Oct. 13, 2001, 8:12PM
By CHARLES WARD
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle
OPERA is a field of feast or famine.
Forty years ago, you were hard-pressed to cast Mozart's Cosi fan tutte,said Houston Grand Opera music director Patrick Summers. But last season, he conducted different, equally gifted casts in productions at HGO and the Metropolitan Opera.
The needed voices are lyrical, agile, filled with personality -- and they abound today, even as opera executives bemoan the lack of more powerful singers to fill their productions of Wagner's Ring Cycle.
We're in an era with a large group of singers skilled in the bel canto style,Summers said. He is rushing to use them in key works from the early and mid-19th-century Italian repertoire.
The latest example is Friday's Houston opera debut of the great Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, giving his first North American performances of the title role in Verdi's Rigoletto.
Joining Hvorostovsky will be Corpus Christi-born soprano Laura Claycomb as Rigoletto's daughter Gilda and Italian tenor Robert Aronica as the licentious Duke of Mantua (both are also debuts). American bass Raymond Aceto appears as the assassin Sparafucile, and American mezzo-soprano Stephanie Novacek as his sister Maddalena. HGO is reviving its Renaissance-style production, directed by Frank Corsaro and designed by Michael Yeargan, last seen in 1994.
In 1997, Summers and Hvorostovsky toured Europe with mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina. Between concerts, the two men discussed and rehearsed various works, including Rigoletto. They discovered they shared an interest in bringing Rigoletto back to its bel canto roots,Summers said.
Rigoletto was a pivot point in Italian opera at its premiere in Venice in March 1851.
The innovative forms and style of early-19th-century opera had slipped into formulas. Government officials reacting to the political ferment that swept Europe in 1849 imposed a censorship that stifled artistic creativity for several decades.
Only someone with the stature of Verdi could, with great difficulty, get approval to write an opera based on Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse (The King Amuses Himself), a play castigated for its immorality and republican sympathies. Of course, Verdi had to find a new title and rename all the characters, but the essence of the work remained.
Rigoletto is sometimes viewed as the end of an era both in Verdi's career and in Italian opera. That opinion has sparked Summers' interest in viewing the work through the prism of bel canto singing.
Literally, bel canto means beautiful singing. Sometimes it is simply applied to the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, which Summers has frequently conducted.
At its heart, however, the phrase refers to a distinct style of singing found in Italy during the 18th and early 19th centuries, according to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Its qualities include "perfect legato (smooth) production through the (vocal) range, the use of a light tone in the higher registers, and agile and flexible delivery.
Bel canto usually is contrasted with the weightier, more powerful, speech-dominated style associated with German opera, Wagner in particular.
Summers offered a more expansive view of the tradition: singers of great vocal personality and rhythmic flexibility (who can make) spontaneous decoration and ornamentation of the melody."
Tackling Rigoletto from this viewpoint is potentially controversial.
Twentieth-century singers, conductors and audiences have become used to hearing Rigoletto at high volume, with blood-and-guts drama and the plush sound of the modern orchestra.
Yet that view is anachronistic. As the editors of the authoritative edition of Rigoletto point out, performance practices at its 1851 premiere were very different.
There was no conductor. The quality of the musical instruments was much poorer, especially the woodwinds and brass. And the orchestra was expected to follow the singers, who set tempos and dynamics according to the text and dramatic situation.
Performers expressed vibrant traditions, however, one of them being a heavily ornamented vocal style.
Rigoletto was written just after the period in which vocal ornamentation ... was not only normal but even obligatory,the editors wrote.
Summers' ideas appealed to Hvorostovsky (the H is silent), who had nursed similar ambitions since the start of his career in his home city of Krasnoyarsk, 2,000 miles east of Moscow in central Siberia.
As a student, he listened voraciously to the early recordings of singers who epitomize the bel canto tradition. He studied its history and can throw off its most famous names as if they were winning quarterbacks in American football.
Rigoletto was the first opera he performed at the state theater at Krasnoyarsk, which he joined in 1985, during his second year at the conservatory. He sang the part of the cavalier Marullo, and almost immediately he wanted to sing Rigoletto, too.
However, he knew he had to wait. The part can damage the voice of a singer with insufficient technique and craft.
In the most dramatic moments, you tend to shout and lose control of your voice,he said. But the best singing is about concentration and projection, about breath support and breath control, and about the focus of the sound, which should never be pushed.
Equally important is vocal maturation. Over time, the voice becomes heavier -- and stronger.
I've been waiting for so long,he said. Now, approaching my 40s, I can afford to try it out, because technically I feel well-prepared. Physically even more so.
Ultimately, he said, the most important factor is the ability to convey to the audience the intense emotions of this tragic character -- his deep, protective love for his daughter; his hurt and sense of betrayal at her seduction by his employer, the Duke of Mantua; his consequent fixation on revenge.
Hvorostovsky, who will turn 39 this week, has enjoyed a fabulously successful career.
In 1989, at age 26, he won the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, beating out Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, one of his few rivals today, in a controversial decision.
My career began the next day,he said, but its scope didn't sink in until he was back in Krasnoyarsk. His manager called and started dictating dates in such opera houses as La Fenice in Venice, La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London.
It was like a dream," he said.
Hvorostovsky has developed a reputation for passionate, lyrical singing. He has applied it equally to opera -- roles of Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Verdi and others -- and orchestral and solo repertoire. He is deeply admired for commissioning and performing new works in his recitals.
He made his Houston debut in May 1997 with his first performance of Brahms' A German Requiem. His tone was fairly light, but his top notes rang freely, with little strain. His involvement with the text was deeply personal. His singing was free and fervent.
There is some chatter among opera aficionados that Hvorostovsky's voice may be too small for the role.
It's a charge laid against Cecilia Bartoli as well, but she has had a similarly spectacular career by choosing carefully which works she sings and in what size houses. She has done Rossini's The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola in Houston with great success.
We've forgotten about sheer beauty of sound, Summers said. "Dmitri has an incredibly beautiful, big, lyrical instrument, and Rigoletto is a role requiring an incredibly beautiful, big, lyrical instrument.
As rehearsals have progressed, Summers has found his theories unfolding as he hoped.
It's been fascinating to see the drama of Rigoletto come to life. I've not experienced that with this opera before.
The combination of text, music, beauty of sound and declamation -- it's a very different experience from the attachment to sheer volume usually heard in this piece