directory  |  sites  |  press        Submit Site  |  Submit Press Release

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web usoperaweb.com

Over the past few months, USOPERAWEB has enjoyed the opportunity to speak twice with mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, a rising young star in the opera world. Since her professional debut ten years ago, Ms. Genaux has accumulated a dazzling resume of opera performances on the world's most prestigious stages. Her recording career is nothing short of spectacular too-no small accomplishment in these times. We first talked with Ms. Genaux last May while she was in Marseilles and asked her to tell us about her upbringing and what led her to music. "I was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. My mother was born in Mexico City to Swiss and German parents and my father was born in the States of Belgian and Welsh background. My father is a big Bruckner, Mahler, Mozart and Beethoven fan and he had a great record collection that I was exposed to. My mother liked to listen to the opera. Music was important for us-for the city and pretty much the entire state. We have serious winters in Alaska [she laughs]. They are very dark and can last for nine months. Sometimes the temperature goes down to 40 or 50 below zero and depression and cabin fever are real issues. You invent excuses to get out of the house. For us, it was the arts, whether it was theater, dance, orchestra, chorus, belly-dancing, bongo-drumming, poetry, pottery, metallurgy. I had a lot of extracurricular activities. I played piano for awhile and violin for nine years. I sang in choir and jazz choir and did jazz, ballet and tap dancing. My sister learned to play field drums and she plays percussion for a belly-dancing class. I was very shocked when I came out of state and learned that it wasn't how everyone was raised. My upbringing in the arts was very hands-on. Everything is a participatory activity; it's not exclusive. In New York, I went to what they called a sing-it-yourself Messiah and you were only allowed to sing the 'Hallelujah Chorus'. At home, we literally sang the entire Messiah ourselves-it may not always have been the most pleasant sound, but we had a good time.

"I first went to college for biology-I wanted to go into genetics. But it was really lethal to me not to have my music time and I got depressed. I finally decided that if I was going to be miserable not studying music, I may as well be a starving artist but be happy at least, even if I was financially less comfortable. I transferred to Indiana University and got my bachelor's degree there. After I finished my bachelor's I began studying with Claudia Pinza, the daughter of Ezio Pinza, in Italy and started doing competitions and got a couple of jobs and things took off pretty fast for me."

By the late 1990s, Ms. Genaux had established herself as one of the leading interpreters of the baroque and bel canto repertory. A series of concerts with conductor René Jacobs led to her first solo recording, the spectacular Arias for Farinelli, on which she sang arias associated with the 18th century superstar castrato. The recording earned rave reviews and further propelled Ms. Genaux's career. "It was kind of scary for me. It was my first solo project and there was a lot of work to do. I'm happy I survived it and I'm happy it has had a good success."

In 2002, Ms. Genaux and Maestro Jacobs collaborated for a production of Handel's Rinaldo at the Opéra de Montpellier and the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music; they also recorded the opera. Ms. Genaux spoke about the character of Rinaldo. "Rinaldo has to remain the honest, fixed point of the opera. The other characters are swept away by all of the action and violence. Rinaldo is the one who experiences the absurdities and surreality of what is going on around him. He is the eyes of the audience. He is a somewhat stereotypical heroic figure, though-a typical castrato character in baroque opera.

"The production we did was quite contemporary, very much like what you would have seen on television then about the Palastinian and the Israeli conflict. Instead of having magic sticks, the director gave Goffredo and Eustazio a suicide bomber to take along to destroy the power of Armida. The Christians had their huge missile and the Muslims had a tiny, donkey-mounted missile, which exaggerated the difference between the two sides. It was a kind of in-your-face, over-the-top way of showing people, 'you think this is going to be ridiculous and you're probably going to hate this production, but this really happening in the world.' We've been so numbed by the television and media coverage of the violence that goes on around the world that this was the director's way of bringing it back to people's attention and making them focus on it. So the next time you turned on CNN, you'd maybe be a little less numb and you'd realize that this is what really is happening.

"I was kind of worried about doing it in the south of France, because there is such a large Muslim community here (although I don't know if they are big opera-goers). But France has some success as a nation that has embraced and learned to live with and accept the Muslim community, certainly more so than the United States. There is more tolerance in the government system here and there is a willingness to try to compromise. Still, I was a bit wary going into this production, knowing it was going to be very much from the Christian point of view. There were some interesting things though, although the suicide bomber was one thing that turned my stomach every time we did it."

Castrati were the matinee idols of the 17th and 18th centuries and no opera went onstage without a star castrato in the leading role. In modern times, these roles have most often been taken by mezzo-sopranos. What is like it to spend one's career portraying characters of the opposite gender? "I don't tend to think very much about the fact that I'm portraying a man, especially in the baroque pieces, because one of the things that has intrigued and inspired me about these roles is the androgyny of the period. I did a piece with René last year, Hasse's Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra, which I was very excited to do it because it was one of the first operas Farinelli sang in his professional career. I was surprised to discover that Farinelli had been Cleopatra, not Marc'Antonio. The role of Marc'Antonio had been sung originally by a female contralto. Farinelli sang a lot of female roles in his early career because he had a very high voice at that time (he was around 21 when he sang Cleopatra). So I think the public was very willing to accept gender bending, more so than we are today.

"I try to focus on the humanity of the character and accept both the male and female sides. It's something I've seen in the cultures in Italy and Spain and southern cultures that I don't see so much in the American and northern cultures. Men are allowed socially to express their emotions and show their gentle side. In Italy when two male friends meet they kiss each other on the cheek, which is something you'd never see in the U.S., unless it was between gay friends.

"The first time I did a trouser role onstage was in Seville, Spain, and I went out every day and watched how the Spanish men related to their families, their girlfriends and to other men. The openness and the physical language they had at their disposal was something I had never seen before. It has inspired me in these portrayals. I don't feel I have to be rigidly butch all the time when I'm playing a man. I let the characters be human and express both their male and female sides."

We asked Ms. Genaux about the different vocal demands associated with singing in the bel canto and baroque periods and specifically dealing with the different schools of current baroque performance practice. "It all depends on the conductor you are working with. There are still many conductors who would subscribe the 'English' school of baroque singing, which would be using more flat tone with no vibrato and a smaller, more focused sound. The work I have done with René has been very free vocally. I have been able to sing with the bel canto technique I have learned-the same technique I use in singing Rossini-which I hadn't anticipated when I started singing baroque operas. I don't think of doing anything differently in the baroque than in the bel canto, with the exception of musicological dialects that have to do with the different periods. In baroque, I occasionally use straight tone to underline a phrase or a word and there are expressive colors that were traditional for the time.

"It has been said that the castrato voice was hands down the most beautiful voice of that time period. Beauty of tone was definitely important, but so was expression. For me, expression comes through the beauty of the voice. There is a certain amount you can do with words in the recitative, but in the typical da capo arias, you have ten words you repeat for ten minutes. So, it has to do with inflecting the line and revisiting the same thoughts with different colors.

"My teacher, Claudia Pinza, is (as was her father) a big exponent of being able to understand what somebody is saying when they are singing and using the words and speaking the text when you are singing it. René is also a fanatic about that; he always wants you to be able to project through the words. For some it is the beauty of the line and the vowel and the fluidity. With the aria 'Cara sposa', which is such a beautiful legato line, it's easy to emphasize that."

Ms. Genaux is one among many exceptional mezzo-sopranos performing today, including several who also specialize in baroque and bel canto operas. Add to this the new popularity of countertenors, who sing many of the same roles, and it makes for a crowded field. "I like it. It means there is a market for this music. You mention the three recordings of Rinaldo. I think you'll find greater differences between those recordings than you would listening to three recordings of The Barber of Seville, for example. Baroque music is more like jazz in that way. It's so subjective to the individual singer. It's the same as if you were listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing "Mack the Knife" and Louis Armstrong singing it, the interpretations would be completely different, which is more like the baroque music.

"Now, with the Rossini Foundation coming out with the original manuscripts and the critical editions and with all of Rossini's own cadenzas written out, it's getting more limited as to what you can invent. A lot of people argue that Rossini didn't want singers to invent cadenzas, he wanted them to sing what he wrote. In the baroque period, it is known that the ornaments and cadenzas were improvised by the performer. That's not really feasible today because everyone has to learn so many different musical languages, from Monteverdi to yesterday's composers. You can't count on the conductor and the other singers and the orchestra having the same knowledge or same dialect. René Jacobs happens to write all the ornamentations for all of the singers, which I think is fabulous because it keeps everyone singing in the same musical dialect throughout the piece and keeps the continuity. It's much better to have things worked out ahead of time."

Our second conversation with Ms. Genaux transpired the morning after the dress rehearsal of Gluck's Orpheus and Euridice, in which she is playing Orpheus with the Los Angeles Opera. It's another pants part, but one of a different nature than most of her other roles. "Orfeo [Orpheus] is an amazing part. It's probably one of the shortest operas I've done but one of the longest roles, because I'm onstage the entire time; I don't come off except at intermission. The role is a challenge. There's no one part I'm worried about vocally; it's trying to find an overall curve for the entire role-the physical dynamic and the emotional dynamic-that has been challenging. I've also tried to find more colors, more expression. I've tried to use the words more, especially in the first part, when Orfeo is alone onstage. It's all inward agony, which is hard to hold on to for a long period of time. When Euridice comes on, there's finally someone else onstage to act with, even though I can't look at her. Emotionally, it becomes more intense and more reactive, less introverted.

"This opera is not about all the flashy vocal fireworks, as I'm used to in roles. Of course, it's the way it was written. It was Gluck's reaction to the baroque excess. Doing all the fast coloratura is pretty much part of my bag now and this is really a step away from that. It's such beautiful music and the production here is visually and sensually very pleasing, and I think it's nice for the audience not to have a 3½-hour opera for a change. The choruses are exquisite-the textures Gluck writes for the orchestra and chorus are really fantastic."

Do you think the story translates for modern audiences? "It's almost a Romeo and Juliet-type of story. Gluck originally didn't want the opera to have a happy ending; but in that time period, they wouldn't hear of having a tragic ending. I supposed it would have added some dramatic challenges having his head chopped and then having it float down the river singing [she laughs]. It would have been dramatically interesting for the opera to end the way the story does in mythology, though. The happy ending feels kind of tacked-on, as it does in Don Giovanni-'and then they lived happily ever after'. I suppose it is nice to have an ending where love and persistence win out.

"There are four versions of this opera, you know. We're doing the original Vienna version. I have had other offers to do the French version, the rewrite by Berlioz. Gluck's French version was for tenor, and then Berlioz rewrote it for Pauline Viardot. It'd love to do this version sometime, but I was really interested in looking at the Vienna version first and seeing what Gluck's original idea was. The French version is more glamorous, I suppose, because you have the coloratura aria in the first act, which was written in for Viardot. I was studying this last summer in Munich while I was doing Penelope in Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria [The Return of Ulysses] and I was discovering so many similarities between what Monteverdi wrote and what Gluck was trying to bring back in terms of the sheer drama of a story and setting words carefully to the music and not having a lot of excess baggage. I suppose a modern audience might find this simplicity somewhat shocking. It's interesting because they're also doing Lucia di Lammermoor here, which of course is much more similar to the baroque period in terms of vocal fireworks."

More about Vivica
     http://www.ffaire.com/genaux/