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Villazon’s voice has brokenHugh Canning
For those of us who hailed Rolando Villazon as the brightest opera star of the Noughties after his triumphant Covent Garden debut as Offenbach’s Hoffmann in 2004, the unravelling of his voice and career have been painful to listen to and watch. On Monday night, he returned to sing in London after the second of two career breaks — the first due to vocal exhaustion, the second to convalesce after an operation on his vocal cords.
Bafflingly, he chose Handel, a composer with whom his name has not been associated until, in the wake of his first career crisis, he recorded an album with the specialists Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Players, his backing group for Monday’s Festival Hall concert. So this was the concert-of-the-album (his most recent recording), with a glossy, expensive bilingual (German and English) “souvenir programme” in which 6½ pages of blurb and pics were devoted to the evening’s star and half a page to Handel.
Although originally planned to coincide with the release of the disc last year, the concert was clearly rescheduled to cash in on the tenor’s recent exposure to millions as “mentor and adjudicator” of ITV’s widely ridiculed Popstar to Operastar “talent” contest. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t censure Villazon for taking part in what was clearly intended as a light-hearted “bringing opera (sort of) to the masses” show, one that will do nobody any harm. He’s a resting singer and has cancelled many lucrative engagements. As Brecht wrote: “First comes food, then morals.”
I was surprised to see so many empty seats on Monday, considering the coverage Villazon has enjoyed since appearing on Popstar. Okay, the prices were high — £75 top, which looks like a combination of overoptimism and greed on the part of the promoters, Villazon’s record company and agency, Universal Music Classical Management and Productions — and the programme was relatively obscure operatic Handel. Arias from Serse (Xerxes), Rodelinda, Ariodante and Tamerlano are possibly not what a Popstar to Operastar audience associates with one of the world’s leading Latin tenors. Handel generally sells out in London (perhaps not always in the 2,700-seat RFH), but Handelians who had heard Villazon’s album might be forgiven for staying away.
To say his Handel isn’t exactly stylish would be kind. On the disc, he sings as if the past 50 years of scholarship and performing practice had never happened, transforming the music of the baroque era’s greatest opera composer into a sort of genteel, polite verismo. At least his voice sounded in reasonably healthy shape when he recorded the album. Now it is a thing of shreds and patches, and he compounded his evident misery — unwittingly and generously — by agreeing to appear alongside the rising British star Lucy Crowe, a superlative Handelian who brought the house down with her captivating account of Cleopatra’s great lament, Se pieta (If you feel no pity), and a dazzling Da tempeste (Ravaged by storms), from Giulio Cesare.
2010年05月09日 06点05分
