The Belter

Look who's blogging again! After a four-month hiatus, a new post: Patti LuPone, circa 1980, as photographed by the iconic German photographer, Chris Von Wagenheim, as seen in US Vogue.

La Gheorghiu Enchants D.C.

My friend T., who worships cara Angela unconditionally and who could do no wrong in his calculation, files his report below of the unsinkable diva's D.C. recital début. If unabashed superlatives make you cringe, I urge you to stop reading now. Otherwise, read on!

_______________

Angela Gheorghiu, goddess among us mere mortals, gave a stunning recital Saturday night at Washington National Opera, her first at the house, to a spellbound audience voraciously hungry for heavy dollops of old-school diva glamour. Ms. Gheorghiu, not one to disappoint, certainly offered a banquet in terms of style, and how! Appearing regal in a ravishing iridescent taffeta gown draped at the waist à la Dior in a beguiling shade of apricot tinged with pale gold rather like the colors of Venice at twilight, Ms. Gheorghiu showed who's boss and commenced with her signature Handel opener, "Ombra mai fu," at a slightly brisk pace that she felt suited her best but of which the conductor, veteran Eugene Kohn, felt otherwise. No matter, the soprano refused to let a minor flaw, in this case something as insignificant as tempo, blemish her performance. Ms. Gheorghiu has more talent than she knows what to do with, and so proceeding confidently into Mozart's lovely "Giunse al fin momento...," she went from strength to strength that once again showcased her prodigious gifts. One of those gifts is her ability to spin long arching lines that never seem to end, as evinced in her ethereal reading of Massenet's "Vive amour," which was preceded by yet another glorious example of this innate gift in a knock-'em-dead rendition of Dvorak's classic weepie, "Song to the Moon," which concluded the first act. (In between these quartet of arias, the orchestra provided fillers in the form of overtures.) The overture from "Le Corsaire" was a most wonderful entr'acte played with Gallic style by the band, as if Berlioz's triumphant score were written specifically to herald the soprano's entrée deuxième. It very well may have been, for the soprano looked like a vision straight out of Singer Sargent: black sequins seem to have been invented with Ms. Gheorghiu in mind. Perhaps sensing that she had the audience at the palm of her hand and on her side, and not the conductor's, she gave an arrestingly beautiful "Adieu notre petite table," as well as a supremely confident "Pleurez mes yeux". Spontini's rarely-performed "O nume tutelar" and La Wally's often-performed tragic soliloquy ended the program proper with aplomb. Encores galore flowed like champagne, from the frothy "I Could Have Danced All Night" to the showstopper "Granada," all the way to the sentimental "All The Things You Are," which sparkled like the diva's sequined gold gown (her third of the evening, mind), and of which the audience awarded with plenty of love. A glittery night was had by all, no more so than the diva herself, at the not-so-glittery Washington National Opera.

La Gheorgheous

Aida On A Winter's Night

Sondra Radvanovsky's Aida was unveiled Saturday night at Lyric Opera of Chicago amid Biblically-epic sets that were more Bollywood than Egypt. The entire production had the chaotic ambiance of a Cecil B. DeMille set, complete with dozens of extras in preposterous get-ups that screamed tacky Las Vegas instead of Cairo chic. I found the costumes for the principals lacking in style. An azure jersey column for Aida was lovely but unimaginatively designed. Remember Aprile Millo's Nile-green costume dangling with tribal beads from circa 1988? Now that was a frock fit for a love-sick Ethiopian princess. But never mind, the uninspired costuming is beside the point.

None of the vulgar pageantry that transpired on stage would have remotely annoyed me had Radvanovsky gave a searing or, at the very least, committed performance of this touchstone role. While the soprano showed considerable power over chorus and orchestra in the unforgiving Triumphal Scene, effortlessly riding the Tsunami-like wave of sound from stage and pit, I thought she gave a frustratingly lackluster Aida, so decidedly devoid of intimacy and pathos, particularly in moments that required intimacy and pathos. Her "Ritorna vincitor!" was bereft of any real hint of agitation or urgency. "O patria mia," though competently sung, was bland and lifeless. Her diction—lazy, slurred beyond recognition—did not help her either. Like a figure skater faced with the daunting task of mastering a quadruple flip at the Olympics, Radvanovsky attacked the dreaded high C with palpable trepidation; the effect was hardly earth-shattering—the pyramids were unharmed. Her showdown with the crude, underpowered Amneris of mezzo Jill Grove also proved disappointing. Vocally, the soprano was in top form, exhibiting impressive agility and power to burn, but dramatically it was not the nasty cat-fight, claws and all, between two bitter rivals. Both singers lacked the fierceness and nastiness required to set this scene on fire. So, naturally, her confrontation with the impassioned Amonasro of baritone Gordon Hawkins was also a let-down. When the time came for the gorgeous "O terra, addio"—ditto. On what should have been the most suitable time for this Aida to redeem herself by delivering a gut-wrenching, Millo-like farewell to life, the soprano once again succumbed to her customary "safe approach," inducing nary a single tear from my eyes. With the rise and fall of the vocal line written to evoke the soul leaving the body, the duet is one of Verdi's most heartfelt melodies, yet both Aida and Radames (a nasal-sounding Marcello Giordani) squandered the golden moment by refusing to give a part of themselves. Opening night nerves? Was the soprano battling a cold? The mere fact that it is January in Chicago? Or is it perhaps because Aida is simply too gigantic a role for this promising Verdian soprano to tackle this early on in her career?

A Pair of Fashion Victims

Dmitri and Renée, taking their bows at a "special recital" held Saturday night at Lyric, an event staged in honor of ex-manager William Mason. While both singers exhibited vocal élan and admirable musicianship in daring arias and riveting duets as disparate as Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Massenet's Thais, which soprano and baritone either sang solo or in tandem, their appearances, however, were hard to fathom. Dressed in a black longsleeved top sprinkled with dusts of sequins that morphed into a ballerina's bouffant tulle skirt, Fleming looked like a middle-aged debutante positively giddy at the prospect of receiving her first kiss. Her paramour, meanwhile, had his own fashion statement to make, albeit one that should not have come out of the closet. Hvorostovsky may have been an imposing presence—I half-expected this playboy to grab Renée by the arms and ravish her body—but his swashbuckling costume of black Nehru-inspired silk shirt and skin-tight trousers was as flamboyantly outré as his vocal projection. I'm surprised that this Siberian Fabio did not consider donning a highwayman's cape to go with his Errol Flynn get-up.

The Art of British Restraint

I offer you this 1969 TV adaptation of Wilde's An Ideal Husband, starring two of my favourite English actor/actress from that long-ago time: the exquisite Margaret Leighton and the magnificent Jeremy Brett. Two thoroughly enchanting performances that are masterclasses in understated elegance and the inimitable art of British refinement and restraint. Enjoy!

2012!

Angie, Darling, There's Only One Maria: "Moi"

The day I learned that EMI was putting out a disc with my name on it came hardly as a surprise: they do it all the time. What came as a surprise, however, was the knowledge that my name was going to be placed underneath someone else's. I never imagined such an outright violation of "decency" laws would occur in my other life. I, who topbilled every opera I ever appeared in, was not going to take this one sitting down! What's worse, the name that hovers directly above mine is the very name that has shamelessly capitalized on my fame more than any other soprano, living or dead. The impostor's name is none other than the so-called "definitive diva of the 21st-century": Angela Gheorghiu. A pretty enough name, yes, but you have to admit it lacks the familiar ring and alluring nuance of mine. Further, it's not even her own name: it's her ex-husband's. No, dear, not the fellow who stormed off the stage, but her first husband's name. Really, I have no problem at all with her name or in her dubious choice of men. The one thing that sent my blood pressure rising into the rafters was when I actually received the CD in the mail the other day.

While I'm flattered beyond words to be hyped and celebrated in such a way, what burns me is that Gheorghiu does it horrendously. From the first track to the last, she is downright imitating my style, my voice, my personality in the worst possible manner. It isn't even campy: it's worse than mere camp. It's one thing to do an "homage," it's another story entirely when someone does an utterly tasteless imitation of the person one is giving an homage to. I must admit that she does an admirable job of selling herself—her breasts appear to get bigger and BIGGER every time I see her on T.V.—but she is not an artist in the truest sense of that frequently misused and misapplied of words. For one, true artists never imitate. They may, on occasion, show up late for rehearsals or not show up at all, but they never—and I include myself among this elite group of artists—imitate someone else's vocal style or mannerisms. As for her choice of repertoire: well, it seems to me that when choosing prospective arias to include on the CD, she simply roamed around my vastly opulent garden of a discography and plucked the ones she liked without examining the roots to see if they had anything whatsoever to do with me. I mean, hello, I never even sang Dalila on stage, nor have I made something out of Carmen. I sang Adriana, Mimi, and La Wally on record (and a few times on stage) but these roles never became my signature roles. "Homage" my foot! What was she thinking?! To be perfectly blunt, her voice in the atrocious "Carmen" track, the one where she "duets" with me, is just about the single worst thing I've ever heard in my entire life—and believe me, I've heard my share of atrocities over the years. Listening to it gave me nightmares for several nights. Whoever had the idea of merging our voices into an incohesive duet ought to be fired immediately. (A trusted source tells me that it was not one of those stuffy British EMI executives as I had originally suspected but Gheorghiu herself who broached the monstrous idea.) Pairing our voices together was a proposition as disastrous and ill-advised as Mrs. Kennedy's Grecian nuptials! It just made me sick in disgust. Oh, don't get my blood pressure rising again by mentioning her absolute train wreck of a "Sempre libera". I thought it would never end: all that screeching and howling and barking. She sounds as if her Violetta is about ready to expire right then and there, doing so without fornicating with the sexy Alfredo of one James Valenti. Oh, the sheer horror of it all. Don't get La Divina wrong, I think Gheorghiu a fine artist, but only when she becomes herself. Her silly little tribute to my artistic legacy is nothing more than a clever plot to further her career by selling a few million records. Nothing less, nothing more. But then what can one expect from a self-centered, self-righteous, and self-promoting diva that is Angela Gheorghiu?

Pensée II

khalil gibran: "Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror."

Pensée

albert einstein: "Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift."

Belated

Clearly I am a delinquent. In that I haven't written down a single word about the current Lyric Opera of Chicago season which began some nine or ten weeks ago—practically a lifetime in the world of opera blogging. Whatever the reason(s) may be for my hiatus now seems irrelevant to rehash, for the one crucial thing required of people who intend to "move forward" is to bravely let go of the past and all its excess baggage—let's leave it at that. I will, however, revisit a most memorable performance that I was fortunate enough (really fortunate!) to have witnessed at Lyric this autumn. It made me forget the frustratingly dismal Lucia I saw earlier in the season with Giuseppe Filianoti, as well as a tedious Hoffmann with Matthew Polenzani. That performance was Ariadne auf Naxos, with Amber Wagner in the title role (replacing Deborah Voigt), Anna Christy as Zerbinetta, Alice Coote as the Composer, and Brandon Jovanovich as Bacchus. The production was very Gilbert and Sullivan. The singing, on the other hand, was not. Soprano Wagner, making her Lyric début, was a revelation. A consummate performer, her voice swirled and flowed in the air like French chiffon, majestically and technically secure in all registers. Her soprano soared thrillingly across a flawless Straussian sky. Coote was just as impressive, as was Christy's stratospheric Zerbinetta. Jovanovich was a vocally and visually arresting Bacchus. Like Voigt, the scheduled Ariadne, conductor Andrew Davis has never excelled in Italian operas, but his Ariadne was a sheer delight from beginning to end, as the music of Richard Strauss should be.

The Divine Miss Sarah

O Angela

For a change, diva Gheorghiu fulfilled her promise: that of performing with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on Sunday night. My friend T, who trekked up north last weekend specifically for Angela's sake, files his report below. Merci to him, and to the diva herself who, for once, actually turned up after saying she would.

____________________

Angela Gheorghiu's highly-anticipated, rather belated Vancouver debut recital took place at the Orpheum, a palatial venue that, upon entering its cavernous facade, had me worrying like a stage mother. The first thought that creeped into my mind was this: Would Gheorghiu's precious decibels prove deficit against such a vast space? Followed by: Would it soar against full orchestra, project audibly across the hall, without damaging her voice in the process? For after all a singer's number one priority, more than anything, is to be heard loud and clear. I need not have worried, for this soprano soared magnificently into the rafters, the kind of glorious soaring that would render her detractors mute, those who quibble about the size of her voice when they can't find anything else to quibble about. Gheorghiu, on the evening of April 3, once again demonstrated her almost superhuman ability to capture an audience hook, line and sinker, turning the most maudlin of arias into luminous gems, showing off her celebrated soprano as the gods themselves who created it would want her to, singing a treasure trove of arias both genteel and dramatic in nature, earning her lavish praise from the audience who applauded wildly the moment she made her entrance. "Lascia ch'io pianga"—the soprano's favorite warm-up piece—was exactly that: a "safe," risk-free little aria, a balm to soothe her vocal chords as only the music of Handel could, a prelude to the bigger, more riskier numbers such as Rusalka's haunting "Song To The Moon," La Wally's tragic soliloquy "Ebben, ne andro lontana," and Margherita's powerful "L'altra note in fondo al mare"—all of which Gheorghiu delivered with thrilling passion and artistry that the audience, no doubt caught up in the rapture of a voice so bewitching and magical as to seem altogether real, willingly overlooked the constant tug-of-war the diva and conductor Bramwell Tovey were pointlessly playing on stage, and that Schubert's Ständchen did not at all become her—all these minor blemishes vanish the moment one hears the miraculous beauty of Gheorghiu's voice. It also doesn't hurt that the diva cuts a striking figure on stage, looking like a Hindu goddess in a black and white long-sleeved plaid organza ensemble with matching fringed shawl. Gheorghiu looked especially smashing in a flowing hussy-red dress that followed every contour and emphasized every erogenous zone of her hour-glass figure and which, naturally, turned heads whenever she moved which she did quite a bit. The encores—they weren't encores per se, at least spontaneously speaking, for they were obviously rehearsed—the encores were extravagantly sung and extravagantly rewarded with rapturous applause. I'm talking nearly half-a-dozen numbers here that ranged from the infectious "Granada" to the sentimental "All The Things You Are," the latter of which the soprano, accompanied on the piano by conductor Tovey, sang with all the joy and promise of an exuberant, flawless, picture-perfect spring day, the audience barely resisting the urge to sing along with Angela. It was a gorgeous end to a gorgeous recital. Later in the lobby, a few people, perhaps the same ones who found themselves mesmerized by the melody of Jerome Kern's most beloved song as to almost sing backup to Angela, were humming the exquisite melody, doing so without the slightest inhibition, as we all walked out into a cool, moonlit Vancouver night.

To Love Or Not To Love

"There is no pain like the pain of knowing you love someone but cannot live with them." This line is found on page 17 of Sándor Márai's rediscovered, newly-translated novel, Portraits of a Marriage, but its frankness and simplicity is so powerful in its emotional truth that Márai, had he opened the book with it, may have written an entirely different novel altogether; its stunning impact worthy to be placed alongside other iconic first lines such as: "The past is a different country, they do things differently there," from L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between.

The Hungarian novelist, famous in his native land and who later committed suicide at 89 in San Diego where he lived for many years, has had one of the most enthusiastically-received posthumous careers in recent years, consistently making the bestseller list, all thanks mainly to Alfred A. Knopf who, for the past decade, has devotedly churned out five beloved Márai novels that, once translated into English, put the long-forgotten writer back on the map with his evocative tales of longing and loneliness, unrequited love and immeasurable loss that in their brilliance and breathtaking originality surpass, in scope and magnitude, the novels of that other Astro-Hungarian writer of mad genius who also took his own life, Stefan Zweig.

Márai's Portraits of a Marriage is a searing, intense, thought-provoking dissection of a disastrous marriage told in the distinctly different voices of three protagonists: the man, the woman, and the other woman, with an additional person, an unnamed man, who concludes the story through his own point of view. Peter, who leads an enviable life—fancy car and house, servants, every comfort money could buy—with his adoring wife, Ilonka, in pre-WWI Budapest, has had it with marriage, but who is reluctant to get out of it because of one significant hindrance: a child, the product of this seemingly charmed and ideal union, and whose tragic early death shatters Peter's world and, inevitably, his marriage. Enter the "other woman," Judit, whom Peter marries and eventually divorces. The plot, more or less, ends here. All of the three characters are then given substantial time to vent their innermost feelings, feelings that have been festering inside for years and are freed at last. Painstakingly, these anguished souls reconstruct, reconfigure and revise their fractured lives with unflinching candor, and here is where the novelist's genius is fully revealed. Even though Márai is never subtle when giving voice to his characters, he is an extremely generous writer, often sacrificing subtlety in lieu of powerfully concocted prose. If a thought suddenly enters his mind, he not only writes it down but offers a mini dissertation on the matter, sounding, in most pages, like a Baptist minister who preaches, rather emphatically, that "To love is to know joy as completely as it can be known and then to perish," and that "True love is always fatal. . . it burns with a fierce, more dangerous flame."

The urgent, dashed-off, in-the-heat-of-the-moment tone of the prose has the texture and bleak atmosphere of an Ingmar Bergman or John Cassavetes movie. The conversational, idiosyncratic narrative style is highly effective for a novel that reads like a transcript of an hours-long therapy session where the patient is doing all of the talking and the shrink is virtually mute. The pacing is unconventional: past, present and future are blurred beyond recognition, colliding into each other as in dreams. The dialogue—or, rather, the monologue spoken by the characters as they seem to be talking to an invisible friend and in fact are—are inlaid into the abstract structure of the narrative, piece by piece, like ornate Byzantine mosaics, gleaming with the shine of age-old wisdom: "Let's forget loneliness. Let it go. It may be no more than illusion," one character suggests wearily; while another troubled soul asserts that love is not "a great help to anyone. . . now here, now gone." Márai's clear-eyed, uncompromising insights into the intricately tangled web that is human love teach rather than preach, enlighten rather than condemn. In one particularly memorable episode, a character pours out her heart to a priest in what can be considered the novel's epitaph, the voice of the priest shining forth with conviction, like the gilded altar of the ancient cathedral itself where the confession takes place: "God gave people love so they might bear the world and each other."

At the end of this uncomplicated yet complex, brazenly modern (it was originally published in Hungary seventy years ago) novel, all three characters (along with the reader) will ultimately ask themselves if love, in all its myriad disguises and possibilities, "might prove. . . eternal"—can it "dissolve the distance between two people."? In an appalling age where "lovers make love in a hurry, like children gobbling their food," where love easily succumbs to hate, where it is seldom reciprocated, and where very few people would take the trouble to "strain every muscle and nerve to love"—can love exist, survive or grow at all? Márai, in this exceptionally wise novel, does not give clichéd answers and then tie them all up with a pretty bow; instead, he offers hope: "some hope at the bottom of my heart, that there would be a body, one single, unique body, that would move in perfect harmony with mine, that would succeed in quenching the thirst of desire. . . that people generally refer to as happiness."

Beaton's Met Traviata Revisited

For the Met's legendary 1966 season, Cecil Beaton was commisioned to design the sets and costumes for Alfred Lunt's new staging of La traviata. The costumes were inspired by the evocative silhouette of 1860s Paris, of the age of Réjane, of the era of the demi-monde. Beaton remarked at the time that he "wanted the colors to have a gold light, dark but sparkling, and scintillating." Violetta's first-act gown, a showstopper in rich brocade, above, captures the courtesan's imperious coquettishness superbly; while the ballgown, below, presumably the one Mlle. V wears in the second scene of the second act, showcases the heroine's killer allure and subtle power to stunning effect. The Violetta of that glittering production, by the way, was the stunningly beautiful Anna Moffo, whose vocal and physical fragility made her one of that century's most visually alluring and compelling la dame aux camélias.