Three Sopranos Try to Find Magic of the Three Tenors

Tibor Rudas, the impresario behind the wildly successful Three Tenors mega-concerts, has tried to make lightning strike a second time. It didn’t work. But at least it didn’t work for interesting, if not instructive, reasons.

Rudas presented the “World Premiere Performance”--the capital letters seem mandatory given all the hoopla--of the Three Sopranos Thursday in a specially constructed outdoor stage at Century Plaza Towers.

The three are (in alphabetical order) Kathleen Cassello, Kallen Esperian and Cynthia Lawrence. They are not household names on the order of (again alphabetical order) Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti. Whether they are all “rising opera stars,” as the promoters assert, is a debatable point. On the evidence Thursday, some are more “rising” than others.

Given the promotional machine behind it, the concert had all the markings of an event, loaded with Hollywood-style glamour and glitter. Atlantic Records was on hand to record the event for the marketplace.

House lights were turned on after every selection to capture the faces of the audience. Microphones were set to pick up the applause. It was mildly entertaining to spot the hidden camera camouflaged among the flowers behind the back of the stage. The audience--at least some of it--couldn’t help feel manipulated.

The sound balance may have been better for the recording engineers than for those in the seats out front. The singers were often swamped by a studio pickup ensemble called the Hollywood Festival Orchestra conducted by Marco Armiliato.

The three sopranos are winners of the Luciano Pavarotti Voice Competition. Esperian is best known locally. She sang in Verdi’s Requiem at the Hollywood Bowl in July and sang Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” for Opera Pacific in January and Mimi in the Herbert Ross-directed “La Boheme” for Los Angeles Opera in 1993.

Lawrence sang with Pavarotti in a “Great Performance” program broadcast in 1995 and in a live Pavarotti concert at the Forum in Inglewood earlier that year. Cassello, according to an event producer, is making her career in Europe.

Following the Three Tenor formula, the singers sang vocally demanding solo arias from operas by Puccini, Verdi, Catalani, Massenet and Leoncavallo, and teamed up for medley sequences drawn from operas, operettas and Broadway shows, orchestrated and arranged by Giancarlo Chiaramello or Peter Matz.

Esperian has a rich, creamy, dark-toned soprano, which she used with aristocratic taste. Lawrence has a brighter but more unfocused sound, and she hit high notes like little explosions. Cassello tended to sound thin and dry, scrappy in the depths but brighter in the coloratura heights.

The tension between them and Armiliato suggested minimal rehearsal time. At least for the singing. The smiles, the camaraderie, the poses looked well choreographed.

Things went reasonably well during the long first part of the evening, but the life went out of the party after intermission when the program began to emphasize music of the American theater.

It may be hard to sing opera arias written in French, German or Italian, but it’s harder to fake character singing when the audience knows the language.

Cassello sang a reasonably persuasive if white-bread version of “Summertime.” Lawrence used her explosive urgency for dramatic impact in “My Man’s Gone Now” (both from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”). Esperian sang “All the Things You Are” beautifully in terms of tone production, but refined the character out of existence and made English sound like a language foreign to her.

Audience enthusiasm dropped off markedly, but picked up during group-sing encores including “Granada” and a reprise of “Sempre Libera,” which ended with one soprano after the other hitting and holding the final E-flat. Not a high point in an uneven show.