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By
Martin Bernheimer
Named last year as one of Musical America’s top young vocalists, he has since taken the vocal world by storm, singing regularly with the leading divas of our time, in the world's leading opera houses. Moreover, like Enrico Caruso, the most famous tenor ever, he is a talented caricaturist.
A critic’s lot can be a happy one. The duties do tend to include too many performances, however, of La Bohème. There’s nothing wrong with Puccini’s mellifluous tearjerker. It’s just that some of us have endured it too often. Yesterday’s pathos has a nasty way of turning into today’s cliché. Still, life is full of surprises, some of them joyous.
And so it was in March 2001, when the New York City Opera introduced its latest incarnation of the verismo warhorse. Lincoln Center was approached with trepidation, resignation camouflaging ennui. The critical mood changed drastically, however, seconds after the curtain rose.
“Nei cieli bigi guardo fumar dai mille comignoli Parigi,” sang Rodolfo. “I am watching a thousand Parisian chimneys smoking in the gray skies.” It isn’t a profound sentiment. But here, for once, the impecunious hero looked like a slender teenager and sounded like an introspective poet. This was no smug tenorissimo warming up while biding time for the aria to come. Instantly one recognized a genuine artist at work, a singer who knew how to stand and how to move in character, an actor who cared to inflect the text with subtle nuances. Here was a Rodolfo, passionate yet suave and sensual, who seemed more interested in pleasing Mimì than courting the audience. Here was a singer with a vibrant, dark-tinged sound that flowed sweetly, evenly, easily.
As the afternoon progressed, brilliant high notes offset tender pianissimo phrases; even, here and there, a delicate diminuendo. This young man sang as if no one had told him singing was difficult. Not since prime Björling, I thought at one moment. Not since the young Di Stefano, I thought at another. Old La Bohème suddenly seemed new again.
The review virtually wrote itself. “Rolando Villazón of Mexico City dominated the ensemble—the term is used advisedly—as a boyish Rodolfo blessed with a fresh, gleaming tenor, an admirable sense of rapture, a ringing top and pervasive sensitivity. Remember the name.”
It would be difficult to forget. Our Vocalist of the Year never returned to the City Opera. Virtually overnight he became too expensive for this modest company. He became a stellar attraction in the greatest and richest houses of the world, including the Met next door. Now a grand old man of 33 (he was born February 1972), he can sing just about whatever he wants, wherever he wants. His recordings, most notably one splendid set of Italian arias, both familiar and obscure, and another CD devoted to the French repertory, are instant best-sellers. Still, Villazón seems to retain a sense of modesty, even wonder.
In his multifaceted youth he planned to become a history teacher, devoured literature, flirted with the priesthood. Starting at age 11, he studied acting and dancing along with music in general and voice in particular. “It taught me to listen and to feel my body,” he recalls. The final push toward opera came from the woman who was to become his wife, Lucia Escobar. A trained psychologist, she reinforced his penchant for probing emotions and relationships on all levels, personal as well as professional. It must be significant that he still consults his longtime analyst in Mexico City via phone, four sessions per week.
In his spare time, what little there can be, Villazón draws deftly amusing operatic caricatures, many of which are reproduced on his website (www.rolandovillazon.com). It may be worth remembering that another multitalented tenor, Enrico Caruso, enjoyed a similar pastime. Villazón says he doesn’t mind publishing his cartoons, because they are funny. He is less casual, however, about his short stories and sonnets. “I write these for myself. They are very personal. I have already burned some. I wouldn’t dare show them to anyone.”
“Literature has been one of my best teachers,” he explains. “It opens my imagination.” Knowing that, one could not be too surprised that this unconventional artist surprised the audience at the Metropolitan Museum during his first recital with an excerpt from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday. “I had been reading the poem that morning,” he explains, “and felt an urge to share it.”
Villazón undertook advanced operatic training in Pittsburgh and San Francisco before winning some prestigious contests. Then he returned to Europe in 1999 for his professional debut, cast as Des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon in Genoa.
Although very conscious of his affinities as a lyric tenor, he knows that his voice is gaining color, strength, and depth with the passage of time. “The spinto repertory attracts me,” he admits. He already has conquered such middleweight challenges as Verdi’s Don Carlo and Bizet’s Carmen. Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera, and Puccini’s Tosca loom. “I love to take risks,” he admits, “and sometimes I surprise myself. But I don’t pretend to sound like Del Monaco.” He wants to move with caution. “I might try Trovatore in three or four years, and maybe one day there will be Lohengrin. I will think about that in ten years.”
I caught up with him last summer in Salzburg, where he was preparing Alfredo in Willy Decker’s controversial staging of La Traviata. The tenor, obviously stimulated, labeled the production concept “very modern, very smart.” The fashionable break with tradition, more controversial in America than Europe, intrigued him. “I like to be challenged,” he reflects, “and to be stretched.”
No matter how often he repeats a given role, he says he never freezes a characterization. He adapts to his surroundings, and to his colleagues. “My Alfredo cannot be the same with Anna Netrebko as with Renée Fleming or Ruth Ann Swenson or Angela Gheorghiu. They are very different. The energy has to be different. The relationship must always feel fresh, spontaneous, real.”
Villazón apparently gets on famously with his colleagues, and he acknowledges no rivals. He makes the point without insisting too much. “Ramón Vargas, Juan Diego Flórez, Marcelo Álvarez, all are wonderful and all are my friends.”
Can it be a coincidence that so many of the best tenors today are Hispanic? Rolando Villazón, the thinking person’s tenor, ponders, giggles, and delivers a perfect explanation: “There must be something in the tequila.”
Pulitzer-Prize winner Martin Bernheimer served as critic of the Los Angeles Times for 31 tumultuous years (he started young). Now safely back in New York, he covers music for the Financial Times and Opera magazine.
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VOCALIST OF THE YEAR
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