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.
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