José van Dam in Recital
Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre
Ann Arbor, Michigan
October 20, 2000
Quite simply, this recital was one of the most consecrating and among the most definitive in my experience. At 60, the Belgian bass-baritone’s voice is amazingly well preserved and intact; the voice sounded like that of a man who could be anywhere between 30 and 50. One could wax poetic and get into such well-worn metaphors as “autumnal glow” — which certainly is true — but it’s actually more like an “extended summer,” due to an obvious discipline and care in the preservation of the voice.
Of course, it does help that van Dam’s vocal technique is awe-inspiring to begin with, and he uses it with consummate, refined artistry. Somehow, in listening to van Dam, I was constantly reminded of the recordings of the great Golden Age French bass Poll Plançon (whose art is to be found on a priceless 2 CD Romophone set); there’s something about the elegance and pliancy of tone that has many similarities.
Throughout, van Dam’s singing reminded one of a fine, resonant cello, evenly produced from top to bottom. Every note was placed properly, with a flawless, tightly bound legato, completely sustained by a bedrock of support. When he sang a phrase that included a wide interval, he never showed any sign of “building up” to the higher note; it just placed itself there, and without a break of breath before or after the note. All throughout one had to marvel at the consistency and smoothness of his production. Never was there any sign of the typical, migraine-inducing noises — puffed-up, exaggerated tone production and strained vocalism — that is redolent in many classical singers. Van Dam has the most complete dynamic control a singer could have; it takes a lot of hard work to sustain, minus crooning, a softly-produced tone, but that is what van Dam is a master at, par excellence. A singer is doing things correctly when a pianissimo tone has an unmistakable halo of resonance surrounding it; if it’s breathy, vibratoless, and “flat” sounding, then it’s unsupported crooning. And oh, what marvelous diction! Every word emerged distinctly, a telling indicator that his technique is of such an excellence by the fact that he does not have to sacrifice clarity of enunciation in pursuit of a faultless line. Here’s proof it can be done — and then some.
Van Dam, in contrast to most recitalists I’ve heard, is much more reserved in personality. Those looking externally, wanting mainly to be charmed by a naturally effusive personality will be disappointed — but only if they haven’t looked and listened closely enough. I was just as deeply impressed by van Dam as I was by Thomas Quasthoff — also in Ann Arbor earlier this year — but for totally different reasons; just the same, the greatness of artistry is absolutely equal. Whereas Quasthoff is an expansive, outpouring extrovert, van Dam is the internalized, private introvert. And yet, one felt he was giving his all, communicated through exquisitely subtle means. I had the impression, too, that van Dam is a person of utter, dignified simplicity and guided by a kind of affirmative inner strength. Like Quasthoff, van Dam’s physical deportment is plainly an object lesson. Van Dam stood poised and mainly still, hands clasped gracefully together. There was no nervous shifting, tics or distracting mannerisms (a colleague saw Wolfgang Holzmair here in Ann Arbor once, and, asked about the concert, my friend’s first words were “never again.” He described Holzmair’s, twitchy, shifty presence: He conducted himself while singing, arms flailing madly, completely obliterating his song-making.
Miraculously, van Dam gave no impression of even taking a breath, and there was no heaving of the chest or lifting of the shoulders; too, his face and jaw were relaxed, natural and at ease. It was this economy of effort while giving all vocally that left me in awe. This, I would say, is van Dam’s secret, a kind of miraculous deception, you might say. He makes it all look so easy that an unaware person may carelessly lead himself to believe that van Dam is not “working hard enough,” but that response would cause me to grin knowingly, because I “know” (perhaps with a touch of arrogance) the secret. Van Dam is perhaps one of the hardest-working, most consummate professionals I’ve ever witnessed. It shows, and yet he doesn’t bring any of the baggage of all that hard work with him; it would, as with so many singers, simply get in the way. He leaves nothing to chance, nothing is shrugged off — and yet, again, the effort is economical. Every area that needs to be met IS met, because he cares — cares very deeply about the result; this shining frame of mind obviously stems from an inborn, unsullied sense of integrity. Having seen so many artists of varying qualities, I feel as if in van Dam, I’ve been privy to one of the most “compleat” artists of my time. Touched by greatness. How often does one witness that (And how astonishing to witness it again, so soon after the Quasthoff experience)?
As to the songs: there was the inevitable warm-up time needed at the very beginning of the recital, but that’s generally so true of most singers. Van Dam didn’t try to put his cards out on the table all at once, and simply let the poetry of Heine in the Schumann “Dichterliebe” shine through his peerless diction and warm tone. I have to confess: German lieder can really rub me the wrong way as done by some singers. All that excessive underlining and barky “expressionism” actually countermands the beauty of the melodies and eloquence of the poetry: Van Dam makes German lieder as beautiful and as expressive as one could wish. THIS is the way to do it. Enough said. The song that really made a deep impression on me was van Dam’s interpretation of “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet (I Wept in My Dream).” It begins a cappella, and grows in intensity and pathos. The final line is “Ich wachte auf, und noch immer, Strömt mein Tränenflut (I woke, and still my tears stream).” It was here that van Dam somehow conveyed a concealed-within, abject heartbreak that was devastatingly forlorn in its effect.
In the second half of the program, van Dam displayed his beautiful French in the melodies of Fauré, Duparc and Poulenc. Never was it more of a pleasure to hear a beautiful language given such reverence as van Dam did in these songs. His poignant, supplicant rendition of “En priére” caused several people to audibly turn misty-eyed. The final set of Poulenc “Chansons gaillardes (Ribald Songs)” showed a completely different side and body language of van Dam. His stance loosened a great deal, and there emerged an engaging twinkle in his eyes as he took us through these rollicking songs. Yet the few gestures he made came to great effect because, again, of his economy of movement. He elicited chuckles and outright laughter at the woeful sigh he emitted at the end of “L’offrande.”
One of the encores was a delightfully droll enactment of Basilio’s “La calunnia,” which van Dam sang with amazing dexterity and vocal presence that scored resoundingly, because of the lack of the usual hamminess that afflicts this classic buffo number. When van Dam finished, the audience leaped to its feet and gave him a rousing standing ovation.
I cannot find enough words of praise, either, to describe the singer’s accompanist, Maciej Pikulski. It says in the program that Pikulski is van Dam’s exclusive accompanist, and it is easy to hear why. Pikulski’s technique is out of this world, and he worked magic, especially in the accompaniment to the Fauré “Clair de lune,” where the filigree weightlessness was simply unbelievable. Piano reductions of Rossini are often impossible to play, but here Pikulski whizzed through effortlessly.
Van Dam should be studied by anyone wishing to further their artistic and technical aspirations. This great artist is a living example of the most exemplary kind of integrity in the performing arts. —Niel Rishoi
Verdi: Aida
Cincinnati Opera
Music Hall Cincinnati
July 14, 2000
Sung by a competent cast, reasonably attractive artists who can hit the notes and occasionally turn a magical phrase, Verdi’s Aida never fails. Sung by superb, fresh voiced, attractive artists who live the text, Aida is seen and heard as the great testament to late romantic opera that it is. It has a blazing love triangle in an enormous setting where the sets never sing at the expense of the leading characters’ emotions.
Cincinnati Opera returned Aida to its repertoire for three performances in July of this year (the Company’s 123rd, 124th and 125th outings of this work) and offered lots of competence, one noble experiment, and one great performance. Beginning at the beginning, the vocal honors went to soprano Hasmik Papian in the title role. The Internet opera lists and chat rooms have been a buzz with news of her performances of Norma and Aida in the last few years. To Papian went the Met broadcast of Aida two seasons ago, rather than to the more established Deborah Voigt or Sharon Sweet. I remember greatly looking forward to this broadcast and then feeling disappointed. It was a good, generic performance, but nothing that inflamed the imagination of a radio listener. Perhaps Papian had a bad afternoon, perhaps she was nervous. As heard in Cincinnati on July 14th, the first of three performances, Miss Papian has a perfectly even voice, easily riding the Act II ensembles and including a free and lovely top C in “O patria mia.” There’s not the power of a Jane Eaglen, there’s not the vocal size of Tebaldi, but the tone is full and beautiful from top to bottom. This is no chest diva; the lower reaches of ‘Ritorna vincitor!’ (“E dal mio labbro usci l’empia parola!”) came and went without impact. It’s a narrower voice than some, and it has a tighter vibrato than say, Leontyne Price. Miss Papian’s singing suffers not at all in comparison to those ladies of happy memory. She is a beautiful woman with an attractive figure, nicely shown off in Susan Memmott-Alfred’s costumes, deep crimson for the first two acts, moss green for the rest. This is a full lyric voice used with point and taste, and dazzling it is. This was for me the vocal performance of the past twelve months. Hasmik Papian. Write that name down.
Denyce Graves made her Cincinnati Opera debut singing her first Amneris. Now ten years or more into an international career that has her the world’s most successful Carmen, an outstanding Dalila, and a favorite at the Met and La Scala (she came to Cincinnati direct from performances of Mere Marie in Dialogues of the Carmelites in Milan). Her recent performance of Charlotte in Werther held its own beautifully opposite the mega hyped Andrea Bocelli singing the title role. But what’s a lyric mezzo to do, particularly if she is blessed with Miss Graves’ beauty, musicianship, and brains?
Can endless Carmens be satisfying? There’s Dalila, there’s Dulcinee in Massenet’s Don Quichotte (how often is that produced)? Charlotte, Dorabella, maybe Preziosilla? Miss Graves’s voice to these ears is a bit too voluptuous to be convincing in the hosenrolle repertoire; do you really want her as Cherubino? Perhaps Amneris seemed a logical next step, but not all the train kicking and posturing in the world can make a marvelous lyric mezzo into the dramatic voiced singer Amneris requires. Denyce Graves is far too gifted an artist to risk herself on this role, particularly in Cincinnati’s 3,500 seat Music Hall! The Verdi mega-honker mezzo roles are the star parts of the repertoire, but Miss Graves was clearly spent midway through the judgment scene. It was a noble experiment in a role she will hopefully put aside.
The men operated at a consistently middling level. Romanian tenor Gabriel Sade made a local debut as Radames. He sounds fine, he has all the notes, but there was no hushed finale to “Celeste Aida” for this tenor. He rode the horse gamely in the triumphal scene and nearly fell on his fanny but he sang bravely on in a leathery voice devoid of caress but with enough power for an impressive B flat at “Sacerdote, io resto a te!’ in the third act finale. Donnie Ray Albert remains an imposing onstage presence but sounded tired as Amonasro. He did manage to bring off well the great phrase in Act III, “pensa che un popolo, vinta, straziato; per te soltanto risorger puo”. Bass Ronnie Johansen rumbled impressively through Ramfis (young basses studying this role would do well to seek out Ezio Pinza’s recordings of this music to hear what can be made of Ramfis). Two young singers deserve a special word of praise; I’m sure each will graduate to larger roles, possibly in this opera. Soprano Adrienne Danrich was excellent as the High Priestess, onstage for Act I, sc. 2 as was the very promising tenor Scott Piper as the messenger.
Musically all was well in the hands of conductor Edoardo Mueller, a product of the leading Italian opera houses, and one time accompanist and coach to Renata Tebaldi. From her it is likely he learned how to support and encourage, if not dictate, Hasmik Papian’s wonderful phrasing of “O patria Mia!” Here was color, attack and power when needed, in the pit. Here was every effort to buoy Miss Graves through the judgment scene, even at “de miei pianti la vendetta; o dal ciel si compira” with its you-either-got-the-chops-against-this-orchestration-or-you don’t demands.
A word about the Cincinnati Opera, now in its eightieth season, since 1974 at the Music Hall after more than fifty years al fresco at the Cincinnati Zoo. Nicholas Muni’s artistic direction has brought superb productions of Pelleas et Melisande and a sold out run of Jenufa two seasons ago, a hard sell anywhere except it seems in Cincinnati. This is a good town for opera, with Hasmik Papian’s Aida a jewel of the recent season.
—Christopher Purdy
Bizet: Carmen
Arizona Opera
Tucson Convention Center Music Hall
November 10, 2000
Arizona Opera’s 2000-01 presentation of Bizet’s Carmen utilized the Keith Warner 1991 production owned by Minnesota Opera, with sets and costumes by Marie-Jeanne Lecca and lighting designs by Kim Davis. By setting the opera in Seville under the Franco Regime of the 1930’s, the stage director James McNamara provides us with a rather different version of this familiar opera.
The single set for the four acts combined into two is a solid white wall, varied somewhat by projections. It works for the sunlit plaza in Seville, it passes rather well as a dimly lit backdrop for the vulgar dancing at Lillas Pastia’s dive, and it doubles as a wall of the bull ring. However, it seems totally out of place in the mountain pass of Act II, Scene 1. At the beginning of this scene, the smugglers lurched and jumped across rocks projected on the steeply raked floor, but later lounged on nearby surfaces that looked exactly the same.
The 1930’s costumes were generally attractive and in keeping with the production, but the raincoat-covered, full skirted dresses and heeled galoshes worn by many of the women in the mountain pass were a bit over the top.
Lithe, good looking Buffy Baggott, who sang the title role, has a large, high mezzo voice that commands the listener’s immediate attention. Her sexy Habanera and inviting Seguidilla made Don José’s obsession with her seem quite believable. The dancing during the Chanson Boheme diverted the audience’s visual attention, but Baggott’s singing was absolutely solid.
Only in the “Card Song” did it become noticeable that her voice lacks resonance at the bottom of its lower register.
As Don José, Jeffrey Springer proved to be an effective actor with a rather dry tone. He had all the notes in place, but his delivery created little excitement. It is quite probably, however, that he was being overly careful because, owing to the illness of his alternate, he was scheduled to sing the role three nights in a row.
Bradley Garvin, who was a hilarious Don Basilio in the previous month’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, made a handsome and full-voiced Escamillo, but Michele Capalbo, seemed to be a truly nervous Micaela and had trouble relaxing enough to intone correctly and let her voice project freely during her aria.
As Frasquita, Diane Gardiner effectively punched out the high notes in the ensembles. She and Korby Myrick, the creamy voiced mezzo who sang Mercedes, were the perfect foils for Daniel Kurek, a comic Le Remendado and Reynaldo Romo, a bossy Le Dancaire. The Quintet was fascinating with all the vocal notes falling perfectly into place while the singers poured wine, slurped soup, and tossed fruit in the air, caught and peeled it. As a combination of staging and singing, it was a tour de force. The opera’s finale was a bit confusing as the chorus, all dressed alike, sat in rows watching Carmen argue with José, as though their fight were the action in the bull ring. At the end José swept his knife across Carmen’s throat instead of stabbing her and she fell against that white wall making huge red splatters as she went down. Though rather gory, it was quite effective.
Although not the perfect Carmen, it was a very enjoyable presentation, helped greatly by Cal Stewart Kellogg’s snappy tempi and the excellent playing from the Arizona Opera Orchestra, which has improved markedly since last year.
—Maria Nockin
Flanigan was more successful than usual. But as Elisabetta in Donizetti’s Devereaux, her excitation simply could not efface the far-more-considerable imaginative challenges set for her by the composer. All of Flanigan’s energies and thoughts on the role needed to come through, but by way of the music. They needed to come through the long scales her breath couldn’t compass and also through the radical palette of emotional colors (suddenly-challenged authority, inexplicable human frailty, sexual jealousy) the words require to truly come alive, but which she simply couldn’t realize; through an architectural molding of the great last-act aria. She simply couldn’t manage to do that. Instead of watching the great monarch felled by her own machinations and frustrated desires (to say nothing of her unfortunate choice of boyfriend), we witnessed a singer undone by a role she had everything for but the crucial vocal and musical equipment needed to handle it.
It’s not that all her singing was inadequate. In the second act, with shorter vocal lines to sing and lots of anger and betrayal to tear about, Flanigan’s Elisabetta came to life. It was a pleasure to see her wipe out the unfortunate production design, successfully dominating the stage. And there is something admirable about her, something indomitable. But there is also something frustrating about Flanigan’s efforts, and their too-eager acceptance by some listeners.
There is, there has always been, a taste for overparted but energetic singers. (Was it Chopin who once described an audience’s unwarranted protestations for a prima donna he considered unworthy as “enthusiasm of a bad genre?”) Some listeners prefer it to the well schooled but less feverish voicing of, say, a Renée Fleming. There is some point to the Callas-Tebaldi dichotomy as a textbook example of beautiful sound vs. expressive deployment of sound. I think this is all bunkum; beauty and truth are wedded in all the arts, and the human voice at its best unites them just as surely. At her best, Callas was an uncommonly beautiful (if idiosyncratic) singer. Play her last act Norma from La Scala in 1955. When Callas identifies herself as the priestess whom she has indicted for betraying her vows and people, her incredible extension of that eerie “Son io,” is answered by a shiver of awe from the audience; it’s a staggeringly meaningful and beautiful moment. Chaliapin, with his incomparable range of color, intonation, and insight, was certainly also gifted with a beautiful voice. I once heard a Mirella Freni Bohème that was so perfect a wedding of impersonation and sonic lustre that I was too haunted by the tragedy she conveyed (think of that beautiful sound falling still!) to go to sleep for forty-eight hours. In our own day, Lorraine Hunt finds extraordinary insights in line after line of hauntingly beautiful singing, often in musical territory uncharted for generations. (Her voice just seems to get bigger and broader to handle her roles.) In a series of recitals and concerts in recent New York seasons, the Polish contralto Ewa Podles has moved me to tears or chills of fears with her powerful, rich, expressive tone. And the most moving Manon I have ever heard in the theater was Renée Fleming’s. I think that singers like Flanigan, however well-intentioned and laudable (if on reduced terms) are the unfortunate symptom of a desperation for emotion, any kind of emotion, in opera, even when it is at the expense of the music that the singers are entrusted to realize. There are so few true prima donnas on our stages today, women whose training, natural abilities, and musico-dramatic imaginations can sing through the music to the truest essence of opera, that we go crazy when even an approximation of a prima donna appears. (And please note I do not say so few exist or aren’t lying in wait in the throats and aspirations of our young singers.) In Devereaux, Flanigan was such an approximation. A temptation to side with her, to want her to win, must be checked by an insistence on remembering what a true prima donna is. One must bear in mind how time and space in an opera house can literally come to a standstill when a true prima donna raises her body and soul to the music and the audience lifts their heads to believe in her.
If Flanigan ever tries this role again, it would be nice to discover that she has the ability to sing her way through it and realize the drama of the role instead of wrestling it to the ground. But that will only happen if audiences demand more of her, and their urgings cause Flanigan to regroup and not to be satisfied with what she can already do, but rather to keep improving, extending, and discovering the greater reserves of achievement that are hopefully available to her.
