Packing a Vocal Punch

Operalia 2000, Placido Domingo’s international opera competition for singers between the ages of 19 and 30, generated considerable excitement when it was held in Los Angeles for the first time late last summer. Reports assured us that the pool of talent among young singers is very well stocked. Nine of this year’s 11 judges for the contest are opera administrators in the Americas and Europe, and profitably afishing they undoubtedly went.

As a musical event, Operalia, which presented its six winners in a gala concert of opera excerpts at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday night, is an insurance policy for the operatic public. The audience, which included socialites and opera patrons in formal dress, is assured that we will not run out of Mimis or Butterflys or Don Giovannis any time soon. Not only that, but there might even be a fresh supply of Callases and Chaliapins, as well, to carry with us into a new century.

And yet, the future of opera seemed hardly addressed in a program of arias, duets and a sextet accompanied by the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and conducted by Giovanni Reggioli. These were famous excerpts from opera’s history. Domingo managed to enliven the evening by encouraging the inclusion of his beloved zarzuela, the Spanish musical theater that he promises to make a welcome part of Los Angeles operatic life. But the overall impression Friday was of singers trained as historians to preserve the past under current conditions.

What that meant essentially was power. The five voices who most impressed the judges are instruments trained to project excitingly in large spaces. However, one singer, Virginia Tola of Argentina, who got a special People’s Choice award from the audience and listeners to the radio broadcast of the competition finals, is less conventional than the others as both singer and theatrical presence. She is the one who brings Maria Callas to mind.

With a dusky and throaty soprano, she has Callas’ way of shifting registers through recklessly compelling jolts of dramatic energy. Her stage presence, however, is her own. She likes to begin demurely so that she can spring her vivid, fiery theatricality upon the unsuspecting listener. The trick proved effective in “Tacea la notte placida” from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and brought a vivid intensity to the sextet from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” But soon we began to catch on to the game. Still, she demonstrated flirtatious flair in a zarzuela aria, and only she among the three sopranos who sang duets with Domingo (in her case, from Manuel Penella’s “El Gato Montes”) seemed comfortable with a tenor who normally puts other singers at ease.

The manager-judges, however, preferred the safer Canadian soprano, Isabel Bayrakdarian, who won first place. With a degree in biomedical engineering and an active opera career in Europe, she appears a formidable achiever with a broad hall-filling voice. For the “Song of the Moon” from Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” she overfilled Royce. In “Piangero la sorte mia” from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” she showed more flexibility and more temperament, but even so, she was too pushy for Baroque sentiment. “Tonight” from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” which she sang with Domingo, was the only music of the evening with a 20th century spirit, although it hardly survived an overblown operatic rendition.

The bass, Robert Pomakov, also Canadian, was a third-place winner. He is a strange performer, a 19-year-old with a dark and rich bass and so old-fashioned a manner that he fascinates. A corny, overstated actor, he was the one who, with his fussy dramatic gestures, seemed an amusing throwback to Feodor Chaliapin in his aria from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Rachmaninov’s “Aleko.” One hopes he might start to seem younger as he grows older, but it will be fun to watch him mature.

The other singers were the Chinese soprano He Hui, who shared second place with the Russian tenor, Danil Shtoda. Both have the power high notes but strained for intimacy in quiet passages. (I hope Hui’s fluttery vibrato in quiet passages is a passing problem.) The Ukrainian tenor Konstyantyn Andreyev cuts a romantic figure but forces an essentially lyrical tenor.

How these singers will fare in a future opera scene that may not be like the one today or yesterday was not answered. Can they sing the music of our time or create modern characters on stage? Can they produce the intimacy needed for recording or the inevitable entree of amplification in the opera house?

These are issues that Operalia does not address, but it must. And, at the same time, it also might consider investing in a conductor who can help guide young musicians now when they need it the most. Reggioli was deferential and one-dimensional. That dimension was Puccini.