Music : Jerry Hadley: A Tenor With 2 Faces for the Occasion

Will the real Jerry Hadley please stand up?

Two tenors, both personable, appeared under the same name Saturday night amid the glitzy neo-Deco splendors of the Alex quasi-movie-palace/would-be-concert-hall in Glendale. The first Hadley was a bright and brash opera star with a penchant for easy effects. The second turned out to be a hard-sell show-biz idol who often sang artfully.

Ah, paradoxes.

A large audience--the sort that breaks into applause when it recognizes the introduction to “La donna e mobile” and hums along with Cilea--loved both guys. It also seemed to love Gualtiero Negrini, the dauntlessly idealistic resident maestro-cum-impresario who tends to confuse time-beating with conducting.

And that’s not all, folks. The assembled fans also registered emphatic approval for a dutiful if not beautiful student band labeled the Opera Orchestra of Los Angeles, and for an amateurish men’s chorus that occasionally raised its 16 voices in a reasonable facsimile of song.

This wasn’t a very good night for pursuit of the loftiest lyric muse. But it was quite a good night for star-gazing and tune-basking.

Hadley, fresh from Tom-and-Jerry shows in San Francisco (joint concerts with the baritone Thomas Hampson), began the relatively serious half of the program with a single flight of esoterica: “Alma soave” from Donizetti’s “Maria di Rohan.” He sounded engaging in the bel-canto challenge, poised and ardent, despite an ongoing tendency to push the tone sharp in climaxes.

Then came the Great Hits.

The conductor, who frequently reached the last cutoff before the tenor, confused “La donna e mobile” with a slow waltz. For his part, the tenor disfigured the Verdian structure with odd pauses, most notably an endless break just before the ultimate two-note cadence. Still the sound was always pretty, the manner always urgent.

Surprisingly and disappointingly, Hadley mustered more passion than finesse for the famous laments from “L’Arlesiana” and “Werther.” He spun out the legato lines of “Je crois entendre encore” from “Les Pecheurs de Perles” sensitively, but valor turned to pallor when he resorted to wide-open falsetto in the ultimate climax. Bidding his operatic adieu, he reveled in the bravado of the Kleinzach narrative from “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.”

Hadley’s gifts are obvious. His top tones gleamed (though some of the bottom ones tended to evaporate). His sound was always fresh, his interpretive manner always forthright. He phrases cleanly and points the texts knowingly.

Still, given his extraordinary resources and obvious intelligence, one wished for more: greater attention to distinctions of style, greater concern for dynamic subtlety, a heightened sense of individuality, a touch of poetry.

*

To give his illustrious guest some breathing space, Negrini interspersed a rather raucous “Figaro” overture (what’s a man like Mozart doing in a place like this?) and a literally racy “Carmen” entr’acte.

After intermission came the light stuff. Hadley marched bravely through “Stouthearted Men” in a key palpably too low for him. He offered a mushy ode to Mario Lanza via the Serenade from “The Student Prince” and crooned “What’ll I Do?” sweetly. He waded elegantly through the slush of “All I Ask of You” from “Phantom of the Opera,” and found the high-pianissimo ending of “Bring Him Home” from “Les Miserables” more congenial than the comparable reflection of Bizet’s pearl fisher.

To end the official portion of the program, Hadley belted out “Almost Like Being in Love” in a particularly tasteless arrangement (disfigurement?) by Michael Starobin. Lerner and Loewe should sue.

For their contribution to the fun, Negrini and the kids plodded through Bernstein’s “Candide” overture.

At encore time, Hadley made a lovely, wistful thing of “Lonely Town” from Bernstein’s “On The Town,” followed by a soggy Neapolitan song and, finally, “Funiculi, Funicula.” Where are those accordions when we need them?

The fans bestowed cheers and flowers. Lots of both.

*

Incidental intelligence:

--Seated downstairs at an orchestra concert a few weeks ago, I found the acoustics of the all-purpose Alex disastrously dull and dry. Seated at the front of the balcony this time, I found the sound drastically over-resonant, the instrumental choirs dominated by bass and brass. Go figure.

--The program booklet could have benefited from the services of a good proofreader. In the end, however, the typographical errors didn’t matter because no one could see the program. A jittery genius at the lighting console kept the hall pitch dark. He also kept turning the tenoral spotlight on and off, and, whenever sentiment loomed, bathed the stage in lurid red. Very classy.

--Negrini’s program biography omitted his most salient credit: a long, successful run as the Pavarotti look-and-sound-alike in “Phantom.” Surely he isn’t ashamed of his mock-operatic past.

--When Hadley first burst upon the scene, one enthusiastic critic--this one, actually--called the young singer a “great tenor hope of the post-Pavarotti generation.” Now, Hadley is 42, and hope seems to have evolved into something else. The critical quote is still in use, however, now conveniently altered for a prominent poster. “Jerry Hadley,” it claims, “is one of the great lyric tenors among the post-Pavarotti generation.” The attribution is unchanged.

So much for literary license. So much for truth in advertising.