I ran for Charles the 2012 Richard Tucker opera gala, an annual event in Tucker’s home town of New York City, sponsored by his descendants as part of their ongoing project to find and help launch the careers of new opera singers. This year the Tucker Award winner was an interesting soprano named Ailyn Pérez (though on hearing her first name announced by host Audra McDonald I assumed it was spelled the conventional way, “Eileen”) who happens to be married to the 2009 Tucker Award winner, tenor Stephen Costello — and naturally the producers of this program made a big to-do about that, giving the two lovebirds a lot of duets, including the Cherry Duet from Mascagni’s second best-known opera, L’Amico Fritz (I couldn’t help but notice the irony that the first complete recording of L’Amico Fritz, made in Italy for Cetra during World War II and conducted by Mascagni himself, also starred a tenor and soprano who were husband and wife: Ferruccio Tagliavini and Pia Tassinari) and the “Libiamo” from Verdi’s La Traviata. I remember having seen at least one of the Tucker galas on PBS before and not being particularly impressed:
I … watch[ed] a video I’d recorded
two or three months ago on PBS: a show called the Richard Tucker All-Italian
Opera Gala (a title which proved to be a
misnomer, since there was one non-Italian “ringer” in the music: the revival
scene from Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, sung by bass Samuel Ramey — ironic to see the singer I’m most familiar
with in the title role of Boïto’s Mefistofele as a Fundamentalist minister!), followed by a New
York City Opera broadcast of Verdi’s La Traviata. There was a long explanatory program before the
opera began — ironically, Terrence McNally was one of the “authorities” (I
guess his main qualification for that was being Gay and having written a play
called The Lisbon Traviata, in
which one member of a Gay male couple in the process of splitting up torments
and eventually murders the other while they’re listening to, and arguing over
who gets to keep, the Maria Callas Traviata album that gives the play its title) — which
featured clips from an earlier
New York City Opera Traviata,
this one starring Beverly Sills (a beautiful and intelligent singer, but not
really capable of the vocal and emotional depths a soprano needs to be a truly
great Violetta).
The Tucker Gala was a disappointing
program. Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore was introduced as the winner of the
1994 Tucker Award (set up by the late tenor’s estate to foster young American
singers), but in her opening number — the “Mira, o Norma” duet from Bellini’s Norma, with Larmore as Adalgisa and Carol Vaness as Norma,
Larmore seemed a bit wobbly vocally and uncertain dramatically (Vaness outsang
her, though admittedly not by much). The other young singers on the program
weren’t that much better — tenor Kristjan Johannsson was a welcome change for
the stentorian efforts of Pavarotti et al. in Calaf’s “Non piangere, Liù” from Act I of Puccini’s Turandot, but he hasn’t yet developed real authority; and
Kallen Esperian, singing Liù in her aria “Signore, ascolta” just before,
wobbled very badly. Some great
voices from the 1960’s and 1970’s — notably Montserrat Caballé and Sherrill
Milnes — made reappearances, and Caballé’s performance in “O mio babbino caro”
from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi showed
that what she has now is only a minor remnant of that incredibly spectacular
voice (in particular, her penchant for pianissimo high notes has now become a necessity because she
can’t sustain a high pitch at full voice!). Milnes’ voice has weathered the
years a bit better; his showing in the great “O sommo Carlo” episode from
Verdi’s Ernani is quite a bit
weaker than his performance in the same moment with the Met in their live
broadcast 12 years ago, and Vladimir Atlantov was properly stentorian in his moment — the third-act finale from Verdi’s Otello — but I’d want to hear him in more of the role
before I made judgments. Ironically, the best singing on this 1 1/2-hour
program came from Richard Tucker himself, in the company of Risë Stevens on an
old (1953) Ed Sullivan Show
kinescope of the final scene from Bizet’s Carmen; while the staging was the pits (they never quite
explained why the town square in downtown Seville should have, front and
center, a fully set lunch table) — the singing on that clip had a passion and
commitment missing from the performances in the gala itself. — 6/2/95
Fortunately, the 2012 gala had at least some performances
that rose to the dramatic, as well as the musical, demands of the pieces
performed — and I give whoever put together the program credit for digging
through the operatic repertoire and coming up with some real rarities instead
of churning out yet another set of Opera’s Greatest Hits. Yes, there were some
numbingly familiar pieces on the program — the Traviata duet (though they also performed the final scene
from Act II of Traviata — the one
in which Alfredo openly insults Violetta by hurling his gambling winnings at
her and saying that he’s paid off the whore in full — which is hardly ever done
out of context); “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson
et Dalila (sung by a major star, mezzo Olga
Borodina, with impeccable technique but almost none of the air of mystery and
seduction the piece needs to work); “La calunnia” from Rossini’s The
Barber of Seville and the Song to the
Evening Star from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (one of those bits, like the familiar Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, that’s essentially Wagner for people who hate
Wagner — though it’s ironic, to say the least, that a concert named for one of
the most committedly Orthodox Jews in all opera should have featured anything by so notoriously anti-Semitic a composer).
But
there were also quite a few real rarities: the opening piece was an aria from
Handel’s Rinaldo sung
(gloriously) by baritone Gerald Finley, who’s most known for his contributions
to contemporary opera in general and John Adams’ works in particular; the complete Cours-la-Reine sequence from Massenet’s Manon (showing off Pérez’ vocal beauty and facility in
coloratura — though she’s not going to make me forget the spectacular singing
Beverly Sills did on this in her “complete”); the spectacular “Take the world,
but leave me Italy!” duet from Verdi’s Attila with baritone Quinn Kelsey (who looks like a street
person but sings like a demigod) and bass Ildar Abdrazakov; “O mon Fernand”
from Donizetti’s La Favorite,
sung by the glorious mezzo Janis Barton (who should have been the 2012 Tucker Award winner; she’s a far
more exciting singer than Pérez and in the battle of the mezzos she blew the
much better known Borodina off the stage — and, praise be, she sung the aria in
the original French instead of the slapdash
Italian translation usually used); “Ave Signor” from Boïto’s Mefistofele (my choice for the most underrated opera of all
time) sung by surprisingly slight German bass Erwin Schrott, whose idea of
looking like the devil was dressing in a black leather jacket and putting its
collar up; “Vieni! T’affretta” from Verdi’s Macbeth (with Macbeth’s lines in between the cavatina and
cabaletta supplied by African-American baritone Brandon Sidell) by a
breathtakingly intense dramatic soprano named Ludmilla Menastyrska (I wouldn’t
mind seeing or hearing her and Sidell in a “complete” even though Sidell was
ill-used in this program — only a brief recitative in between the two halves of
this aria and a brief appearance in the Traviata Act II finale); and the Septet from Offenbach’s The
Tales of Hoffmann, in which Janis Barton’s
voice soared above the rest — as it did in the Traviata finale as well even though that’s one piece in which
the mezzo is definitely not
supposed to upstage the star soprano! The Traviata “Brindisi” and the final selection, the “Va,
pensiero” chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco — both the chorus and the orchestra were from the Metropolitan Opera
and the conductor was Patrick Summers, who frankly was dull through most of the
evening; many of the singers had to make their effects in these selections in
spite of their conductor and his leaden
tempi — were essentially presented as encores.
The evening was a quite
spectacular one and offered hope for the future of opera — though less hope for
the future of opera conducting;
as dissatisfied as I was with some of James Levine’s Met performances
(especially in the 1970’s before he settled in as the long-time music
director), he’s emerging as a shining light on the podium compared to a lot of
the conductors the Met has had since. At least part of the problem is that
conducting opera is no longer seen as the stepping-stone to conducting
symphonic concerts it used to be, when musicians like Arturo Toscanini and
Herbert von Karajan spent long apprenticeships making the rounds of provincial
opera houses before they got let anywhere near a symphony orchestra; today a hot-shot conductor
like Gustavo Dudamel can get a major berth with a first-rate symphony without
ever having to go near an opera house, and if he decides he wants to conduct
opera he can do so with his regular orchestra in a concert performance without
having to set foot in an opera house or worry about staging. And speaking of
staging, some of the music on the Tucker gala actually benefited from the lack
of it; the Traviata finale in
particular made a much stronger emotional impression on me here than it had on
the Met’s recent telecast, partly because Ailyn Pérez is much closer to my
ideal voice “type” for Violetta than Natalie Dessay and partly because she and
her hubby didn’t have to compete with Willy Decker’s silly production and
Wolfgang Gussmann’s even sillier sets and costumes. Despite Summers’ poky
conducting, the Traviata scene
took off and lived emotionally —
as did the Macbeth aria and just
about every number involving Janis Barton, who to me is the real star-to-be
from this concert!
