Interview with José Cura:  “In classical music, versatility breeds suspicion."

Fidelio

11 April 2024

[Computer-assisted Translation]

This year, the VeszprémFest audience will be pleased to have a returning guest.  On July 17 José Cura, who has performed regularly at the renowned festival since its beginning, will be in concert again. We talked with the artist, who is also active as a conductor and composer, about the program based on Argentine songs and opera arias, musical versatility and social responsibility.

In recent years, we have heard you often in Hungary, and you have a long-time returning guest of the VeszprémFest.  How did your relationship with our country become so close?

It's hard to explain who and what you start to be attracted to, but maybe that's okay. I performed in Hungary for the first time in 2000, like this.

Next year will be my "silver wedding" with my Hungarian musical family, twenty-five years of fantastic cooperation.

And my concert at the VeszprémFest celebrates the twentieth anniversary of my musical friendship with this wonderful city, of which I am also an honorary citizen, because we opened the festival with Zoltán Kocsis in 2004.

In the description of the concert, it is stated that the works performed were specially selected for this occasion. What will we hear?

Since I have already performed three times at the festival, I want to recall the atmosphere of the very first concert in 2004, which was a very eclectic performance since not only the usual opera arias were performed. I conducted Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto, in which Kocsis was the soloist, and he in turn conducted the opera parts that I sang. The next two concerts (in 2010 and 2018) were based on the opera repertoire, I was able to perform with excellent colleagues such as Ildikó Komlósi, Andrea Rost, Erika Miklósa and Ramón Vargas. And now I am proud to be able to present the songs of my homeland in the first part, accompanied by the fantastic Czech guitarist Barbora Kubikova, my old friend, the excellent pianist Dóra Bizják and the Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra. Then, in the second part, we will perform excerpts from opera with the participation of one of my favorite sopranos, Polina Pasztircsák, and the expanded orchestra will be conducted by Mario De Rose.

You often sing the music of your native Argentina. How much did this musical world influence you in your childhood?

When I was younger, I only knew a few iconic Argentine songs. My family has 100% European roots.  Though my parents proudly admitted that they were born in Argentina, they followed the international musical life much more [than the local one]. In 1999, I symbolically became Argentina's cultural ambassador, when my album Anhelo was released.

That's when I received two large boxes of sheet music and a letter from a publisher asking me to be the standard bearer of this extraordinary music.

Since then, I have been touring with the songs, singing them either with piano accompaniment or in my own arrangement with the participation of a chamber orchestra. When I recently asked the publisher in question to include these arrangements of mine in their catalog, they refused. So much for gratitude... But my musical brothers, the composers, are not responsible for the do's and don'ts of the labels, so I will proudly sing these great works until the air runs out of my lungs!

How easy or difficult is it to get into the shoes of a character when you only sing one aria from a role at the concert?

This is the biggest challenge for a singer or an actor, and also the most brilliant feeling during his career. Transfiguration into a character would really be the essence of modern opera, not that the director processes his traumas by creating meaningless performances with the audience's money. Of course, it is not easy to become another person for the duration of a five-minute aria, if one does not have enough experience in the role as a whole to be able to highlight the right moment and convey the emotions associated with it.  And of course, not all arias need to be explored from a theatrical point of view in order to please the audience. If you sing the death of Otello, you have to experience everything the character goes through, but in Nessun dorma it is enough to hold the last note for a long time.

You mentioned your partner at the concert will be Polina Pasztircsák, with whom you have appeared on stage several times.

I think of Polina as a very dear colleague ever since we sang together in Otello at the Hungarian State Opera House in 2015. The spontaneously formed professional friendship that was established between us then has only become stronger since then. We presented my Te Deum together at the Enescu Festival, and last year she also sang at the Czech premiere of the piece, at the concert organized on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday. I hope that we can perform this composition of mine in Hungary soon. But I also conducted the performance in which Polina made her debut in the main role of Puccini's La rondine, and now we can go on stage together again at the VeszprémFest.

In your own compositions, you immerse yourself in very different musical worlds compared to the ones you are used to dealing with as a performer. For example, the Requiem does not follow the Italian tradition of the genre, which builds the piece on arias and ensembles. Do you think the options for a singer to be involved in as many different types of music as they want are too limited?

The more colorful you want to paint the canvas of your life, the bigger the palette your creativity needs. Of course, this doesn't mean that singing can't be enough if someone decides they don't want to expand their spectrum further, but it's surprising that

while in other art forms it is accepted for someone to specialize in several different activities, in classical music, versatility gives rise to suspicion even in the 21st century.

It took a few years for us to go from the reserved opinion that "Cura is a man who thinks he has to try everything" to the point where they say: "Cura can do everything, he is the Da Vinci of our time." But I'm not complaining, I have myself to thank for that. I just sometimes wonder how much talent we can lose because of social constraints. A very topical question is what mechanisms control us in almost all areas of life.

You are known to deal a lot with social issues such as poverty or migration. How do you think art can make the world a better place, and what do famous artists need to do in addition to practicing their profession?

People pay more attention to a celebrity—we can call them "influencers" using a fashionable term. Therefore, it carries a lot of responsibility when that person says or does something, and he can use his influence to sell garbage or to plant an idea in the collective consciousness, which then starts a whole avalanche of consequences.

The result can be positive or negative depending on one's moral compass.