Bravo Cura

Celebrating José Cura--Singer, Conductor, Director

Concerts

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Early Concerts: 1996 - 1999

1996

The young Argentinean José Cura has been hailed as the successor to Pavarotti, Domingo, and other great singers, but he’s keeping his head about it all, as Arminta Wallace found when she met him at Covent Garden.

The Next Great Tenor

Arminta Wallace

The Irish Times,

2 May1996

We’ve heard it before, haven’t we? The new Pavarotti. The new Domingo. The best thing since Caruso. The greatest thing since sliced bread. Every so often a tenor nobody has ever heard of materializes out of nowhere, glows, twinkles, lights up the operatic skies. Some last, some don’t. Most can’t seem to stand the heat generated by their own burst of stardom.

But one who has cooly been making progress over the past three years in the young Argentinian tenor José Cura. Though he has just received—for his performance as the eponymous hero in Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden—yet another batch of red-hot reviews, Cura is all too aware of the possibility of burn-out, and has decided it’ not for him.

“There’s a lot of noise around me and around my ‘great promise’ and blah, blah, blah,” he says, unceremoniously. “Of course I like this and am flattered about it—you would not be an artist if you don’t have some vanity—but I don’t want to precipitate anything.

“I want to learn my job, to be myself, to show everybody what I can give—and what I cannot give. There are two ways to arrive at the top of the hill. You can be put there by helicopter, and whoosh! The first wind that comes along whips you down. Or you can arrive at the top by yourself, making muscles as you go along, so that when you get there you are strong. That doesn’t mean you are invulnerable, but at least you are stronger.”

Strength, strangely enough, is one of the onstage qualities most often attributed to José Cura by the critics: strong voice, strong personality, strong physique. In person it is equally apt. He bestrides the lunch-time rush-hour at Covent Garden’s frazzled stage door like a Colossus, appearing precisely on time, radiating warmth and charm, answering questions with a laid-back ease which belies the fact that he is squeezing an interview into an already crowded rehearsal schedule.

Yet it is something of a miracle at all that José Cura every ended up on an opera stage at all. Born into a musical family in Rosario, he started taking piano lessons when he was seven, only to be told by his teacher that he had no talent and give up the instrument. He switched to classical guitar, but didn’t make much headway with that either. At which point most people would probably dust off the stamp collection; instead, he took up conducting. Conducting? He smiles a mischievous smile, shrugs a graceful Latin shrug.

“I made my debut as a conductor when I was 15. It was a good occasion, an open-air concert in Rosario. I was just a musician—it was normal and spontaneous to be organizing the show. I didn’t think about it. I just did it and I enjoyed it. Then I began thinking maybe I’d like to be a professional musician, so I started to study composition and conducting seriously at the conservatoire.

Through his involvement with choral conducting Cura was encouraged to take up vocal studies and won a scholarship to study singing at the School of Arts at the prestigious Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Was that the beginning of a prestigious solo career? Was it heck. Incorrect teaching damaged his voice and he was forced, yet again, to change tack. If he were to harbor murderous intentions toward the wretched teach it would be understandable, but he writes the experience off as something of an occupational hazard.

“Ninety-nine percent of singers have problems with this,” he says, with another of those “what’s to be done” shrugs. The he grins broadly, fiddles with the lace of his right sneaker, which is balanced on his left knee as he on the sofa of conductor’s room at Covent Garden, and delivers one of the drily iconic broadsides which occasionally emerge, with unexpected force, from his charmingly-accented English.

“There are a lot of…smoksellers—I don’t know the word in English—bullshit-sellers perhaps. All over the world who say they are singing teachers.”

Back in Argentina he persevered with his choir and eventually, in 1988, his moment came. He was due to conduct an opera gala; the tenor cancelled at short notice; Cura stepped in and the rest, so far, has been happy ever after. His stage debut in Verona in 1992 was swiftly followed by dates of increasingly glamorous hue: Nabucco in Genoa with Ghena Dimitrova and Leo Nucci, La force del destino with Aprile Millo, Tosca at the Puccini festival in Torre del Lago, another Nabucco at the Bastille in Paris—and, of course, the roles which have endeared him to the British opera-going public, the title role in Verdi’s Stiffelio and Samson in Saint-Saens’ biblical epic. In the middle of that, he won the Placido Domino competition, Operalia, in 1994.

It has been, on the whole, a very focused career, perhaps because he knew which roles would suit him pretty much from the beginning. “Verdi and Puccini,” he says without hesitation. “Dramatic roles, not only in the sense of quantity of sound, because everybody thinks ‘ah, dramatic is a shout’ but it’s to do with the intensity of the roles, the intensity of the roles, the intensity of the opera. I need to be intense on stage. There’s no point in putting me there just to sing beautiful notes. I can’t. I get absolutely bored—so that’s why I try to refuse operas where I cannot really act, suffer on stage, cry if I have to cry.

All those piano lessons paid off, too, for he can study new roles by himself—which, he says, represents not only a huge saving of time and money but also gives him greater freedom of interpretation.

“It’s a good thing for me because I’m really the owner of my character—I create it myself. You can like it or not like it, you might not agree with it, but you can never say I’m copying or picking things from other people. I’m just being myself.”

It’s an approach he admits is ‘difficult and dangerous” but it has won him both critical and popular acclaim. This he modestly attributes to the fact that he gives himself totally to the performance.

“I go out and give my best on stage, and I think the people can feel that—like any human being. I make mistakes here and there. But you never see me on stage not really giving myself. That’s why people react to my performances.”

There was certainly plenty of reaction when, in his recent run of Covent Garden performances as Samson, Cura brought the house down—literally—going at the temple in a manner reminiscent, according to one critic, of Sylvester Stallone and, at another point, revealing rather more of his manly flanks than the designer of the skimpy slave costume intended. Many a tenor’s dignity would be affronted by the mere mention of the incident, but Cura bubbles over with laughter.

“I love doing Samson,” he says. “Somebody said here there never saw a leading tenor take so many risks as I did, because I kicked and fought, pulled everything down. They’re still talking about my legs and my ass. But I didn’t show my ass on purpose—it was natural. I mean, if you’re a slave and you’re being tortured, you’re not going to worry about your outfit or wear black tie or something, are you?”

Singing at its Best in Puccini

Irish Times

John Allen

4 May 1996

Argentine tenor Jose Cura, who appeared at the National Concert Hall on Thursday night in a Barra O Tuama concert sponsored by New Ireland Assurance, is a young singer whose international fame is spreading rapidly.

He is a big man, with a charismatic presence and an intrinsically exciting instrument, replete with clarion top notes. But, on the evidence of this hearing, he is suspect in matters of pitch and rhythm and his sense of phrasing is nonexistent.

Further, his over the top histrionics, which ran the gamut from embarrassing to risible, were entirely out of place.

His best singing was heard in music by Puccini, particularly in arias from Manon Lescaut, Tosca and La fanciulla del west; but in the Act 1 finale from La bohème he was all over the place.

Virginia Kerr, who partnered him in the latter and in a duet from Aida, was a model of musical rectitude. In truth, she hasn't got the heft for Verdi's spin to heroines; but in concert, at least, she was quite splendid as the Ethiopian princess and as the Forza Leonora. In her own lyric category, she delighted with beautifully spun pieces from Tonnhouser, Rusalka and La Wally.

Covent Garden repetiteur Christopher McManus was the assured accompanist and Mark Armstrong's Dun Laoghaire Choral Society entertained with nicely balanced sound and good intonation without ever sounding like an opera chorus.

MUSICAL REPORTAGE

Irish Times

Margaret Moran

14 May 1996

Sir, I found the headline "Singing at its best in Puccini" for John Allen's review (May 4th) of Barra O'Tuama's opera gala concert (May 2nd) very misleading. It led me to believe that Mr Allen had enjoyed the concert as much as I and the audience at the National Concert Hall had. Not so! He was dissatisfied with Jose Cura's intonation and phrasing, but was more concerned with "his over the top histrionics, which ran the gamut from embarrassing to risible", and which Mr Allen deemed to be "entirely out of place. Mr Cura clearly knew the stories of the operas from which he was performing extracts, and conveyed in vocal expression as well as his actions the characters the composers had portrayed in their music. Indeed I felt that Mr Cura inspired Virginia Kerr, a singer I admire greatly, but who can be somewhat reserved in concert, to give a more relaxed and communicative performance, akin to her best work in the theatre. Occasional intonational flaws are a hazard of live performance, Mr Cura and many great and even many lesser artists are forgiven for the emotional responses their overall performance evokes.

I thought it was the policy of your newspaper that music critics not review encore items, as these are not part of the prepared and advertised programme, yet Mr Allen found that his “best singing was heard in music by Puccini, particularly in arias from Manon Lescaut, Tosca and La fanciulla del west." Your critic sat through a performance he evidently found inappropriately histrionic and unmusical in matters of phrasing and intonation and a very long ovation for Mr Cura and Ms Kerr from a satisfied audience to hear and review the aria from Manon Lescaut which Mr Cura sang as an encore? In the interests of balanced reporting, may I point out that he must therefore have seen, yet failed to mention, the standing ovation given the artists by the audience? This would never have happened in the days of Charles Acton, who, however much a performance was not to his personal taste, always noted that the audience differed from him in their appreciation, and never, to my knowledge, reviewed an encore, though I often saw him stay to listen to them.

Can you please explain is Mr Allen a victim of the editorial pen, or have standards of musical reportage fallen so badly?

Te Deum, Paris, 1996

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Chorus of Approval

Financial Review

Richard Synnott

17 May 1996

José Cura has had a sudden rise to fame, but many believe he is on the way to becoming one of the great tenors, writes Richard Synnott

José Cura is his name. Mark it well. He's the tenor star of the Puccini Spectacular playing Melbourne Park and the Sydney Entertainment Centre in the next few weeks. In London, he's the hottest new talent in town. Elsewhere he's not well known. In fact, so sudden has been his rise that so far he's made no recordings. In the next five to 10 years he may be well on the way to being one of the great voices of the next century.

José Cura is not the only attraction in the Spectacular. This compilation of highlights from four operas has three top Australian sopranos (Joan Carden as Tosca, Deborah Riedel as Mimi and Marilyn Richardson as Turandot) and a Japanese and a Chinese singer sharing the role of Butterfly. Inevitably, though, it's José Cura who will command most attention, if only because he sings the tenor lead in all four sets of excerpts and will hardly be off the stage.

In London the recent success of this 34-year-old Argentinian has been both popular and critical. The reviewers have acclaimed his heroic ringing tones, his passionate delivery, his sexy, charismatic presence. Tall and muscular (as a struggling young singer he worked for a while as a gym instructor) with a Latin intensity, he's apparently the ideal Romantic tenor. The chorus of approval has been loud but not quite unanimous: one critic discerned a tendency to shout, another called his voice "an acquired taste."

On the telephone from London this week, José Cura sounded quietly elated, but also rather humble, about all the good reviews and the full houses he's attracted recently at Covent Garden. When he first appeared there in early 1995, he was criticised in some reviews. "They are intelligent critics and I was able to improve some of the defects in my singing as a result of their comments."

To the inevitable question about whose voice his own resembles, he's extremely cautious. Placido Domingo, whose international singing contest Cura won in 1994, has mentioned that his voice reminds him sometimes of Gigli. Others have mentioned Corelli and Martinelli, and even Domingo himself. Cura takes the position that every voice is unique.

Underneath the diplomacy, there's a discernible passion to succeed. Before he won the Domingo contest in 1994, Cura spent some dispiriting years in Italy, enlivened only by his Italian debut in a new opera in Trieste. "They were going to cancel the production because they could not find a tenor who could sing such difficult music. I am a musician by training and it was possible for me," he says.

His training was unusually extensive for a singer. He studied at the conservatorium in his hometown of Rosario. His enthusiasm for opera was suddenly kindled in his late teens and he moved to Buenos Aires to train as a singer. Unhappy with the tuition there, he dropped out, married at 22 and scratched a precarious living as a conductor and occasional composer. Then at last he found a suitable teacher who tutored him gratis for three years.

Singing to audiences of 10 or 15 thousand is a new experience for José Cura. What does he think of the idea of performing in such vast spaces?

"To appreciate an opera it's generally better to be in a theatre because you're closer to the artists. But it depends on the quality - if you have a good quality show it can work for 15 thousand people. And that's useful because it finishes with this conception that opera is only for an elite. The point is not how many people you have in the audience but whether you can do it well. And now, thank God, with all the computers and techniques we have we can do it well. With a big video screen you can compensate for not being as close as you are in a theatre."

What about the sound? Isn't the loss of the pure, unamplified voice a big shortcoming? "Yes, that is a loss," he concedes. "To have a true impression of voice - its particular character, its colours - it needs to be unamplified. That's the price you pay for having a huge audience."

The Puccini Spectacular at Melbourne Park May 23 and 25 and Sydney Entertainment Centre June 5, 6 and 7, presented by the Victoria State Opera.

A Spectacle Bigger than Ben Hur

The Sydney Morning Herald

Peter McCallum

Friday, June 7, 1996

The Barbarini theatre, the first opera house in Rome built in 1632 JL (by the Pope), held more than 3,000 people. My guess is that about twice that number were at the Victoria State Opera's Puccini Spectacular on Wednesday.

Even so, it is worth remembering that contemporary stadium opera is no more than a continuation of the tradition of catering for large numbers of people in large spaces which has been with opera from its beginnings. Like the earliest operas, The Puccini Spectacular relies on spectacle, uses the latest technology to dazzle and impress and aims to create a special space in the imagination which transcends physical limitations. You don't usually see cars or fireworks on stage, so this production has them, not because cars and fireworks are The Puccini Spectacular, intrinsically interesting but simply because such a gesture gives an impression of limitless resources.

Those in the Entertainment Centre on Wednesday probably heard more than their counterparts in the Barbarini 350 years ago, thanks to modern electronics. The notion that even the most steely tenor (and Jose Cura is certainly that) can fill a space this large is illusion, not reality. The fact that it happens (courtesy of an amplification system of quite acceptable qualify, with the exception of one or two level peaks) reminds us again that we are not in the real world but in a magic space where normal limits do not apply.

Used well, as it generally was here, the conquest of space is one of the most important new dramatic resources of stadium opera: when Marilyn Richardson as Turandot confronted José Cura as Calaf in “In questa reggia” from the second act of Turandot across an area the size of a football field with a hundred or so in attendance and their voices blend as though they were centimetres apart, a new means of generating dramatic excitement has been born.

The idea of casting Puccini (Dennis Olsen) as a reflective narrator looking over his life's work was a no-more-than-adequate device for linking together the most famous scenes from four of his operas. This was not due to any shortcoming of Olsen's but to the sometimes execrable words he was asked to say, self-indulgently wittering on about his eye for the girls, for example, after the great final scene of Madama Butterfly.

José Cura, in the four big tenor roles from La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot is a tenor in the grand manner: impressive, with a thrilling bloom to his voice in climactic moments, if not yet with the polish or spotless intonation (pace the opening of Bohème) to put him in Holy Trinity league (I also found the constant portamento slides up to every note in Tosca unnecessary in a voice of this quality). Still, this is an exciting voice to hear rattle round the few million cubic feet of the Entertainment Centre.

Deborah Riedel was a polished Mimi, Gillian Sullivan flamboyant if slightly less polished on top notes as Musetta. Joan Carden (Tosca) and John Wegner (Scarpia) carried the second act of Tosca convincingly and this scene, as well as the finale of Madama Butterfly, were two of the most dramatically engaging parts of the evening the fast-forward approach of cutting to the next good bit used here doesn't particularly help dramatic integrity. Chen Sue made a splendid opening as Butterfly, largely maintained, while Marilyn Richardson brought cogency, if not quite her best voice, to Turandot. Conductor Richard Divall was, as far as one could tell, hugely proficient in holding it all together (with a little help from closed-circuit television) while the dancers, VSO chorus, the children's choir, the WilIoughby City Band, the light show and all the flags, banners and gorgeous costumes created a brief moment of colour and radiance, as far removed from the unholy traffic jam outside as were the stalls of the Barbarini from the aging sewers of Rome.

One Tenor Leaves Fans on a High (Note)

The Age

John Elder

26 May 1996

[Excerpt]

The nicer people gather closer to the stage, like regulars at a pub watching a fight on the television. We are among them and going well, until an old woman turns around and makes to smack us on the knee. As she surveys our party, her forehead creases with sad surprise, her eyes slide from side to side in the dark. Can't blame her, really. We are at the opera, at The Puccini Spectacular, four rows from the orchestra at Melbourne Park.

There are 11,000 people here. They go all the way up to the giant No Smoking signs hanging from the ceiling. Down here, among women in coats they might have skinned out themselves, we can see the players in the pit. When things turn poignant on the revolving stage, we look at the musicians, at their faces gone warm from the bare bulbs that light their scores. The men playing cymbals have clipped mustaches. My companions have noticed that a blonde violinist is in dire strife with her split skirt. It's as I crane to see for myself that the old dear turns around with her shaking hand. We have revealed ourselves as members of the cheaper set.

This is the opera for people like us.

This is for the people who went out and bought the Three Tenors and played it to their friends.

The Puccini Spectacular features the most passionate, the most colorful scenes from four of the Italian songster's most famous operas: Tosca, La Bohème, Madam Butterfly and Turandot. Tonight we get the fun parts of plays we'd be loath to sit through in their entirety. It's like 'The Sound of Music' without all the dreary dialogue.

There's nothing mysterious about opera. It is Melrose Place in Italian. But it goes for three hours. And it has an overwrought and overblown soundtrack that sometimes rises to moments of devastating beauty. The rest of the time it grates against dragging scenes of people murmuring at each other in whispers that come out like song.

We're here for the hits, Puccini's greatest. The big songs used on coffee and airline commercials. The marvelous arias with names you can't pronounce. Melodies you destroy in the shower. We want to see the dark moments of love on the stone table and the bare floor. We want the scuffles, the knife play, the falling on the sword, the big parades with a marching brass-band and people waving flags and spooky lanterns. And we want fireworks. Mostly, we want the gut-busting wall from the heart, the sustained shriek that can drill a denture. And we want to start clapping before the music stops without having to consider the etiquette of such enthusiasm.

We're getting it now. José Cura is lying on the floor in leather pants, his arms stretched behind him and seemingly tied to the bars of a bed or a jail cell. ... He is singing 'Nessun Dorma'; the song featured in New Zealand tourism commercials; the tune Pavarotti delivers with a wet hankie and a black suit jacket snug at the bellybutton.

With his legs splayed out and spent, Cura howls at the ceiling. The people sitting up there can at last see his face. A handsome face from Argentina, he once worked as a gym instructor. When Cura gets to his feet and hits the long high note, searchlights travel over the crowd. I'm surprised no one whips out their cigarette lighter and holds it in the air aflame.

Instead the tenor drops to one knee. We clap for such a long time his legs go to sleep. We whisper to our neighbors, and wonder if he might do it again. But, hush. The old lady is turning her head.

Right now, Glacomo Puccini (Dennis Olsen) is striding the stage, telling us of his women troubles. He wishes that the women in his life had been like those in his operas. The guy is a nut.

One of his heroines keeps dropping things until she herself drops with lungs full of fluid (Mimi from La Bohème, sung by Deborah Riedel). Another is a nag aglow with jealousy (Tosca, Joan Carden). The third is an abandoned single mother who ends it all with cutlery (Madam Butterfly, Shinobu Satoh). The fourth is a princess whose riddles get a man executed (Turandot, Marilyn, Richardson).

Cura, who is regarded as the next big thing among big-throated men, takes the lead in all four segments. During the interval I overhear a man telling his friend that Cura hates opera. "I read that he gets bored sitting through a whole show," he says. His friend orders a paper plate of potato wedges and says: “Well, yeah."

Nearby, is a man with a pony-tail, made perhaps from the hair that has fallen from the front of his head. His wife and her mother are giving him hell. They are wearing matching purple scarves and glum lips. He suddenly gets an idea and says: "What about cakes? They've got some nice cakes." They shake their heads. He goes off anyway, anywhere.

I ask the women if they like their opera trimmed and glittery. The older woman raises herself up and says: "This is a bit of fun." Her eyes glaze over as her son-in-law returns humming the roller-door song from Carmen.

"The Puccini Spectacular" – 1996

“This show is among the best souvenirs of my early years. It was great and it really needed all the stamina the young me could put on stage: 4 operas (cut in a way that they would make sense even if shortened), 4 different casts in all characters, apart from the tenor lead --- I remember having been double dressed --- Cavaradossi under, and Rodolfo on top. So, after Bohème there was a sort of 1 minute black out, and when lights went on, there was Mario, singing “Recondita armonia” --- Almost a Copperfield kind of thing ---:-) 3 hours on stage nonstop!” José Cura, 25 August 2014

Puccini Spectacular, Sydney and Melbourne, May 1996: ‘We were given a lot of Puccini and it was a lot of work for one tenor. By popular acclaim the night belonged to José Cura, the audience roaring its approval of the personable young tenor at the curtain calls. He is highly impressive in straight-from-the-shoulder passages. The powerful timbre and vigorous delivery in such sections tends to outshine his equally effective interpretations of E lucevan le stelle and ardent, non-hysterical Nessun dorma.’ The Age, May 1996

1997

Concert in honor of Franco Corello

Vienna

December 1997

Come un bel di di maggio

Andrea Chénier

Du bist meine sonne

Giuditta

London Opera Gala, November 1997

A Subdued Artists' Procession: Opera Gala

The Times

John Higgins

18 November 1997

[Excerpts]

Improvision was in the air on the opening night of the Royal Opera's short stay at the Albert Hall. Nights of Stars was re-billed as A Gala Evening of opera, which was just as well because not all the artists originally announced were present.

The young Italian tenor, Fabio Armiliato, due to make his company debut, was a last-minute cancellation. Fortunately, Jose Cura, already well-established on the international opera circuit, was on hand and prepared to add to the number of arias he was already scheduled to sing. Appropriately, he took over Andrea Chénier's "Improvviso" and in Giordano's opera provided the most stirring singing of the evening. Cura, bold in his vocal attack and ready to flood the music with emotion, is a natural in this part.

He was also the star, carrying the personality and the volume to take on the wastes of the Albert Hall. He got the proceedings off to a fine start with "Cielo e mar" from Giaconda and closed them in equally ringing style with "Tu qui, Santuzza," from Cavalleria. In the latter he was joined by Agnes Baltsa,

The evening lacked structure. The procession of artists each doing their piece before existing was the musical equivalent of fashion parade. Sometimes the clothes fitted and sometimes they did not. Luckily, Cura was at hand to raise the temperature at intervals.

Concert, Cork, 1997

Ireland says Olé to José

The Examiner

Declan Hassett

1 March 1997

[Except]

Dublin heard him first last year and fell at his feet. Now the most exciting dramatic tenor on the world stage is returning to Ireland next month for a three-city tour to Limerick, Cork and Dublin.

The athletically handsome Argentinean, with those smoldering good looks, is not just a pretty face but possesses one of the most exciting tenor voices I have heard in a lifetime of attending stage performances. The scene in the National Concert Hall last May had to be experienced to get some idea of the magnetism of this sprint champion amongst the Sumo-wrestlers of the top operatic world.

His appearance in Dublin was made possible when New Ireland backed Barra O Tuama's efforts to bring him here. The Cork-based concert promoter wanted Irish audiences to hear the man before he became too busy on the world circuit. Cura sings in Limerick University Hall on April 3; City Hall, Cork, on April 3; and NCH Dublin on April 9.

Cura casts aside the traditional constraints of conventional concert opera.

It is not every day that a performer will heighten the impact of his performance by throwing a chair across the stage or hold a final note as he leans backwards on his haunches, having fallen to his knees for 'E lucevan le stelle' from Tosca.

[...]

The man is in constant demand by the great venues of the world and after his La Scala appearances in January, he sang in Fedora in Vienna. After Ireland he will sing Otello in Turin.

He is compared to the great Franco Corelli and the London Evening Standard found José more exciting than Domingo ...

1998

1998 Opera Gala

Starring the famous tenor Jose Cura and soprano Daniela Dessi, the Gala took place in London's historic Guildhall with the Countess Mounbatten of Burma as Guest of Honour. Almost 600 guests attended the pre-concert champagne reception. The artists, who donated their services, were accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Alistair Dawes. A superb dinner by Anton Mosimann followed the performance, during which an auction conducted by 'Antiques Roadshow' expert Bunny Campioni rounded off an enchanted evening. The Gala, chaired by Miss Carina Hellemaa, was sponsored by Revlon and Warburg Dillon Read and raised £82,000 for Cancerkin.

Concert, Prague, 1998

The Tenor of the Next Century

Magazín Koktejl

Jaroslav Haidler

July – August 1998

The Argentinean tenor José Cura, currently living in Paris and considered to be the tenor of the next century, will appear at the International Music Festival Pontes, which takes place in the Municipal House in Prague on 27 and 30 August.

Jose Cura is very attentive to the quality of the accompanying orchestras. One of them is the Virtuosi di Praga orchestra, which accompanies him during last year’s tour of Germany. “We had five concerts together, and the orchestra was doing a real honour to its name: Virtuosi," Cura said. Thanks to that musical harmony, Viruosi di Praga will accompany this supernova not only in Prague but also at other concerts. Listeners will hear songs by Argentine composers, nine arias from the world repertoire and several of Cura’s own works. During his four-year campaign through the opera houses of the world, Cura has performed 25 operas. Many of them will be repeated on stage as the tenor has appeared to master them….

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

Concert, Graz, 1998

The Fascination of a Powerful Late Starter

If we talk about the new world stars of song, it goes without saying that today the name José Cura comes into play. This Sunday he will sing arias and songs in Graz.

Der Standard

Wolfgang Schaufler

10 January 1998

Graz - "Maybe it was an artistic disaster," José Cura says of his opera debut, in which he sang an aria in Rosario, Argentina's second-largest city, at age 19. "But I still had a great success, probably because of my physical presence, my temper." These undeniable advantages complete a very well-educated, mature voice so it’s no coincidence that the name of the Argentinean is constantly coming up alongside Roberto Alagna in the search for new dramatic tenors.

Alagna and Cura are both in their mid-thirties. The fact that Cura still has the aura of freshness has initially to do with the fact that his career is at least five years younger but the two hopefuls are fundamentally different. Cura is the prototype of a Latin American macho. His body is characterized by all the features of regular fitness workouts. And there is also that courteous friendliness…

Robust trumpet

Cura is smart enough to know that we have all been waiting for someone like him. His trumpet-like high notes corresponds in substance to his gigantic appearance. It is robust, but also has the necessary flexibility. Sometimes his timbre sounds slightly metallic. But you can also call this a force of impact.

In addition, Cura, who sometimes composes or picks up the baton, understands his arias in their musical entirety. Thus, he does not celebrate them like incessant rags, but organically integrates them into the dramaturgical arc of an act. It is this musicality that ensured this artist a carte blanche at the Vienna State Opera. Whenever he wants to sing there, he will be welcome.

The image of the lighthearted beau on stage, to which everything (including the worship of lots of groupies) almost effortlessly floats, presses itself but that is only half the truth. Behind the success is bone-hard work, the overcoming of full-blown crises.

At the age of 22, his voice was "completely out of control," Cura says, "I was like a hot-blooded horse, always nervous on my feet, despairing of myself, not enjoying my performance, and it's very difficult to find a good teacher who responds to my individual needs.”

That delayed the start of the career but also had something good. "It takes," says Cura, "usually ten years, until something semi-interesting develops out of a pianist or singer. The big difference between me and my colleagues is that I was very well prepared when I put my nose into international music business."

After initial successes in Buenos Aires, Cura first went to Italy for three years, where Vittorio Terranova ("the Italian Alfredo Kraus") gave him the final touch. Then he literally exploded into the music business, which at once had too narrow limits: "My solo appearances are more shows, not ordinary recitals. If I feel like it, I accompany myself on the guitar, sing a Beatles song. It's amazing how well the audience reacts. "

If he builds his career so close to the popular stream, then can the move to a successor ensemble of the "3 Tenors" be far off? Cura shakes his. "Just yesterday managers were with me. You cannot imagine the sums of money they offered but I do not want to do that. I want to go my way." He will not reveal which colleagues were in conversation.

In earnestness Cura also explains he does not deny the modern age. You can talk to him in great detail about Penderecki but on the other hand, if the conversation turns to Bach's fugues, he can also show his knowledge.

Cura’s weakness is his still relatively small repertoire. Although he claims to have 30 roles available, he has achieved his triumphs with only a handful of roles (Chénier, Radames, Don José, Des Grieux). His musical intelligence will soon make up for this deficiency.

Cura will give a recital on Sunday in the Graz Stephaniensaal. This is a rendezvous with his past. In 1992, the as yet unknown Cura participated in the Tagliavini Competition. Now he returns as a world star.

Concert, Dublin, 1998

Concert, Dublin, 1996: José Cura at the National Concert Hall (May 2nd) will remain in my memory as one of the greatest concert performances ever seen in this country. The Irish Times Letters, 15 May 1996

HOT OPERA

Irish Times

Sat, Feb 28, 1998, 00:00

Paris in the spring is not, I muse - as I crunch my way carefully up the frozen-solid steps of the Bastille metro station, along the side of the opera house and around the intermittently slippy place to the offices of Erato records on the rue des Tournelles - quite what you might expect. Behind the somewhat grim, stone facade of Numero 50, however, all is sweetness and bright-green minimalist steel-and-glass light. And when Erato's superstar tenor materialises in the foyer at the appointed hour, a warm Latin whirlwind dissolves the last, lingering hints of ice from the morning. "My God," exclaims Jose Cura, surveying The Irish Times's ankle-length overcoat and fur hat before clasping the whole lot to his bosom in an embrace worthy of the last act of La Boheme, "you're very black . . . "

Ok, OK, I just put that bit in to make you all jealous. Because with a best-selling CD in the classical charts, his name on the cast list of some of the most prestigious shows around and his face on the cover of just about every music magazine you pick up, Cura is one of the hottest properties on the contemporary opera scene. He has been thrice blessed: with a voice that is both powerful and heartstoppingly beautiful; with Hollywood heart-throb looks allied to a sure instinct for the dramatic; with - and this, ultimately, is the most telling - a keen musical intelligence rooted in a solid training as a conductor and composer. No doubt about it. On a tenor scale of one to 10, Jose Cura is the full monty.

He is, at 35, approaching the pinnacle of his vocal powers. But he is also approaching the fearsome chasm that exists between "promising young singer" and "successful mature artist" - which is where the intelligence comes in. Take the make-or-break role of Otello in Verdi's setting of the Shakespeare tragedy, for instance. All aspiring dramatic tenors are expected to master it, yet it is commonly regarded as a killer for the voice, turning crooners into croakers faster than you can say "Hey, Desdemona . . . " Cura sang his first Otello with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic last year, to considerable acclaim, but he shrugs off the suggestion that it's a dangerous role.

"That's a cliche," he says. "A cliche that was born during and after the creation of Otello by Mario del Monaco. He created that character in verismo style, a Pagliacci and Cavalleria style - OK, that was his Otello, but it doesn't mean Otello is like that. And if you forget del Monaco and go to the singers who sang the role before him, you'll understand that the del Monaco interpretation is an item in the middle of the story, but is not the only possibility. Otello is bel canto - it's Verdi, not Leoncavallo. Dramatic bel canto, of course, but still bel canto.

"And if you read the character in the Shakespeare key, then you realise that the drama shows him not as he used to be - a warrior, a hero - but in the last 24 hours of his life, as he is going to pieces. Then Otello is no longer a shouting role. If you interpret Otello in the key of Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles and you put that reading together with music, then you have a new Otello and the role is no longer dangerous. It's difficult, but not dangerous. After having sung Aida, or Forza Del Destino, or Samson And Delilah, I must say that Otello is not - vocally speaking - more or less difficult for me than those operas. "Dramatically, though - well, if you take the role of Radames in Aida, if you just stand there and sing Radames nobody will be upset: it's OK; it's enough. But with Otello you have to create a character; so the difficulty of Otello is to be mature enough, or intelligent enough, or good enough, put it whatever way you want, to create that character. And usually this ability is associated with 20 or 25 years of career. Nobody thinks that you can have this maturity or capacity for analysis when you are young."

Both Cura's penchant for doing the unexpected and his ability to think himself right inside a character are shown to perfection on his debut CD, a comprehensive collection of Puccini arias. It was a courageous departure from the usual tenor debut - a dash of this, a sprinkling of that and a few lollipops to finish - and it has been wildly successful, winning ecstatic reviews and selling in excess of 90,000 copies worldwide, an unprecedented number for a first album from a relatively untried artist. He agrees, gleefully, that it was an ambitious and potentially suicidal idea. "If you put 21 pieces by the same composer on the same recording, it can get boring after the second or third piece. And everybody was worried about it, I must say, because it was also the first time in the history of recording that the same tenor recorded all the Puccini songs at once."

So was it difficult to persuade the record company to take it on? "No. It was simple. I said: `There's a lot of material in the record market, and I don't want to put another piece of meat in the fridge'. So they took the risk. And now everybody is happy."

Including himself? He laughs, happily. "When you listen to my recording, it's not like a computer singing - I mean, when I listen to my recording, again and again and again, I hear mistakes here and mistakes there, and I think if I had to do that recording again tomorrow I'd do it completely different.

"But there's one thing that makes me happy all the time, and that's that it's alive - and that each character is comparable only to itself and not to the others. So Nessun Dorma is heroic, in a way; but it's also sad because the character is not heroic all the time. But anyway it's completely different to E Lucevan Le Stelle and that's completely different to Butterfly."

While we're on the subject of "and now for something completely different", how did he end up belting out a couple of duets with Sarah Brightman on her last album, Time To Say Goodbye? Far from having the grace to look abashed, he grins widely and offers the excuse that, coming a month before his Puccini recording, it gave him a chance to polish up his microphone technique. "No, the real background is that East-West Records saw one of my videos - a behind-the-scenes video made by the BBC while I was recording the programme for the Great Composers series. And they saw that I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and they said `this opera singer is cool - why don't we call him, to do this recording?' Because although they wanted a tenor, a `name', they couldn't have an old-style tenor singing an opera aria. "So they called me, and I asked them to send me the music and the arrangement, because I wanted to see if it was high-quality or not. I don't care whether it's classical music or pop music, if it's good. And I really enjoyed it. I love pop music. You know, when I was on the trip from my house to here this morning I was listening to a whole Sinatra recital and I was jumping and dancing in the car because the guy was just incredible. And I was just thinking, it's a pity I will never be able to listen to him live . . . anyway, I'd do a pop recording again tomorrow, as long as I could keep the high quality and not end up sounding cheap."

Recordings are a bit of a red herring, though, because Jose Cura is primarily a stage animal, and having just returned from a triumphant Aida in Tokyo, he is about to get his teeth into Carmen at the Bastille Opera. Later in the year he has Manon Lescaut at La Scala, Milan and Samson Et Dalila in Washington. And in the middle of all this, he comes to Dublin to sing in a gala concert with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Anissimov, at the RDS on March 14th. This will be his third visit to Dublin. How on earth does he manage to fit Ireland into his glittering schedule - more to the point, why does he? "When I was finishing my studies in 1991, 1992," he says, "my old teacher said to me, `OK, you have to have the theatres in the big cities where you're going to work almost exclusively. But never forget you have to have those places where you go for the pleasure of singing, because that is the only thing that will keep you humanly alive'. And that's why I keep returning to Ireland - because I love the feeling of singing in Ireland. You're singing for people who know that you love what you're doing. No matter if you're famous or not famous, if you sing well you will have your success in Ireland."

The programme for Dublin consists partly of numbers he has sung in Ireland before ("I was asked to sing them again so that people can hear them with orchestra") and partly of arias he has never performed in Ireland, such as the aria from La Forza Del Destino ("which, by the way, I haven't sung for four years, so you'll get the premiere of my `new' version of it!"); the overall aim, he says, is to keep the show moving. Which, as anyone who has seen Cura in concert before will readily attest, is something of an understatement, for his is the very antithesis of a "stand-and-deliver" delivery.

"Yes," he agrees, "it will be the old-style Cura show. Because my primary aim in opera, always, is to create theatre. Now at the end of the century you have cinema, you have video, you have computer images: and you have audiences who won't put up with some guy standing there" - he puts his hand on his heart, mock-tenor style - "singing".

Jose Cura will sing with the NSO, conducted by Alexander Anissimov, at the RDS on Saturday, March 14th. Tickets from HMV and usual outlets. He will sign autographs at HMV Grafton Street on Sunday, March 15th from 12.30-2 p.m.

Prinsengracht Concert

1998

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

Singing is Just One of Cura’s Many Talents

Volkskrant Art

24 August 1998

[Excerpts]

Canal festival. With amongst others José Cura and the Groot Omroepkoor conducted by Martin Wright among others. August 20-22. Various locations, Amsterdam.

Young talent and old houses, those are the two pillars on which the Amsterdam Canal Festival rests. For more than three days, the area south of the Westerkerk has been the scene of large and small-scale concerts and many unusual scenes. A conducting mayor, a top string quartet between the sliding doors, intimate recitals in the greenery of a hidden garden, and finally that crowd of fifteen thousand, crammed together on the small piece of canal in front of Hotel Pulitzer, breathlessly listening to the man who promises to become the first famous tenor of the twenty-first century.

[…]

Yet a really big personality makes the largest room small. The performance of the Argentinean tenor José Cura on the pontoons at Hotel Pulitzer was the undisputed highlight of the festival and possibly even of seventeen years of Prinsengracht concerts. The 35-year-old Cura is not only in possession of a golden set of vocal cords, with a flexible timbre that has the same intense warmth from low to high, but also has many other talents. He composes, arranges and conducts, plays the guitar with quality, and above all has a flawless sense of presentation.

Supported by a perfect sound reinforcement, he totally wrapped the audience around his finger. That started with the casual way in which Cura, dressed in a poncho, talked about the ten Argentinian songs connection to each other. Strictly speaking, the detailed explanation of the lyrics was not really necessary, because in his interpretation of each song, no matter how short, received its own color and character. That Cura accompanies himself on the guitar in one of those songs is of course heart-breaking. Pianist Giulio Laguzzi, a competent accompanist, faded somewhat into the shadows after that.

A heavy rain shower threatened to spoil the party but Cura responded decisively by singing “Singin’ in the rain.” Unfortunately, the program had to be shortened somewhat but the rain stopped at least in time for the direct television broadcast of the second half.

Also in this [second] part, with a series of fragments and arias from beloved Italian operas, Cura again managed something special. In a black velvet jacket, complete with cigar, he surges across the stage and beats the drum during the opening scene of Pagliacci. The Groot Omroepkoor, which plays an important role in this, is audibly carried away. This is no longer a concert; it’s opera. And this also applies to the drinking song from Cavalleria rusticana, in which Cura roams the space to hand out glasses of wine to the audience.

He had surprises in store right down to the encores. The guitar comes back when he announces he will sing the first song he could ever play. The audience sings along softly to “Yesterday,” and then later, more loudly, with “Aan de Amsterdamse grachten.” You could almost forget what it was really all about: those touchingly high notes in Puccini’s “Nessun dorma,” that inspired expression in Bernstein’s “Somewhere, that brilliant and—undoubtedly soon in the most literal sense—priceless voice.

Note: these two short videos use an older video format; we haven't had time to convert to MP4 but the files should display fine, especially if you are using a Microsoft based machine.

Click on each of the photos to watch a portion of the interview

There are so many fun moments from the Amsterdam concert but one of our favorite is the ending, in which José just vocalizes along to a lovely little number. It offers a showcase of the sound quality we love so much: rich, warm, penetrating, embracing: if a warm blanket on a cold night could be turned into sound, it would be very much like this voice.

It has been thirty years since this performance and time has brought changes to us all--but one thing remains constant: we still hear the essence of this remarkable sound whenever José sings. Still, it's nice to remember one of the first time we heard that extraordinary voice and fell in love.

Click on the photo to watch and listen....

Click for Singing in the Rain and Somewhere

Click for Yesterday

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

Instinct forces Cura on stage

For years he worried about his voice and he hated singing. Now tenor José Cura is mentioned in the same breath with Domingo, Carreras and Pavarotti by connoisseurs....

De Volkskrant

22 August 1998

[Excerpts]

“And there is where Pavarotti arrives,” comments a passerby with an imaginary microphone on the empty scene on the Prinsengracht. It will take another two days before the traditional music festival starts, which for the first time is embedded in a multi-day Grachtenfestival. There is nothing happening yet, however the space is already a little crowded.

In any case, the star of the Prinsengracht concert has long since arrived and is already in his hotel room, high and dry. And he isn't called Pavarotti. The star of the Prinsengracht concert is called Cura, José Cura. “Who?” you might ask. Cura, José Cura. Born on 5 December 1962 in Rosario, Argentina. Living just outside Paris. By profession a tenor, by vocation a composer, arranger and conductor. Has in recent years in various opera houses left such an impression that he is called "the fourth tenor”-after Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras. He sang in the Netherland once before, in 1996, in the Christmas matinee of Pagliacci by Leoncavallo. That cooperation went so well that Chailly, Cura and the Concertgebouw Orchestra put the opera on CD for Decca. And in London this summer he is recording Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Delilah with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis; the CD should appear at the beginning of 1999.

Cura wants a lick of powder on his nose to take away the traces of fatigue before any pictures are taken. He would also like a first look at the photos used in the publication. Such goes the vanity of the man—to all expectations—who is the next mega superstar. He is a willing talker, even with the South American radio station that has called him live from Amsterdam for a broadcast. “Ola,” calls out amiably on the phone. "Un momento por favor.” Five interviews in one day is a piece of cake. Fourteen is his record.

He studied composition at the Conservatory in Rosario. “I loved symphonic music,” he says. So when the conductor of the school choir, whose assistant he was, advised him to undertake serious vocal studies, Cura did not immediately welcome the idea with enthusiasm. It would do him good, insisted the teacher. He would, moreover, be a better a better composer and conductor. Cura was 19 years old. For seven years he worried about his voice, kept at it but hated singing. “I was crazy about it.” Then he finally found a suitable teacher and his voice.

In 1991 he moved to Verona for further study. And in the fall of 1994, he won the Operalia international opera competition to which Plácido Domingo had connected his name. Cura’s career developed through lines of gradualism, he says. Whoever thinks he appeared overnight has it wrong: he has been on stage since the age of 12. Cura always knew what he wanted; he had to be on stage. That urge is almost “instinctive, like a racehorse that must run. It's in my blood.” Sit back or listen attentively in a chair in a room while someone else speaks? He can barely tolerate it. “I want to own the stage.”

His career is a journey of discovery. While not a planner, he is thorough, he rehearses, he is steadily building a repertoire, and then suddenly he is able to surpass himself. Time and again he is amazed at what the human body can do, what his own voice is capable of. For example, he didn’t want to sing Aida, no way. It wasn’t interesting, he didn’t feel like it, he has still more excuses ready. What was really behind it? He was afraid. Cura was terrified of Aida because of that first aria, Celeste Aida. So what happened? On a good day, the singer found himself on his back on stage, lying, please note, on his back, while he threw out a pure high b-flat. “Suddenly, you do it! It is like in a sport. You think even harder, higher and farther but you cannot, it’s impossible, and then someone comes yet again and the world record is broken.”

His mother, in particular, raised him “culturally.” In the home she had Beethoven, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Bach on the radio. She loves books, paintings, beautiful things. Cura is grateful to her for that “eclectic” background. For him, it is natural to sing spirituals and jazz alongside Palestrina and Gesualdo and Beatles songs and French repertoire. Fauré is on the program tonight. Opera classics: a lot of Puccini. And Argentine “canciónes” from his just published CD, Anhelo. Cura not only sings tasteful songs of longing and desire on this album; he also set poems by Pablo Neruda to music, wrote arrangements for and conducted the orchestra. Certainly after his success of his Puccini CD, it would have been very easy to produce more opera hits, but Cura didn’t want to do that. He had to make this record because he wanted to hear his roots—just as every German singer ultimately ends up with Schubert and Schumann. It is not folk music, he insists, but rather music of “historic compromise” by Argentines who have been schooled in the classic European tradition while maintaining its own,

For a showman like Cura, who lives for the “encounter” with the audience, it is not always easy to perform in a studio, he admits. But he has found a solution. He stands in front of the orchestra when he makes recordings, with his face toward the musicians. “It works very well. First there is shock and amazement, because there is someone who is standing there doing crazy things. But then what happens is quite beautiful: I sing for them and they play for me.”

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

José Cura with Flair at the Prinsengracht

Rain reduced program

NRC

Kasper Jansen

August 24, 1998

The Argentine tenor José Cura (35), the soloist Saturday night in the seventeenth Prinsengracht concert, is a versatile musician. He is a composer, arranger, conductor, guitarist and he is also widely regarded as the most promising tenor of our time.

In addition, he is a born actor with a flaming temperament, great theatrical sense, playful and relaxed with a lot of flair.

Cura was not satisfied with the applause for his first appearance: he wanted to start in silence and sing a cappella to the Argentine song Desde el fondo di tí. Then he reappeared, in a poncho and indeed in silence, casting his beautiful and dark-penetrating voice against the illuminated canals houses and the dark evening sky.

When it started to rain just before break, Cura replaced part of the program with the song I’m singing in the rain, joined by the thousands around the pontoons in the Prisengracht Canal.

After the break, when the weather was dry, he poured glasses of wine during the drinking song A casa, a casa amici from Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, and shared it with the mayor, choir members and the audience in the boats around the floating stage.

Before the break, Cura sang Argentine repertoire with persuasiveness, songs that also appear on his new CD Anhelo. Songs from Fauré, Tosti and Respighi unfortunately disappeared from the program due to the rain.

Then Cura sang opera. The first scene and Vesti la giubba from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci were a reminder of his Dutch debut in 1996, when he performed as Canio in Pagliacci at the Christmas Concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Cura could not, however, repeat the very same intense impression (as in the Concertgebouw concert) in spite of his highly variable and colorful voice—such a varied concert as the Prisengracht requires informality.

That was also true for Recondita armonia from Tosca and Nessun dorma from Turandot, the end of the official program. But in Come un bel di maggio from Giordano's Andrea Chénier, Cura demonstrated an unexpectedly charming lyricism

Rome Recital

1998

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

Applause in Rome for José Cura

Clarins

24 March 1998

[Excerpts]

Cura tackled a varied repertoire that included works by Argentine composers including Guastavino, López Buchardo and María Elena Walsh.

With warm applause and comments of unanimous approval from the large audience, the Argentinean tenor José Cura, one of the most notable young figures of the current lyrical panorama, appeared on Sunday night at the Teatro Ghione in Rome.

Following the accolade from his triumph in the [singing] contest organized by the Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo in Mexico City, José Cura has been engaged in operatic recitals and first class performances with a repertoire that includes, among other great creations, Otello by Giuseppe Verdi and most of Giacomo Puccini's works. Cura tackled a very successful repertoire in his successful Roman performance, including works by Argentine composers such as Carlos Guastavino, Carlos López Buchardo and songs by María Elena Walsh, Neapolitan songs by Paolo Tosti and lyrical pieces by Ottorino Respighi and Gabriel Fauré. The second part of the concert, which, according to the Italian critics and the cables of the main agencies, seduced the audience and made many of those present delirious, was dedicated to opera arias. Standouts included “Un dí all azzurro spazio” from the first act of Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano, “Donna non vidi mai” from Manon Lescaut by Puccini, and especially “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci by Ruggiero Leoncavallo. The papers relate how Cura communicated with the enthusiastic audience to the point of translating into Italian the texts of several songs, especially those of Argentine origin, and also in his interpretation of Somewhere from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein. He had the audience in his pocket, in the graphic expression of one journalist, reporting on the enthusiasm of the fans. The performance by José Cura was triumphant, culminating in endless ovations.

A concert by Katia Ricciarelli with special guest star José Cura. We aren't sure exactly when the concert took place, but we think it was in Verona in 1999 in a celebration of Ricciarelli's 30 years as a performer.

1999

Dalhala Concert

1999

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

Standing Ovation for José Cura

Corren

Hans Wennering

14 June 1999

Gala concert with tenor José Cura and Philharmonia Orchestra from London.

Conductor / soloist José Cura. Location Dalhalla, Rättvik.

“Tosca’s Prayer” bounced perfectly between the rock walls of the old limestone quarry north of Rättvik when the energetic [soprano] Margareta Dellefors took voice one day in the early 1990s and the prayer was heard by both higher and lower powers. There she decided to create a party venue—it became “Dalhalla.” On 11 June 1999 another voice sounded between the walls, when a world famous tenor visited Sweden for a single concert.

The atmosphere is established from the beginning, when Cura sang without accompaniment, in front of the expectant crowd, after making an effective entrance in the bow of a leaf-lined boat. It slowly slid through the water surrounding the stage, and the singer was helped to the stage by officials dressed in Dalarna’s typical folk costumes.

Universal Talent

José Cura is something of a universal musical talent—he has worked as a choir conductor, plays guitar and piano, he composes.

He also works with great musical intelligence as an orchestra conductor, and as such he performed at this concert while singing one aria after the other.

His position in the middle of the orchestra allowed for eye contact and connection between the singer and the orchestra musicians, which is unique and allows the musicians to breathe with the same rhythm as Cura. His voice became an instrument among the instrument, and the noblest of them.

José Cura has a resiliently powerful and beautifully dark-colored tenor, accuracy in phrasing and excellent evenness throughout the register.

Precision

As so often, the opera tenor Cura had this evening as a well-playing partner, the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra. The precision of the strings was remarkable as was the apparent clarity of the winds. In addition, sharp percussionists add to the completely unique acoustics in Dalhalla.

[…]

Cura got a brilliant response from the musicians. They were excellently nuanced and skillfully followed every hint of tempo changes.

This was particularly striking in the overture to Verdi's La forza del destino. Cura has such a strong sense of the content of the music and its body that he may very well be regarded as one of our foremost conductors.

The drama grew

José Cura put together a program that does not from the beginning require everything from the audience. The tension and drama grew and after the break the audience was completely disarmed with the Puccini "Hai ben ragione" from Il tabarro, "Addio fiorito asil" from Madame Butterfly, Leoncavallo's "Vesti la giubba" from Pagliacci and finally Ponchielli’s "Cielo e mar!" from La Gioconda.

The 3,500 visitors gave Cura a standing ovations and the mood was high.

But the audience wouldn’t leave until Cura performed three extra numbers. The first was a light aria unknown to me. He then took out his guitar, sat on the stage edge and sang the Beatles "Yesterday" with warmth, to his own guitar accompaniment.

Then came the absolute highlight of the evening, Puccini's aria "Nessun dorma" from Turandot. Cura wielded his masterful voice with a deep, genuine feeling to the highest heights without sounding the slightest bit strained—here showed his intelligence and unique musicality.

José Cura then brought his right hand to his heart and waved happily to the audience, fully aware that he has made a thunderous success. He is a great artist with song and music as his tools.

Dublin Concert

1999

This Guy’s not just a Pretty Voice

Irish Independent

28 February 1999

[Excerpts]

[…]

Musically, José Cura and Plácido Domingo have much in common; vocally, there is a clear baritone edge to their tenor voices and this is a useful asset in the more dramatic roles. Of the two, however, Cura is more ebullient and colorful off-stage and possess a more winning personality.

Cura will be only 27 in December next but inside the last five years his career has taken off astonishingly. I feel he arrived on that memorable night in Covent Garden when he sang Samson in the passionate Saint-Saëns ‘opera and the women in the capacity audience simply adored his performance and the romantic image he projected. He quickly followed this up with another compelling showing in Verdi’s moving opera Stiffelio.

He has already conquered La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, and other great houses in Europe and South America. However, he has bided his time about New York’s historic Metropolitan and, in this respect, one must say, rightly so. The management has not, it seems, offered him the type of role he seeks for his debut there. When it does, I’ve no doubt he will be the talk of the Big Apple. Cura’s dark and handsome looks, combined with a sensuous and flexible voice make him ideal casting for [roles like Otello, Don José, Des Grieux, Canio, Cavaradossi, or Alvaro in The Force of Destiny.

Watching José Cura in last year’s RDS concert, one was instantly struck by his charismatic stage presence and how he deftly handled the big audience. He quickly established a warm rapport with them, as he also did with the National Symphony Orchestra, and the result was an irresistible evening musically and vocally. Not for him the sedate stand-and-deliver style of vocalizing: he is quite capable of sitting casually on a chair in the middle of the stage and singing ‘Nessun dorma’ in typical full-blooded voice; or again reclining on his back and singing ‘Recondita armonia; with a seamless legato and surprisingly fine mezza voce.

In a word, he is a crowd favorite, a tenor who doesn’t spare himself. His achievements to date in the opera house are undeniably outstanding. Funny thing is, though, he didn’t start out his career with the ambition of being a singer. His aim was to be a conductor and composer and soon he was assistant to the choirmaster in the National University of his native Rosario. By the late Eighties he was still working as a musician, but at this stage he got interest in singing and by 1991 he was on his way to Milan.

Studying there with tenor Vittorio Terranova, Cura began to sing small roles in opera and by 1994, when he sang Alvaro in the Force of Destiny, he was being hailed as a remarkable talent. He was by now in demand throughout Europe and also sang at the Chicago Opera. Covent Garden audiences took him to their hearts, as did Parisian opera-goers.

Cura makes no secret of his affection for concert work and three years ago scored a spectacular success in this respect in both Melbourne and Sydney where he performed with 250 artists. For Irish opera lovers planning a visit to Arena di Verona, he will be singing Radames in Aida there this summer.

He’ll be partnered in the RDS gala concert on Saturday night, March 13, by Cara O’Sullivan and will be heard in arias from such works as Andrea Chenier, Traviata, Ernani, Don Carlo, and Tosca.

José Cura will sing in concert at the RDS on Saturday, March 13th .....

Fistful of Tenors

The Irish Times

6 March 1999

Arminta Wallace

A fistful of tenors: Who will be the next ‘big three’? As the Argentinian singer José Cura returns to Ireland for the third time, Arminta Wallace finds out who’s making the most noise in the international tenor stakes.

(excerpts)

Saturday night at the Bastille Opera in Paris, and it’s show time. Inside the concrete foyer the middle classes mill about, programmes in hand; outside, Japanese tourists wearing optimistic smiles and hand-written “Cherche Billets” signs brave the sharp air of late maximum chic, and the place is packed to the doors. For a visiting Paddy, the excitement is palpable-on the opera thermometer, a new production of Carmen at one of Europe’s major opera houses has to rate somewhere between “overheated” and “feverish”.

The moment the curtain rises, however, it becomes apparent that this production is never going to make it into the annals of theatre history. We peer in dismay as interminable chorus lines dressed in 40 shades of brown repeatedly skip back and forth across a dimly-lit stage. We fidget discreetly to keep ourselves awake, and are just beginning to long for a few mantillas and a red flounce or two when, mid-way through the second act, and miracle occurs. Carmen’s lover Don José, sung by the Argentinian tenor José Cura, has taken center stage to sing La Fleur Que Tu M’avais Jetee – which, thanks to the seamless beauty of its melody and its extraordinary pianissimo finish, has become a showpiece aria. The moment he begins to sing, a profound silence settles on the audience. All fidgeting ceases. By the time he reaches the final, anguished “je t’aime”, Carmen’s is probably the only dry eye in the house. It’s a miracle, all right – the miracle of a top class tenor in action.

A beautiful, effortlessly powerful voice; a lithe, panther-like grace on stage; a commitment to the part so total that when we go backstage to congratulate him on his performance, Cura -- though he is, as always, the epitome of hospitality and charm –- appears drained to the point of exhaustion. This is what it’s like at the top of the opera ladder. The rewards are great: so are the pitfalls. For every tenor who makes it to the top rung, dozens get stuck on the lower reaches, or fall off altogether.

But has Cura made it to the very top? And if so, is he alone there, of is there a plethora of pretenders to the tenor crown? Over the next few years, will we see the emergence of “a new three tenors” to replace the unholy trinity of Domingo, Carreras and Pavarotti, mostly retired from active service after long and stunningly successful careers – or is the whole idea just an outdated marketing notion which will be quietly allowed to drop by a new generation of intelligent, clued-in singers? Neil Dalrymple, and agent with the London-based Music International, has no hesitation in placing José Cura in the first rank of today’s tenors, along with the Sicilian-born Roberto Alagna and new boy on the block Marcelo Alvarez. Below those three, he says, there’s a major jump downwards to the next level, where he picks out the Americans Jerry Hadley and Richard Leech, a Canadian helden-tenor by the name of Richard Margison, and the Hispanic bel canto trio of Raman Vargas, Luis Lima and Tito Beltran.

[…]

The Latin American countries are also producing beautiful, well-trained voices. Cesar Hernandez, from Puerto Rico, looks a bit like Domingo and has that sort of sound, and Octavio Arevalo, a young Mexican who just sang Nemorino for us, will probably be singing at the Met next season.” Another company which has always prided itself on nurturing young voices is Welsh National opera. Isabel Murphy, director of opera planning at WNO, says her top three tenors would be the British tenor Ian Bostridge, Roberto Alagna and the Argentinian Marcelo Alvarez, who recorded his debut CD, Bel Canto, with WNO last year. “There are some very interesting young British tenors, too – people like Paul Charles Clarke who also sings at the Met and around Europe, or the Welsh singer Gwyn Hughes Jones. Another exciting British tenor to come on the scene is John Daszak, who is singing Peter Grimes in our new production, and has also been booked to do the role at La Scala in the year 2000.” Such is the perspective from the opera house. But what about when you walk into a record shop in search of tenors on disc? Alan Blyth, a specialist opera reviewer with Gramophone magazine, says José Cura would be his number one, followed by Roberto Alagna and Marcelo Alvarez.

“Cura is a very good Samson, as good as we’ve had for many years, and the performances on his Puccini Arias disc were very fine...”

[Jonathan Peter] Kenny is himself a tenor buff, with a considerable collection of historical recordings and a soft spot for Pavarotti. “He really is wonderful. Of course he’s such a megastar, he can’t really come on in an opera without playing the part of Pavarotti – But he’s still a great singer.

“I first went to see José Cura in Stiffelio at Covent Garden. It was fantastic. I’d never heard of him, but he reminded me at once of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi – it was the vibrato, I think, and also the baritonal sound which suddenly surprises you by being able to surge upwards. I like his singing very much – I think it’s very honest and open and from the heart. Even from his discs he comes across as a very sincere and truthful performer.”

“There are far more openings for tenors than for any other voice in the profession,” says Kenny. “There are fewer tenors around, and so there are lots of great roles. But it’s a dangerous profession, being a tenor. You have to sing in big theatres, before huge audiences, you have to make a big sound and project your voice all the time. You’ve got to produce the top notes. The money notes, they call them. But you’ve also got to be careful because if you spend all your money notes at the beginning of you career . . ."

It’s a sentence which hardly bears finishing.

How to Borrow a Tenor

The Irish Times

8 September 1998

Where would you go to get a good tenor? No further than the nearest phone, you might think; call up the agent, draw up the deal, and you're away. Except that good tenors are in such demand, and have their lives mapped out so far in advance, that no matter how nicely you ask you're likely to get a polite refusal. "You have to eyeball them," declares the Cork impresario Barra O Tuama, who has had extraordinary success in bringing worldclass singers to Ireland for his Opera Gala - Plus series over the past decade. "The agents will just give you the brush-off; you have to go and find your man, and sit him down, and look him in the eye. It's the only way."

And so it was that, last May, O Tuama began a trek around the opera houses of Europe in search of the singers he wanted for his 1988-99 season. He began in Bonn … […] Next stop Prague… […] Then it was on to Marseille to see the Argentinian tenor José Cura in La forza del destino. "And I must say, I shed tears of delight at the end. I was never at a performance like it. For half-an-hour afterwards the audience was stamping and jumping and screeching." How to follow such an experience? Well, with a visit to La Scala to see Cura in Manon Lescaut under the baton of Riccardo Muti, perhaps.

"It was my first time to attend a performance at La Scala - I've been trying to get tickets for many years - and it was a marvellous setting. The staging must have cost a fortune. In the third act, when the couple are parting, it was a scene like the Titanic on stage and Des Grieux ran up the ramp to say goodbye to Manon - it was an unforgettable scene. If you could reproduce that in concert . . .”

Not possible, alas, but Cura can be guaranteed to have a pretty good try when he returns to the RDS for a gala concert next March in the company of the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alistair Dawes, and guest soprano Cara O'Sullivan.

Over the years O Tuama has built up a personal rapport with his visiting soloists which has - mostly - survived the vagaries of tantrums, sore throats, prior commitments and prickly personalities. There was one tenor who, on being shown to his luxury hotel suite, whipped out a compass, declared that the bed was facing the wrong way and demanded a change of accommodation. "He was given a fairly robust farewell at the airport, and he'll never be back," says O Tuama grimly. "But as a general rule, artists are much more easygoing than people think. They all have strong personalities - they know what want, and they get it - but at the end of the day they're professionals; they have a job to do and they just want to get on with it."

Jose Cura/Cara O'Sullivan

The Irish Times

John Allen

16 March 1999

The arrival of José Cura has helped to offset the lack of top-class spinto tenors available to sing the Italian and French dramatic repertoire. But composers expect even dramatic tenors to enhance their performances with some tonal shading, and there was very little of that in evidence at the RDS on Saturday.

The Argentinian tenor's stentorian delivery served him best in verismo pieces: he declaimed Andrea Chenier's “Improvviso” with ringing ardour and went on to give exemplary performances of show-stoppers from Pagliacci, La fanciulla del West, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, all given with scrupulous attention to phrasing and without a hint of a gulp or sob. The bonus in this feast of macho tenor singing was a truly stunning account of “Nessun dorma” from Turandot.

He was less happy in Verdi, a composer who calls for rather more subtlety than Puccini, Giordano and company. […]

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

O MITO
DO TENOR VERDIANO

Alface Voadora

Ana Rocha

November 1999

Jose Cura will perform on November 20 at the Fundação Gulbenkian with a program of opera arias at a luxury party sponsored by Siemens for its 95th anniversary of this German company in Portugal.

Alface Voadora meet the Argentine José Cura at his hotel in Lisbon; he is a very communicative "divo," full of opinions about the world of opera, where he moves like a great master, a divine singer.

Ana Rocha: It had been announced on your calendar that last night you participated in a gigantic party dedicated to the centenary of the death of Verdi in Madrid’s Teatro Real. And yet today, Sunday, you are already in Lisbon to rehearse your concert!

José Cura – I had to cancel. Yesterday I was not in Madrid, where I live with my wife and children. I traveled to Bologna to deal with private matters.

AR: They often compare you to Plácido Domingo. Are you tired of this comparison?

JC: Great Artists should not need to shape their careers in the shadow of other great artists like Plácido Domingo, who is a legend. Let every artist quietly follow his path without this need to always compare oneself with others, which is not pleasant for me and for Plácido!

AR: How do you characterize your career already so full of successes and prestige for this world outside, an artist who is only 37 years old?

JC: I'm a rebel. This means that I am solely responsible for all the mistakes I have been making until now as a conductor and for all the defects as a tenor!

AR: And can you name one of these defects?

JC: I am forced to hide my faults to protect myself! But on the other hand, I am also one of those who admits that defects can become something that brings a touch of originality of the artist, may even be the personal mark of the artist, just as Cindy Crawford's mole is her trademark, something that is unique in the world! My personal brand is commitment. I am a singer committed to all projects undertaken!

AR: You have been asked to sing operas by Verdi, Puccini and the Italian repertoire of the nineteenth century. Do not you sing Mozart?

JC: If I sing some part of Mozart's operas, it will be as a baritone because Mozart's tenor roles are intended for slight tenor voices and this is not appropriate to my voice. However, I would love to conduct Mozart's "Requiem."

AR: Did you develop your maestro career to protect your future when you are tired and worn out?

JC: I have been conducting since the age of 14, when I began to study music in my hometown of Rosario, Argentina. So I've been a conductor for 23 years and I've been a singer since 1990 when, at the age of 27, I decided to launch into the operatic career. In fact, it is more satisfying to be a conductor than to be a singer, because the pleasure of a tenor is very unilateral and that of conductor is more global. But, as they pay me much better for my tenor quality than as condutor ...

AR: Do you sing in Argentina often?

JC: I sang "Otello" in 1999 at the legendary Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, which is closed because in my country there is no money to put the operatic theater to work. It is unfortunate!

AR: Is there a special tenor tradition in Buenos Aires? Are there European teachers responsible for the musical culture of Argentineans? Can you give some explanation that justifies the existence of good singers in Argentina?

JC: This real situation cannot be explained rationally. Luis Lima and Marcelo Álvarez are both Argentines from the city of Córdoba. I'm from the city of Rosario. I do not know the specific environment of the Buenos Aires conservatory. But Argentina has a good cultural environment, although there is no money to pay for opera singers.

AR: Throughout the month of December 2000, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, you will sing for the first time the role of Manrico of the opera Il trovatore by Verdi. Do you have any special notion of what it will be to interpret this tenor role for the first time in your career?

JC: I do not like this Verdi's opera very much. It does not seduce me and the role does not. For my taste, the libretto has some deficiencies, twists and turns that are largely completely unprepared. I have now begun rehearsals with maestro García Navarro and I am looking forward to seeing how he will solve certain scenes.

My "partners" of this Spanish production are the American soprano Michele Cryder in the role of Leonore and Mrs. Tarentieva, a singer who comes from the former Eastern European countries to sing the main one in the Trovadore, the role of the gypsy Azuçena. And to sing the role of Count in this cast is Carlo Guelfi.

AR: You were recently in Tel Aviv to sing Verdi.

JC: I never sang in Tel Aviv. I went to Baalbek, Lebanon, where I sang Puccini's Tosca and received a title. My father was Lebanese and I was awarded the title of "Knight" of Lebanon for life, an honorary citizen. I am the son of a Lebanese father and an Italian-Spanish mother.

AR: So you do not have Argentine blood in your veins!

JC: But the heart is all Argentinian!

Lisbon, November 1999

Private Concert for 95th Anniversary of Siemens in Portugal

Gala Concert - London

1999

All the Fun of the Fair

The Times

Geoff Brown

15 March 1999

[Excerpts]

He sings! He conducts! He's got Latin looks! He's the Fourth Tenor! This is perhaps how a fairground barker would advertise José Cura. In some respects, Thursday night's gala concert of operatic chunks belonged in a fairground, for not only did the strapping Argentine tenor, this great white hope, sing and conduct, be did both at the very same time.

Doomed heroes galore from Verdi, Puccini and company were paraded before the Festival Hall audience, bewailing their lot, hearts breaking, facing death in recitative and aria.

But instead of supporting the voice and emotion with the odd wrenching gesture or imploring stab, Cura's hands and arms were busy beating time to the players behind him.

Cura, to be sure, has every right to conduct. He is trained to do so; he is also a trained composer, with an oratorio, Ecce homo, simmering somewhere on the back burner. The singing began comparatively recently--his stage début was in 1992--though Cura's ringing voice, pin-up looks, leonine profile and CD releases have already whipped up a large fan following. It took only a few notes of Don Alvaro's Act III lament from the Force of Destiny for the man's magic to work: the tone clear as a bell, color-coded chocolate brown.

He is still a young tenor. Individual words throbbed with feeling: "Piango!" he cried in "Sento avvampar nell'anima" from Simon Boccanegra, a hand briefly clutching his throat, shading with all the rainbow's darker hues....the voice was mellifluous.

The Force of Destiny overture made it perfectly clear we were in safe hands. For "Vesti la giubba," from Pagliacci, Cura took great delight in drawing out the growl from the doub-basses at the end; an amusing stunt but nothing could match the Philharmonia's handling of the prelude to Puccini's Il Tabarro, soaked in the atmospherics of the Seine at night.

A promising voice, then.....

Interlude

William Cole

21 November 2013

Nowhere is support more important than for artists at the beginning of their careers, and as such [Ian] Rosenblatt has made a significant contribution to the world of opera through his founding and support of the Rosenblatt Recitals, a recital platform for emerging artists.

‘The Series started in 2000’, Rosenblatt says. ‘In 1999 I sponsored the tenor José Cura’s debut concert in London. It was a commercial sponsorship arrangement, but it dawned on me that apart from the odd “celebrity recital” there was no platform in London for opera singers to give concerts, unless they were lieder specialists. Helga Schmidt, who runs the opera house at Valencia, promoted the Cura concert; I got to know her and she helped me get the Recital Series going. We had a trial run at the Albert Hall in September 2000 with Cura and the baritone Carlos Álvarez, and the series kicked off properly in December 2000 at St John’s, Smith Square…’

Martina Franca (28 luglio 99) - Recital di Raina Kabaivanska e Josè Cura

The Rise of the Big Voice

Musicality, looks, charisma - and marketing. It's going to be hard to ignore José Cura.

The Independent

15 October 1999

There was an extraordinary scene at the end of the Puccini gala in Torre del Lago, the small Tuscan town on the edge of Lake Massaciuccoli. In the 3,000-seat open-air theatre, just metres from Puccini's summer villa, a scrum was going on. Hordes of middle-aged ladies were rushing to the stage, elbowing one another out the way and gasping to get a closer look at opera's latest pin-up.

The object of their excitement, the 6ft-tall former body builder, Kung Fu black belt and tenor José Cura, was pacing up and down like an oversexed tomcat, just centimetres out of their reach.

The man does exude a rare charisma. Throughout the concert he ambled around the stage as if he were rehearsing in his own living room and, at one point, he stopped to talk to a member of the audience. By the end there were shouts from all over as his admirers tried to engage him in conversation. And, more in keeping with cabaret artists than opera singers, he changed his jacket three times. In celebrity terms, this man is a natural.

Fortunately, he can also sing. His rich voice and impassioned acting style have broken hearts all over the world. Journalists have been unable to resist building him up as the successor to the Pavarotti-Domingo-Carreras triumvirate, baptising him "the fourth tenor", though Cura is resistant to such wanton comparisons. "They don't deserve to be compared with someone who is just starting to work and it's not fair for me to be put in a group of people who have been there for 30 years," he tells me. "If my profile is as high at 36 as Domingo's when he was 50 is not because I am doing three times as much work, but because whatever I do is automatically on the radio or the television. The media is constantly on the look-out for new talent."

But despite the praise heaped upon his singing, Cura feels that he is often unjustly attacked. Indeed, it is hard to get him off the subject of critics, particularly British ones. "They act like we are still living in the 19th century," he splutters. "They are conditioned by the idea that a tenor in a recital should be dressed like a penguin and standing close to the conductor at all times. When you break those rules you are committing blasphemy."

Some critics have also expressed a dislike for Cura's vanity, with particular reference to his alleged tendency to present only his left side to the camera. "It's so cheap!" he explodes. "I don't understand why to be an opera singer you have to be ugly and why to be a sex symbol you have to be an idiot. Why can't you look good and be an artist and an intellectual? Maybe it is because some of the people who write these things aren't very good looking."

Cura's marketing team have certainly seized upon his aesthetic qualities, recognising an opportunity to thrust opera in the faces of a wider audience. In the media he has been portrayed as the consummate Latin lover, complete with big biceps, puppy dog-eyes and a fiery temper. And, rather than the standard performance stills, his album sleeves depict him close up, his eyes all dewy and his head tilted forwards as if advertising some hair-rebuilding treatment.

Back at the concert, as the third jacket goes on, there are murmurings from the marketing executives that there is still work to be done on his wardrobe. "Yes, but we've managed to put an end to all the cardi's and ties," sighed one.

In his native Argentina, Cura studied classical guitar before training as a conductor. It was not until he started working as the music director for an opera group that he started to take his voice seriously. "Singing was just a hobby for me until then," he explains. "Everybody told me I was not good enough."

Then Cura won Plácido Domingo's singing competition in 1994. Now, at 36 - an infant in operatic terms - Cura's has already tackled Verdi's Otello and his first solo recital disc, a collection of Puccini arias conducted by Domingo, shifted 150,000 copies.

Now he is ready to go global. There are wall-to-wall Cura concerts for the next six months, his third solo album Verismo is out this week and, on Sunday, he features on the South Bank Show .

It took the 1990 World Cup to bring Pavarotti to the masses, but Cura has no plans for a sporting soundtrack. But there is an appearance on the National Lottery show planned, and he doesn't seem daunted by the prospect of climbing on the media merry-go-round.

"There is this enormous belief around the world that classical music is dead and I am trying to keep it alive," he says.

So how far will he go? Richard And Judy ? Blankety Blank ? "I will go up to the limit of quality. From the point where I feel that that starts to suffer, I will stop."

But despite his obvious desire to become the world's greatest tenor, Cura insists he remains a conductor at heart. "Technically," he says "I'm a composer and a conductor who has taken time out to sing. I will, hopefully, return to what is my real vocation."

Such humble interludes don't really wash for José Cura. The man is at his most interesting when singing his own praises and damning those detractors. Vain? Quite possibly. Charming? Utterly. But modesty would never have suited him.

Paris 1999

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

The 36-Year-Old Argentinean Tenor Is in Recital in Paris at the Théâtre Des Champs-Elysées

Classic

Eric Dahan

27 May 1999

Like their fellow painters, writers and rock artists, classical musicians are obsessed with the great models of the past. Without going so far as to talk about clones, it seems undeniable that Roberto Alagna thinks a lot about Pavarotti and Corelli when he sings. This does not detract from his expressive qualities and his charisma. The Argentinean José Cura, Don José in the resumption of Carmen in the Bastille a few months ago, would rather evoke Domingo, even Del Monaco. Who will complain about the fact that young vocalists who grew up in the pop of the 70s are trying to revive in their own way a popular lyrical tradition? Even if, in wanting to go too fast, some of them take the risk of too heavy roles, emission and attack defects, or notes with approximate accuracy.

Cura is a great enthusiast. From Tosca to La Bohème to Turandot, his first CD at Erato already had the look of balance. Despair, tenderness, gaiety, anger, "no emotion in the Puccini palette is foreign to me," it seemed to declare. This superlative ambition was not to everyone's taste. But a Samson et Dalila led by Colin Davis was unanimously acclaimed. Colossus hobbled by his chains, the macho endowed with a dark and rich timbre, a flamboyant high notes, but especially the very solid middle indispensable to the role, roared like the most beautiful of machines.

Born on December 5, 1962 in Rosario (Argentina), José Cura was first interested in the guitar. But, quickly, he traded Lennon for Gesualdo, with whom he learns composition and conducting. Holding a scholarship at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires, Cura swears by the symphonic and sacred repertoire, and opposes opera. His choral conductor only discovers his voice by chance exercise and encourages him to work on it. At age 24, it's a disaster. Badly prepared by a rough technique, the voice breaks. After two years of complete rest, he leaves for Milan, where Vittorio Terranova is put in charge of the rehabilitation. Cura may have written a Magnificat, a Stabat Mater and a Requiem under the influence of Janacek and Penderecki, but with the global triumph of Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti, it is time to introduce Carmen and Traviata to a new audience. "I never tried to copy models," Cura defends himself today, adding that he has fewer records than scores. If he learned 25 major roles in three years, it is because his training as a conductor allows him to work alone on the piano.

In 1992, he made his debut in Henze’s Pollicino in Verona, then with The Makropulos Affair. After the Operalia contest, he triumphed at Covent Garden. Meanwhile, Domingo directs Norma in Los Angeles for him, and the CD Puccini Arias (Erato). In Turin, directed by Abbado, Cura made a sensation [as Otello]: more suffering and internalized, his Otello owes more to Shakespeare and Orson Welles than to the verismo convention. Some are shocked at his murmured death, but Cura is formal: "Othello is dramatic bel canto."

For Cura, the modernization of the opera requires the return to tragedy. What does it matter then that some conductors are reluctant to see their tenor with his back to the public or belly down; the big ones like Abbado or Muti acquiesce: the man knows how to never let himself be covered by the orchestra. After his Don Jose, like a bull in the arena, Cura would like to try a "dramatic" reading of Werther, usually entrusted to lyrical or light tenors.

Cura now lives in Paris suburbs with wife and children since, having heard of the singer’s administrative difficulties in Italy, the Ministry of Culture sent him an official invitation to remind him that, unlike painting or sculpture of the past, opera exists only through the engagement of new generations to make it live. The voice of Cura may not be one of the ten greatest of the century but, for singing Puccini or Verdi, today, one would hardly be able to do without it.



Recondita armonia

Sun in the Voice

Les Echo

Michel Parouty

17 May 1999

Roberto Alagna, Maria Bayo, José Cura. A Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Argentinian: a nice month of May in Paris for lovers of singing.

[…]

It was at the Opéra Bastille in 1995 that Parisians were able to meet the Argentinean José Cura. In Nabucco, he played the role of Ismaele, and every appearance of this insignificant character was noticed. Once again this winter his Don José in Carmen caused a sensation. There is no need to see any rivalry between him and Alagna. Cura, who likes to compose and conducts orchestras, tackles larger roles, such as Saint-Saëns’ Samson, Turridu in Cavalleria rusticana, Canio in Pagliacci, and everything suggests, after an enthusiastic welcome in the role, that he will be the Verdian Otello of his generation. He has made Puccini, who is particularly suited to his valour and generous lyricism, his chosen composer, and it is to him (but also to Verdi, Ponchielli, Giordano) that he devotes part of his recital, accompanied by Garcia Navaro at the helm of the Orchestre National de France. The "Les Grandes Voix" series definitely bears its title well.

Rosario 1999

The Place that Changed Me

Argentina's charismatic tenor finally finds public acceptance after a sell-out concert back home in Rosario

by José Cura

Independent

17 October 1999

My home town, Rosario in Argentina, is the place that changed me the most, but not in the way that you might imagine. It was when I returned to my city to give a concert for the first time, after being away for many, many years. Last April I had the chance to sing in my city for the first time in my life.

This was something remarkable, not least because we exceeded our audience expectation of five to ten thousand and ended up with an audience of more than 40,000. The open-air concert was the largest ever held in my city and though we were expecting a "classical impact" we gained more attention than a pop concert.

When you leave your city because your people are not recognising who you are and what you are doing, to return years later as a success is the most emotional experience you can have. It gave me a sense that my roots are forever in Rosario and even though I had left I had not been forgotten.

If there's a moment, a place, an event or situation that put my life into a proper dimension again, it was this re-encounter with my home city.

I had left my Rosario back in 1983. I was 20 at the time and - as every young human being does - I was looking out to see what the hell I was going to do with my life. I moved to Buenos Aires and did all those "life- changing" things: I got married and had my first son. These are all enormously important but artistically speaking nothing happened until I went to Europe in 1991. After touring there for a few years my international career was starting to be big enough and important enough to make my fellow countrymen wake up. Only then could I go home again.

On returning I felt an immense sense of honour and anticipation rather than nerves. It was like being a chef who is asked to cook for their family. You're always happy to show eminent strangers and even friends how good you are in the kitchen, but when it comes to cooking for your mother it's another thing. It doesn't mean that you're not a good cook or that when you're in the kitchen you are nervous. It just means that when you have to demonstrate to your own people - to your family, to the people you love, to the people of your own country - that you are as good as everyone says, it's a critical moment. These are the people who know you, this is the guy that used to sell you your socks and your old family doctor or music teacher. Everybody knows your life from the very beginning and they know exactly who you are.

Just like your mother has the authority to tell you that "José, this piece of meat is no good", I felt that my countrymen could do the same when I returned to sing for them.

The applause at the hands of your family and your brothers is doubly important. It's not a question of artistic levels or hype anymore; it's a human question of being able to pass the test out in front of the people who knew you when you were nobody.

It was a very long month and in the run-up to the concert I visited my old school. My old teachers were still there and they suddenly treated me as if I were one of them.

I saw the pupils who were doing today what I used to do years ago and there was a real sense of completion. And then the surprise in the middle of the meeting to see five or six of my oldest school friends - people who I hadn't seen for 25 years. They all had their own story and when I asked after one man called Hector I was told that he'd died five years ago. I could suddenly see that, even being so young, life is passing and 25 years make a lot of difference.

When I played the concert in Rosario I invited all my old teachers onto the stage with me, because if I am what I am now it's as much to do with them as it is to do with myself.

José Cura (and his trip home to Rosario) was taped by British television for the Southbank show and appears regularly on arts networks around the world.

José Cura

Classic FM

The headline in the newspaper says it all. 'LA LO-CURA!' it shrieks in big black letters in a deliberate play on locura (the Spanish word for 'madness') and the surname of the biggest star to come out of Argentina since footballer Diego Maradona. José Cura, the tenor, is back in town, and you'd have to be deaf, blind, and somewhat unobservant not to notice.

The idea dreamed up by his record company seemed simple enough: ease him into his debut appearance as Verdi's Otello at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, by taking him to his home town of Rosario to give a concert and spend time with his friends and family. It was meant to be a low-key affair, but then the media found out about it.

I join the throng in Buenos Aires and wait to get this new star's story - his desire to stay in touch with his roots, his accelerating career and the pressures of international fame. But from the moment Cura steps off the plane, a frenzy envelops him. His entourage is besieged by television crews from around the globe, including one from The South Bank Show. His gala concert is then mobbed by 40,000 adoring fans. Psychologically unprepared for such attention, Cura is left in a state of exhaustion and, reeling from the publicity onslaught, cancels all his appointments - including my interview - for the next 48 hours to recuperate.

It is hardly a surprise that José Cura's professional schedule has suddenly gone ballistic. The opera world has long been waiting for a new young tenor who not only possesses a voice of heroic proportions but has the physique to go with it. Cura clearly fits the bill. He is a superb musician, a fine actor and, crucially in these days of under-nourished 'studio voices', one of the very few singers around who can - as opera critic Rupert Christiansen nicely puts it - "raise the roof".

Cura's arrival on the international scene in the early 1990s sparked off a fiercely contested debate about the elusive 'fourth tenor' who would succeed the Olympian but ageing triumvirate of Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras - the other pretender to the throne being Roberto Alagna.

Born into a musical family, Cura showed early promise as guitarist and pianist, came to opera relatively late, at 21, and a professional career even later, making his debut at the relatively advanced age of 29. His career, though short, has been meteoric, helped along by his success five years ago in Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition in Mexico - an entrée to the world's great opera houses. In only a few years Cura has learned more than 30 different operatic roles, almost all of them Italian and French because he refuses to sing in a language he cannot speak fluently.

Meanwhile his image has been bolstered by his life outside music: a passion for body building, an abandoned career as a rugby prop forward, and a black belt in kung fu. He has worked as a stagehand, a lighting man and a set builder. Seeing him on stage in the summer of 1999 in Verdi's Aida - the opening production of the Arena di Verona season - brought home to me how crucial Cura's athleticism is to his art. As Radamès he displayed the energy of a rock star, running from end to end of the enormous stage, parading his musculature at every opportunity and, in the opera's more lyrical moments, wringing every ounce of character from the role.

In Buenos Aires, Cura's imminent debut appearance as Otello at the Teatro Colón is an opportunity for me to clinch the long-awaited interview. Despite his evident nerves, and the chaos surrounding the dress-rehearsal, he turns in a performance that, vocally and dramatically, more than lives up to expectations - particularly strong on Otello's tortuous see-sawing between outward aggression and inward angst.

Hoping to snatch a few words with the tenor after the rehearsal, I wait amid a gaggle of admirers at the stage door. Here I met Jane Austin, founder of the internet-based club International José Cura ConneXion. Jane has been smitten with the man ever since she saw him sing the title role in Stiffelio in London in 1995. Indeed, she knows more about Cura than anyone - perhaps even more than the tenor himself: she tells me that, on the video he made of Otello in Turin, he leaves a smudge of brown make-up on Desdemona's forehead when he kisses her.

She also knows that, when José - it is always "José" to her - emerges from the stage door, wherever in the world it happens to be, he always finds time for a few words with her. Grabbing my arm as the crowd presses forward, Jane pulls me towards a tall, swarthy figure in an expensive-looking designer coat. He shakes my hand, says "Nice to meet you" in a strong Spanish accent while looking over my shoulder, then moves on to give a big bear-hug to an old friend.

The following morning, just as I think my chances of an interview have slipped away, the phone rings. Señor Cura will give me 25 minutes, but it's now or never. I find him in his hotel room, sinking low in an armchair in jeans and T-shirt while his wife, Silvia, attends to the phone - by the sound of it, fending off more requests for interviews.

"It's a crazy time, you know," the tired tenor said with the weariest of apologetic smiles. "When you are 'missing' for five years and all of a sudden you return to Argentina as a 'somebody' everybody wants to be there, everybody wants you in their newspaper, on their TV, in their magazine." Close up, I can see why we all want him. With his athletic, muscular build, high forehead and noble Roman nose bisecting a pair of dark, angry eyes, he corresponds perfectly to the romantic notion of what a young operatic tenor ought to look like.

In a recent review, The Times opera critic Rodney Milnes wrote that Cura should decide once and for all whether he wants to be a singer or a sex-symbol, apparently sending the singer into a fuming rage. The Independent on Sunday labelled him "an opera singer with a six-pack". To Cura, the physical nature of his work is just as important as the drama and music. "For me the body is essential. If you're an actor, which I am, the body is the instrument of your interpretation. The better you are physically, the better you will sound. Today if you are good-looking people think you are stupid, and if you are a genius you are ugly, dirty and wear glasses. Why can't we combine good looks with intelligence?"

Cura prides himself on his physique and has a personal gym at his Madrid home, although he admits that the demands of fame and the passing of the years are beginning to interfere more than he would like. "I'm not as fit as I was when I was a semi-professional athlete and weighed 20kg less than I do now. I try to live in a more or less balanced way, but when you are invited every day to a cocktail party or a dinner, and to this and that, then it becomes very complicated. Especially now that I'm close to my forties. The body changes, the bones change, and I'm losing my hair like everybody else!"

The question of age is an inevitable one for Cura, not least because in singing terms he was a late starter. But while his peers spent their twenties in the relentless pursuit of vocal perfection, Cura was doing other things. Singing, yes, but singing Beatles songs, Palestrina, spirituals, jazz - everything and anything, except opera. "The first time I opened my mouth to sing something that was more or less opera, I was 21. I didn't like it, so I gave it up. I didn't start again until I was 26."

Cura feels his unusual vocal education has helped him become the well-rounded, mature musician he is today. "It was a normal development, a normal way of arriving at my actual situation. I'm happy that I started my singing career at 26, and the big career at 31. Because at that age you are still young enough to justify all the investment and the hype, but you are old enough to be able to control it."

He has, it seems, got it all under control. Everything he did before the career kicked in, from sport to stage management, turns out to have had its raison d'être. Having worked as a lighting man, he knows where to position himself under the spotlight for maximum dramatic effect. Being an experienced conductor, he understands what conductors require of him. "If you want to be a complete artist these days," he reasons, "you have to master at least three or four different disciplines. Then you can be much more at ease in what you do."

Of all the other strings to Cura's broad bow, the one that interests him most is conducting. He has already started scaling down his vocal commitments so that by 2003, if all goes according to plan, he will be spending half his time singing, and half in front of an orchestra. He tells me this with a pensive seriousness, which suggests perhaps the decision is partly a response to the extraordinary pressures he has recently been facing as a tenor. "My schedule is booked up until 2005. But I am clearing out periods for myself for composition and for conducting. I have already conducted on Anhelo, my CD of Argentinian songs, and now I am starting to receive proposals from orchestras. Next year I want to do a symphonic record."

Any idea yet of the content? "Yes, but I'd prefer not to say. It might spoil the surprise," he says, his earnest demeanour immediately melting into a lighthearted smile. In Cura's current situation, it can't always be easy to keep seriousness at bay. But his life seems rich and varied enough to stop him losing touch entirely with reality. He also has a secret weapon that keeps him grounded. His family. He and his wife now have three young children - José Ben, Yasmine and Nicólas. Gesturing across the hotel room to where Silvia, her long brown hair hanging down to her waist, stands beside the window clutching a clipboard and a mobile phone, he says, as much to himself as to me: "The family base is so important. It's the only way to keep yourself sane as a human being. I mean, this life is very - no, it's absolutely - crazy. When you come off from a performance where there's a standing ovation and the crowd shouting 'Cu-ra! Cu-ra! Cu-ra!', and then you go home and have to change the baby's nappies, you learn to say, 'OK, the opera was fine, but this is fine, too'. That helps me keep my feet on the ground."



'I will lose my hair, I won't be young and I will have a belly'

The Guardian

Stephen Moss

13 October 1999

About halfway through our conversation, José Cura reckons he can spot my angle. I have just asked him the "A" question: would you, as many of your critics suggest, say you are arrogant? (Since Cura is a body builder, a martial arts expert and a former rugby player, this is a courageous question.) He slumps a little lower on the sofa, slows the speed of his already deliberate delivery, and embarks on a lengthy reply, the gist of which is that he is not arrogant, but "disgustingly - is that how you say it? - secure".

He rolls the phrase around; it becomes a recurring theme. "I love this because I can see the title of your article - 'Disgustingly secure' - which of course will drive people to the conclusion that I am arrogant," he says at last.

Cura, the Argentinean-born tenor tipped as the successor to Placido Domingo, appears to both love and hate the media. He is everywhere at the moment: a fortnight ago he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he has just released a new disc called Verismo (a selection of arias by turn-of-the-century composers such as Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Giordano), he is on the cover of this month's Opera and Classic FM magazines, and on Sunday he is the subject of the South Bank Show.

All that adds up to a lot of press, which Cura does willingly, sympathetically, but a little suspiciously. He has been stung several times. In the interview with Opera, for example, he made a throwaway reference to Roberto Alagna - "I wasn't invented by the media or my record company, or discovered in a restaurant" - which he now regrets. The interview, he explains, was conducted many months ago when he and Alagna were not on the best of terms; now they have decided they are "fighting the same fight" and the remark is ignoble.

I interviewed Cura in Madrid, where he has just moved with his wife Silvia and their three children. He talked fluently in English, which is at best his third language, not worrying as we approached the end of the second hour that he had to go immediately to a rehearsal for Otello at the Teatro Real. Cura will make his Madrid debut there on October 29, and the work will dominate his musical life for the next two years.

He is a star and knows it. He has a streak of arrogance but tempers it with wit and a hint of self- deprecation; he likes to talk, appears to want to engage, and puts me sufficiently at ease to ask the even more dangerous "B" (for beefcake) question.

Here goes. "At your Barbican performance in May, one critic said you had to decide 'whether to be a singer or a sex object'. Which is it to be?" There is a pause and a calmly delivered answer: "Looking in a certain way can be useful, but it can be a double-edged weapon. I am pleased to be able to look like the characters I perform, but I am also aware that behind the way I look is a musician fully prepared and technically ready. We have to separate things. I will lose my hair - I am already losing a lot - I won't be young any more; and maybe I will have a belly. That doesn't mean that my whole career was based on the way I look. Believe me, you can look the way you look, but that is no way to cope with Samson or Otello or Andrea Chénier from the beginning to the end unless you are a good singer and a good professional. You won't sing Otello or Samson just with your face."

The question arises because Cura is pretty good-looking - though at 36 there is the first evidence of that belly - and has a powerful physique, which he uses to good effect on stage. He considers himself as much an actor as a singer, and says proudly that after his third performance at the Met a famous Broadway actor (he won't say who) came to his dressing room and told him he was the best actor-singer he had ever seen.

The way his record company markets him - putting as much stress on his pectorals as on his arpeggios - also encourages critics to take the singer-or-sex-symbol line. The new disc comes with a fetchingly rugged photograph of Cura on the cover, and a curious picture of him crawling across the floor on the back. He takes the sensible view that it's all part of the business of selling records. "If you want to ride this kind of bicycle, you have to go for it," he says philosophically.

He describes the record business as a "balance between good art and good business - the line is very subtle and a lot of recordings fall on one side or the other". He has thus far recorded only one full-length opera, Saint-Saëns's Samson and Dalila, and three more commercial discs - a Puccini collection, a record of Argentinean songs, and now Verismo. That reflects the expense of recording entire operas and the difficulty of justifying such recordings in an already overcrowded market, but in the next three years he plans to record Otello and Andrea Chénier, as well as a Verdi tribute and a "high-class crossover" record to keep the accountants happy (his Puccini disc sold more than 150,000 copies).

The other tricky area to negotiate with Cura is the "C" question - why does he so often insist on conducting, as he did at the Festival Hall earlier this year (he also conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra on Verismo)? Opera magazine's John Allison is damning about his Festival Hall appearance: "To all but his most ardent admirers he looked more than a little ridiculous, standing with his back to the orchestra, arms flapping like the wings of a big bird trying to get airborne, and - crucially - singing with less than his full, thrilling power_ he appears not to recognise his own limitations."

Why bother, I ask him? Surely, being a great tenor, a potential successor to the Big Three, is sufficient? There are two answers - self- expression and self-improvement; power and performance. First, power: "The musician and the conductor in me wants to give his own version of these pieces, not a shared version. At least in my recitals I would like to be solely responsible for the results, good or bad, so I can say they are my recitals. It's also because I belong to that rare group of human beings who used to be called kamikazes, who like to experiment and take risks."

Now, perhaps more attractively, performance: "I strongly believe that by conducting, I will be a better singer; that by being a better singer, I will be a better conductor; and that by understanding the rules of composition [oh yes - he also composes] I will be a better conductor and a better singer, at least in terms of understanding what I'm singing. I will be the complete artist.

"I know that I will never be a technically perfect machine for producing notes. Maybe I can't, or maybe it's not in the nature of my voice or personality. It is more in the nature of my personality to be as good an actor as I can be and then put the notes on top of that. I will get reviews complaining about that note which was not perfect from now until the end of my life. My advice to reviewers is to stop wasting their energy trying to find the wrong note in my performances because they will always find one. The moment that I start to read that I was not committed on stage, or that I was boring on stage - that is the moment I will start to really worry."

In fact, Cura does fret about reviews - he was so hurt by the review in the New York Times of his Met debut as Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana that he reckons it affected his second performance - but he says he is getting better at coping with criticism. The "disgustingly secure" side of his character is emerging, plus the inner strength he says he developed while trying to make his name in Argentina.

He was born and studied in Rosario, the country's second city, but his parents' business foundered with the military coup and recession in 1976 and he had to work hard and take on family responsibilities. Then in the early 80s he had a falling-out with the opera school in Buenos Aires and chose to study privately. Eventually he headed for Europe with his young wife to find - after many travails and with the help of first prize in Placido Domingo's Operalia competition in Mexico in 1994 - fame and fortune.

There is perhaps one last question to ask him - the "D" question. Does he have the drive and determination to make it to the top and stay there? Does he really want it enough? One desperately wants him to demonstrate his commitment, to say that he wants to be the new Domingo. But that is precisely what he will not say. "The pressure is not about the need for someone who can pick up the mantle," he says. "That is something that happens naturally; it has been happening for ages and will happen again. I would like to keep this rhythm of career for another 10 to 15 years, but parallel to that I have a private life that is very intense and very nice and very important. I have three kids and have been married for more than 15 years, so in another 10 years or so I could already be a grandfather if God wants that. At a certain point in my life I will want to enjoy my family and my kids and my private life. That is not to say that at 50 I will give up singing, but I may want to take it easier."
So is that the life expectancy of a great voice? When will he be in his prime? When will his Otello reach its perfect pitch? "Good question. I don't know," he replies at once. "I will tell you when it happens. What I can tell you is that I'm not at my best now, that's for sure. I can feel that every performance is different than the performance before. I'm still learning; your muscles are still developing. Your technique is still developing. It's a never-ending story, thank God, because that is what makes it interesting."

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

For Cura, Rosario was always close

La Nacion

05 April 1999

Stubborn? "Yes, but I like the French phrase: "continuity of ideas," says José Cura with a smile. The celebrated Argentinean tenor has just returned, after five years, to his hometown as a new prodigal son. Cura will offer two concerts here: one at the El Círculo Theater on Friday and the other at the Flag Memorial on Sunday, before his debut at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires on Sunday as the protagonist of the Verdi opera Otello.

It is the first time that Cura has returned to the country after he built his phenomenal trajectory as one of the great lyric singers of the new generation with enviable energy and stubbornness. His career took an international dimension in 1994, when he won the vocal competition Operalia and was later consolidated by conquering all the major European theaters based on the strength of his dramatic tenor voice.

At 36, the owner of a plot at the narrow summit of success does not seem willing to give up his way of being and doing everything he considers correct although - a priori – it may seem risky.

That is why he was able to stand in front of the managers of the Erato label, for which he recorded his first and successful CD of Puccini's arias, and convince them that the second (Anhelo) should only composed of Argentine music.

He also has no problem breaking the traditional mold of a concert and engaging in dialogue with the audience, singing, conducting the orchestra and even playing the guitar, activities that Cura also dominates along with the musical composition, because "we have a tendency to believe that Classical music is boring or a kind of black mass, and it's not like that. The important thing is that the artist enjoys the stage because that's going to help the audience enjoy it."

"Otello" with local color

And for his debut at the Teatro Colón, which he went into after bad relations with some of his teachers before he had made a career in Europe, he demanded that the cast that accompanies him in Otello be entirely Latino.

He knows that the expectation is great: "The first time you go to a new place you have to build everything from scratch, even if you come with the biggest reputation in the world. I have nothing to prove. As a serious professional, and not by chance, but after 25 years of work, I come to develop myself as does any professional of my level, with seriousness and work.”

When he feels he is on the right path, Cura advances with overwhelming conviction. He agreed to do El Círculo concert to create a scholarship fund for college students. In the role he will sing, he will lead an orchestra of 55 musicians and present songs from his CD Anhelo with guitarist Ernesto Bitetti and pianist Eduardo Delgado. He will also pay homage to his teachers of his youth.

He lives in Paris but his affections remain in his Rosario, a city that, according to his account in the first hours of his return, surprised him by "the renewal the whole walk along the river and the infernal noise that came through the window at night." But he bears it because he is one block from where his family lives as well as close to the family of his wife, Silvia, also a pure-bred Rosarina.

That's why he confesses: "At least one thousand of the 1,800 of those who are going to be in El Círculo have a name, a surname and a face. It's a great emotional load and that's why 90 percent of my concentration for that concert will not be musical. Thank God, my experience in the professional field is so great that I do not have to be thinking about how to move a finger. Here, the energy concentration will be put into not crying on the stage. "

Reunions and controversies

Without a doubt, one of the most shocking moments of the concert next Friday will be when his first teachers come on the stage. They are the ones who, according to Cura recalls, "saw my ability and had the vision to wrap me in a cocoon and purify me so that beyond and despite the frustration I felt at the institutional level, I did not give up on the art and kept developing." But it hasn’t been all roses. The concert at El Círculo generated controversy because of the high price of the most expensive tickets (150 pesos), but Cura doubles down: "Tickets were not given away because we want to help. I know there are people who said that the concert was elitist, but it is not. If someone wants to do a concert and after doing so there is some money left to help a group of fellows who are trying to get ahead, then to charge nothing helps nothing. At the same time, with the support of the Municipality, a second concert in the Monument to the Flag was made so that everyone can see it."

According to Cura, there are two types of charity. "I do not want them to believe that we are trying to save the undernourished fish from the Gulf of Chiquishiqui," he says with cheerful irony. "We want to establish a scholarship fund for students without means who want to make a career and who have the intelligence and talent." A modern Quixote? "I am neither Jesus Christ, nor Saint Paul, nor a priest. The only thing priestly about Cura is that I have the name," he jokes.

The real authority

His assertiveness has created problems for him and, according to his own account, the accusation of being arrogant and conceited. "I'm smiling, kind and everything you want," he says, "but difficult and demanding as a professional, not to disturb anyone but to create an overall result that is good. I do not ask anyone to do something that I will not do. The real authority is to be able to ask another to do something that one knows exactly how to do, but nevertheless trusts another with it. When one understands this, life changes you because it takes away the courage of conceit.

"When I do not know something, I say nothing, but if I do, I'll speak up," he continues. "The problem is that in today’s world, one that is full of sheep, someone applies the whip and everyone moves together. But when someone doesn’t follow, when he goes out and says and acts in a certain way because he is sure of where he is going, then the others are confused. For 25 years I busted my butt to get where I am. I am not arrogant. I am someone who is sure of himself, which is different.” Cure fires: "There are people who make the mistake of taking a false smile as humility and severity as conceit. Arrogance and conceit are usually the mask of the incapable, professionally speaking. On the other hand, if what is put into the work is effective that means it wasn’t arrogant, it was confidence. "

"Otello does not scream"

"If the story of Otello was limited to nothing more than a problem of jealousy, it would have been another evening soap opera to watch by the ladies as they iron!" says Cura, who will assume the leading role of the opera which Verdi and Arrigo Boito wrote based in Shakespeare's play. "Otello is not a heroic character, but a dramatic one. A true drama, not one that is screamed out. In 90 percent of the role, except for the entry in "Esultate," the end of the second act and a word here and there, the character has to demonstrate his authority without shouting. Verdi writes piano everywhere! But nobody does it that way," he says.

Emotional and good musical reunion

ROSARIO (Martín Liut) José Cura arrived in his hometown last Friday evening. The next day, at four in the afternoon, he met up with guitarists Alba D'Andretta and Juan Di Lorenzo, pianist Zulma Cabrera and composer Carlos Castro, the music teachers he had when he was a teenager.

While they waited for him on the stage of the traditional El Círculo theater, the four maestros agreed that the Jose Cura they met 20 years ago was already a curious and passionate musician.

"He absorbed everything because he is a complete musician and that is why we did not know what he was going to end up choosing, let alone the lyric singing," said Zulma Cabrera. Carlos Castro explained: "José is a good man, proven by the fact that he wanted to share this concert with those who were his teachers, which is not something anyone does," he said with a proud smile that never fades.

In the empty theater, a group of select witnesses (among them, La Nacion) could feel the emotion of the reunion between Cura and its teachers. To create a bit of intimacy, Cura stood with his back to the room, facing first the veteran guitarists and singing with bocca chiusa (humming) to review with them an aria by Felipe Boero. The one who was once a young pupil is now the husky and amiable singer who has become the teacher, giving indications and gently correcting notes. "That part is very complicated, better make a chord directly," he suggests to Di Lorenzo who is still trying to control his nerves and emotion.

The joy and the enthusiasm were the constant, while Cura sang a black spiritual with his piano teacher and later reviewed a bit of Otello with the piano. The reunion will form the most emotional chapter of the concert next Friday.

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

At the monument to the flag: meeting a crowd in his hometown

Tenor José Cura Had Another Night of Ovations in Rosario

Clarins

Fernando Helio Abaca

12 April 1999

[Excerpt]

The audience of his city received him with great affection He had previously sung here 12 years ago, when he was not yet a world opera star Last night he also conducted the orchestra and sang a song by The Beatles

It was eight ten in the evening and a breeze was coming from the river. With his back to the Monument to the Flag, José Cura, the tenor from Rosario who is now a star on the stages of the world, stepped on the stage. The people of Rosario received him with applause, with cheers, with shouts, like those welcoming home a triumphant hero. "The police told me that there are more than 40,000 people here," said the tenor, happy.

Cura is a singer, a composer, a conductor. He wanted to show everything in this return home; he began [the program] conducting and then alternated with the substitute conductor, José Ferrer.

Cura was born in 1962. He grew up a bit on the Boulevard Oroño, near the center, a bit on at the fifth in Funes, 15 kilometers from Rosario. At the age of 16 he went to study in Buenos Aires.

It wasn't the first time he had deployed his voice on that stage. It was not the same: yesterday, the man stepped on the scene dressed in a black velvet jacket, white shirt, grey trousers. And, baton in hand, he started the concert with the overture from Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino.

The concert had been organized by the Municipality of Rosario. Things had been arranged for a multitude: there were four giant screens looking out toward the streets, two video walls of three meters by four facing the courtyard and one more behind the tenor.

The stage had a retractable roof, to be raised or lowered according to weather conditions. In case the weather wasn't good enough, on the sides of the stage there were two black curtains and, in front, one made of transparent plastic. So even if it rained, the show could go on.

If the reception was shouts, what followed was marked by a respectful silence. In this context, an announcer said that Cura was composing a requiem mass that he planned to premiere in 2007, the 25^th anniversary of the Falklands War.

Silence, music, applause, the emotion of simply being there, the excitement of seeing it unfold here--that’s how the night went. "I love it. I think it will be superior to anything we know," said a proud 75-year-old grandmother, Teresa Majluf.

Cura gave a little to every taste: he accompanied himself with the guitar, between one aria and the next he sang “Yesterday,” from The Beatles, and stopped a few times to talk to her people: "Next time we'll do it on a soccer field," he proposed.

On the 18th, Cura will have his revenge: he will sing at the Teatro Colón, the place where he was never valued and of which he once declared: "It's a mafia." There he will be Otello in Verdi's opera.

Cura had already sung in Rosario on Friday night. He performed in the theatre El Círculo, with a full house.

The show was divided into two parts: "Reencuentro" and "Anhelo." At the beginning, Cura spoke to the audience about his feelings: Nicolás, his three-year-old son, had hit his face in an accident and had to be taken to a hospital. And, immediately afterwards, he found the theatre overflowing with people. An emotion, he said, that he could not overcome at times.

Accompanied by an orchestra that he himself conducted, Cura performed songs by Boero, negro spirituals, Fauré, Carlos Castro, Puccini and Leoncavallo.

Before starting with Anhelo, he spoke again. He wanted to pay tribute to his first two teachers: Alba DAndretta and Juan Di Lorenzo, whom he brought to the stage. Carlos Castro also came up. From the stage, [Cura] pointed from the stage to where his family was and that of another master, Livio Gorza.

He developed the final part with themes mostly from Argentine composers and some Italian composers.

In Anhelo, guitarist Ernesto Bitetti and pianist Eduardo Delgado, Rosarinos like him, played and at the end Cura was showered with rose petals.

The cameras of the BBC, which is preparing a documentary about the artist, filmed everything. Towards the end, he offered a phrase similar to that of his fellow countryman Fito Páez: "I come to give you my heart.”

Note: This is a machine-based translation. We offer it only a a general guide but it should not be considered definitive.

The Family, Very Near

Clarins

12 April 1999

José Cura's family wanted to see the show close up, so closely that they were located in a kind of small corral practically on stage. By mid-afternoon several relatives were already there.

The first to arrive was the artist's father, Oscar Carlos Cura, who was later joined by his wife, Olga, and their other children.

Oscar Cura, while following closely the preparations of the recital, was also attentive to the movements of the restless José Benito, 10 years old and son of José, who again and again climbed the containment fences.

Oscar Cura said to Clarín: "We see him perform a lot in European theaters, but here we are in our own house. Yesterday we had the visit of a team from the BBC in London. The truth, these days have been intense and of many emotions."