincided with my first CD
coming out. It was a thrilling moment."
On February 20, Virgin Classics will release Villazon's third solo
album. The previous two were devoted to Italian and French opera
respectively, but the new one covers a range of roles, some already
tackled, some soon to be attempted and some he will probably never sing
on stage. It opens, appropriately enough, with two Hoffmann numbers, the
Legend of Kleinzach from the prologue, and the aria from the Olympia
act, in which the young poet is duped into falling in love with a doll.
Cavaradossi's Act I aria from Puccini's Tosca (a role he plans to sing
for the first time in Berlin, in 2008) is there, along with Turiddu's
"Mamma", from Cavalleria rusticana, and Loris's lament, Amor ti vieta,
from Giordano's Fedora -- all standard "Italian" tenor fare.
But Villazon also sings the Puccini parody aria from Richard Strauss's
Der Rosenkavalier and an old Caruso favourite, Lyonel's aria from
Flotow's Martha, which the great Italian recorded in his native tongue,
but Villazon, as a thoroughly modern -- and linguistically gifted --
tenor, sings in the original German. There is also a taster of his next
new role, Lensky in Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onyegin, which opens in a new
production by Steven Pimlott at Covent Garden on March 16. An unexpected
role for a Latin tenor, I suggest to him.
"Yes, I fought to do it at Covent Garden. I don't know if it will be the
only time I sing it, but I am sure I am not going to sing it very often,
because there are great Russian tenors who can sing it. It's true that
it wouldn't be most houses' first choice to have a singer like me for
that role." However, with his brooding looks and romantic temperament,
he should be ideally suited to the part of Onyegin's young poet friend,
who dies in a duel when they quarrel over a flirtation with his beloved.
Before he went to Nice to rehearse his first Werther in January,
Villazon made a whistle stop in St Petersburg. To brush up his Russian,
I ask? "No, for Valery Gergiev's first Bohème and Anna Netrebko's first
Mimi. It was quite an experience! Fantastic, fantastic." Villazon's
enthusiasm is infectious. In person, he seems as fired with the passion
of youth as he does on stage.
Last summer, Villazon and Netrebko appeared together in what was billed
in Europe as "the operatic event of the year": a new production of La
traviata at Salzburg's Large Festival theatre, sold out for months in
advance, for which desperate internet fans were offering more than
£3,000 for a ticket. The festival had seen nothing like it since the
heydays of Herbert von Karajan, with his deluxe all-star opera casts.
Netrebko is already a megastar in the German-speaking world --
breathlessly (and erroneously) described in the popular press as a new
Maria Callas, her glamour-puss image emblazoned on the front of all the
glossy magazines, and armed with that essential diva accoutrement, a
Rolex endorsement contract.
Villazon first sang Romeo to her Juliet in Los Angeles -- a pairing
devised by Domingo, who is artistic director of the LA Opera -- and,
just before Christmas, they appeared together at New York's Metropolitan
Opera as the Duke of Mantua and Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto. Already, my
Manhattan spies tell me, there is talk of "the new couple", the
successors to the French tenor Roberto Alagna and his wife, the Romanian
soprano Angela Gheorghiu. But Villazon laughs off the idea.
"Er, nooo. There is no new 'couple', but I do believe there is a strong
chemistry between us, and it's a huge pleasure to sing with Anna. We are
more or less the same age. I'm not sure if I am allowed to say Anna's
age, but the difference is some months, that's all. We react naturally
towards each other on stage, we understand each other very well, and I
think the voices match each other well. The good thing is that this
partnership was not created by a record company. Maestro Domingo engaged
us for Roméo et Juliette in Los Angeles, and it worked well, and after
that it just happened that a lot of houses engaged us together."
Villazon, in any case, is married to a psychologist -- "a good job for
the wife of a singer" -- and they live in Paris with their two
"Rolandinos", boys aged four and two. So there is no question of a
real-life romantic attachment.
Nevertheless, before their Salzburg Traviata, DG announced, much to
Virgin/EMI's consternation, that Villazon would be joining the
Hamburg-based company as an exclusive artist when his current contract
expires this year. DG recorded the Salzburg Traviata live and, Villazon
assures me, it has sold a phenomenal 300,000 copies worldwide (a
highlights disc is out this month). Although in parts of the world --
certainly here -- Villazon is regarded as the bigger star, he bridles at
my suggestion that he might be switching record companies to become
Netrebko's supporting tenor.
"I'm not going to DG to be the tenor of nobody," he insists. "With
Virgin, my contract comes to an end. It's a difficult topic to speak
about, but one thing I will say is that it was always a dream for me to
record for DG. There are great new people there now, they are marketing
aggressively, but I think they also care about artistic matters. Of
course, we will be singing a lot together."
He hints at complete opera sets, possibly to be recorded live in concert
rather than in the studio. And he mentions the enticing prospect --
nothing confirmed -- of a joint appearance in a new production of
Massenet's Manon at Covent Garden. Certainly we will be seeing a lot
more of Villazon there: he has new productions of Donizetti's L'elisir
d'amore and Verdi's Don Carlo firmly contracted, which will delight his
growing army of fans here.
Operatic London can't get enough of him.
/Rolando Villazon's Opera Recital is released on Virgin on Feb 20;
Scenes from La traviata with Anna Netrebko is out now on DG "/
(Actually, Opera Recital is released tomorrow, and according to Amazon
it is on its way to me right now...)
post the link
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2030251,00.html> and the
article:
"The newest romantic
With his Latin looks and athletic acting, tenor Rolando Villazon was
born to sing the anthems of doomed youth. By Hugh Canning
When Rolando Villazon made his Covent Garden debut in Offenbach's The
Tales of Hoffmann, just two years ago, few in the audience could have
realised what a treat was in store for them -- or that they were
witnessing the emergence of arguably the finest young operatic tenor of
our time. Even I was surprised. Eight months earlier, the now
33-year-old Mexican had appeared for the first time in the UK, at
Glyndebourne, singing a likeable Rodolfo in David McVicar's modern-dress
La bohème. He got a good, but hardly overwhelming reception from the
British press. So, did we get it wrong? Nobody who was at Covent Garden,
on January 22, 2004, will forget the little dance of triumph Villazon
did at his tumultuous curtain call, jumping up and down like a delighted
child given the run of the world's largest toy shop. He was clearly as
surprised as the rest of us. "Yes," he says, when we met in France in
January, "but something changed in the eight months, I think,
technically. My voice felt different."
His voice, an unusually dark but typically Latin-sounding lyric tenor,
slightly reminiscent of the young Placido Domingo's, but with its own
"imprint", had not seemed especially powerful at Glyndebourne, yet he
managed to fill the much bigger Royal Opera House without apparent effort.
In purely vocal terms, I thought at the time, nobody had sung Hoffmann
at Covent Garden with such allure and charisma since Domingo; but
Villazon's portrayal of the drunken, besotted, fantasising poet was
quite unlike that of the singer he says is his idol and early mentor. He
is slighter of stature, elegant of figure and, by lyric-tenor standards,
an uncommonly athletic actor. Indeed, he has the perfect physique for
the doomed young romantics: Rodolfo and Alfredo, in La traviata, his
first big roles in his native Mexico City in the late 1990s; Massenet's
Werther and Des Grieux, in Manon; and Gounod's Faust and Roméo.
"I love to sing at Covent Garden," he says. "My first big break was
Paris, and that got me to other houses, because theatre managements
heard about a tenor in Paris. But Hoffmann at Covent Garden was, well,
'Pow!' My career exploded after that, and it coincided with my first CD
coming out. It was a thrilling moment."
On February 20, Virgin Classics will release Villazon's third solo
album. The previous two were devoted to Italian and French opera
respectively, but the new one covers a range of roles, some already
tackled, some soon to be attempted and some he will probably never sing
on stage. It opens, appropriately enough, with two Hoffmann numbers, the
Legend of Kleinzach from the prologue, and the aria from the Olympia
act, in which the young poet is duped into falling in love with a doll.
Cavaradossi's Act I aria from Puccini's Tosca (a role he plans to sing
for the first time in Berlin, in 2008) is there, along with Turiddu's
"Mamma", from Cavalleria rusticana, and Loris's lament, Amor ti vieta,
from Giordano's Fedora -- all standard "Italian" tenor fare.
But Villazon also sings the Puccini parody aria from Richard Strauss's
Der Rosenkavalier and an old Caruso favourite, Lyonel's aria from
Flotow's Martha, which the great Italian recorded in his native tongue,
but Villazon, as a thoroughly modern -- and linguistically gifted --
tenor, sings in the original German. There is also a taster of his next
new role, Lensky in Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onyegin, which opens in a new
production by Steven Pimlott at Covent Garden on March 16. An unexpected
role for a Latin tenor, I suggest to him.
"Yes, I fought to do it at Covent Garden. I don't know if it will be the
only time I sing it, but I am sure I am not going to sing it very often,
because there are great Russian tenors who can sing it. It's true that
it wouldn't be most houses' first choice to have a singer like me for
that role." However, with his brooding looks and romantic temperament,
he should be ideally suited to the part of Onyegin's young poet friend,
who dies in a duel when they quarrel over a flirtation with his beloved.
Before he went to Nice to rehearse his first Werther in January,
Villazon made a whistle stop in St Petersburg. To brush up his Russian,
I ask? "No, for Valery Gergiev's first Bohème and Anna Netrebko's first
Mimi. It was quite an experience! Fantastic, fantastic." Villazon's
enthusiasm is infectious. In person, he seems as fired with the passion
of youth as he does on stage.
Last summer, Villazon and Netrebko appeared together in what was billed
in Europe as "the operatic event of the year": a new production of La
traviata at Salzburg's Large Festival theatre, sold out for months in
advance, for which desperate internet fans were offering more than
£3,000 for a ticket. The festival had seen nothing like it since the
heydays of Herbert von Karajan, with his deluxe all-star opera casts.
Netrebko is already a megastar in the German-speaking world --
breathlessly (and erroneously) described in the popular press as a new
Maria Callas, her glamour-puss image emblazoned on the front of all the
glossy magazines, and armed with that essential diva accoutrement, a
Rolex endorsement contract.
Villazon first sang Romeo to her Juliet in Los Angeles -- a pairing
devised by Domingo, who is artistic director of the LA Opera -- and,
just before Christmas, they appeared together at New York's Metropolitan
Opera as the Duke of Mantua and Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto. Already, my
Manhattan spies tell me, there is talk of "the new couple", the
successors to the French tenor Roberto Alagna and his wife, the Romanian
soprano Angela Gheorghiu. But Villazon laughs off the idea.
"Er, nooo. There is no new 'couple', but I do believe there is a strong
chemistry between us, and it's a huge pleasure to sing with Anna. We are
more or less the same age. I'm not sure if I am allowed to say Anna's
age, but the difference is some months, that's all. We react naturally
towards each other on stage, we understand each other very well, and I
think the voices match each other well. The good thing is that this
partnership was not created by a record company. Maestro Domingo engaged
us for Roméo et Juliette in Los Angeles, and it worked well, and after
that it just happened that a lot of houses engaged us together."
Villazon, in any case, is married to a psychologist -- "a good job for
the wife of a singer" -- and they live in Paris with their two
"Rolandinos", boys aged four and two. So there is no question of a
real-life romantic attachment.
Nevertheless, before their Salzburg Traviata, DG announced, much to
Virgin/EMI's consternation, that Villazon would be joining the
Hamburg-based company as an exclusive artist when his current contract
expires this year. DG recorded the Salzburg Traviata live and, Villazon
assures me, it has sold a phenomenal 300,000 copies worldwide (a
highlights disc is out this month). Although in parts of the world --
certainly here -- Villazon is regarded as the bigger star, he bridles at
my suggestion that he might be switching record companies to become
Netrebko's supporting tenor.
"I'm not going to DG to be the tenor of nobody," he insists. "With
Virgin, my contract comes to an end. It's a difficult topic to speak
about, but one thing I will say is that it was always a dream for me to
record for DG. There are great new people there now, they are marketing
aggressively, but I think they also care about artistic matters. Of
course, we will be singing a lot together."
He hints at complete opera sets, possibly to be recorded live in concert
rather than in the studio. And he mentions the enticing prospect --
nothing confirmed -- of a joint appearance in a new production of
Massenet's Manon at Covent Garden. Certainly we will be seeing a lot
more of Villazon there: he has new productions of Donizetti's L'elisir
d'amore and Verdi's Don Carlo firmly contracted, which will delight his
growing army of fans here.
Operatic London can't get enough of him.
/Rolando Villazon's Opera Recital is released on Virgin on Feb 20;
Scenes from La traviata with Anna Netrebko is out now on DG "/
(Actually, Opera Recital is released tomorrow, and according to Amazon
it is on its way to me right now...)
--
http://www.madmusingsof.me.uk/weblog/
http://www.geraldine-curtis.me.uk/photoblog/
http://www.madmusingsof.me.uk/weblog/
http://www.geraldine-curtis.me.uk/photoblog/