Articles & Interviews 1997

Articles and Interviews 1997

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No Need to Cry for Him, Argentina

J. Pitman

Times

19 November 1997

José Cura is an enthusiast. We meet in the office of the young tenor’s recording company, Warner Classics, high above Kensington Church Street and we talk, or rather he talks – very quickly and with great focus, clarifying points, cracking jokes, performing for all he is worth. It is easily ten minutes before I can squeeze my second question past him, and I begin to wonder whether perhaps I should simply have sent a tape recorder round in a taxi – but then I would have missed his one-man talk show. And Cura’s show is so good he could sell tickets for it.

“I started playing the guitar when I was 12 because I noticed that people who played the guitar were always surrounded by girls. This was Argentina in the Seventies. It was still the era of the Beatles, and teenagers like me wanted to imitate them. Life in my country was pretty tough, and we used to escape into music. Also I wanted to be the center of attraction.”

Cura got what he wanted. The girls duly flocked, and their admiring eyes have never left him – today he positively oozes the virility of his Spanish-Lebanese parentage, and that, combined with his exceptional tenor voice and an impassioned acting style, is precisely the sort of package that sets hearts aflutter from Minnesota to Melbourne.

“My musical upbringing was not particularly special. My mother collected records so I heard all sorts of great music from the day I was born. I never thought I would be a professional musician. I just studied composition and conducting for pleasure after school, and then one thing led to another and I started doing music at university in Rosario. I sang in choirs and studied choral technique for a few years. But when I was 23 I just decided to stop singing because I knew the technique and repertoire I was being taught were not right for me.’

His teacher was disappointed, but when Cura makes up his mind to do something, people generally know better than to stand in his way. Three years late, however, fate intervened. “A tenor pulled out of a chamber opera the day before the performance. I knew I could do it, so I just took on the role. I pulled it off and, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but people noticed. A famous Argentinian tenor in the audience came to my dressing room afterwards and said: ‘You must study. Your voice is interesting.’ I took up singing again, got myself a good teacher, moved to Europe in 1991and here I am today.”

Cura today, a 34-year-old resident of Paris, “husband, lover and father of three”, stands poised in the early stages of a glorious career as one of the top tenors of his generation. Since 1992, when he met his current teacher Vittorio Terranova and began to concentrate on the Italian operatic style, he has swept across opera stages around the world, singing lead tenor roles and winning rave reviews.

But Cura is a risk-taker. For his first performance as Otello – by no means an easy role – he chose to sing live for television and radio under the baton of Claudio Abbado with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. “Otello is a role that most singers approach gradually. But I knew I was ready for it and so I did it. People say a lot of things about me but nobody can say I haven’t got guts.”

He displayed his considerable guts again when deciding to record every Puccini tenor aria in existence at one go for a Warner Classics CD. “No other tenor in the world at this stage in their career would attempt the entire Puccini repertoire of arias. But I did. And I’m glad I did. I was prepared and I sang them in my own way. I sing with sobs and cries. I really take on the characters I am playing and I portray feelings, real suffering. My songs are not like computer music, they are the songs of real people . . . I know there is one note that’s flat in the recording. It could have been simply adjusted by computer, but I didn’t want it changed because I wanted this to be a natural, real sound, not artificial like so many CD recordings."

His next recording will be an album of Argentinian songs, some of his own composition. He will sing in concert with Placido Domingo in London in April next year, and between his commitments he will rush back to his family in Paris. “It’s a wonderful way of earning a living, but real life is more important. I’m lucky to have the security of a happy family to come home to. Yes, I am a diva on stage, but at home I am a normal man. I am passionate; I have seen sadness and I am a man who cries very easily . . . “ At this point, the flood of words threatens to turn into a flood of tears. Cura is a consummate actor, but he is also intelligent and charming. If he is moody, I caught him in a good mood.

Interview with José Cura

Birgit Popp

MediaNotes

1997

José Cura, 35, is considered from many sides to be the tenor of the 21st century, the new star at the tenor firmament. Just within few years he has become one of the most sought-after singers at the world's top opera houses. But the Argentinian singer has not only an outstanding voice, but also some personal views.

Birgit Popp: You have been advised by the choir director to start an education as opera singer, but on the other side you have not been interested in opera, what created your interest ?
José Cura: My interest in opera started very slowly when I was 21, 22. But then I gave up, because my voice was not doing very well. When I was 26 I started again. Slowly I began to like it.

B.P.: When you started for the first time, you learned some wrong techniques, which damaged your voice. At that time did youu had an education as baritone or as tenor ?

J.C.: We were trying to find, what to do. But nothing worked, so I gave up.

B.P.: What made you come back ?

J.C.: I do not know. Life, things. I once sang in a concert and the people told me, you have to sing and to study. So I studied again. Life in a way pushed me.

B.P.: Some people told you, you are a tenor, some that you are a baritone. You say you had to find your own way. How did you do ?

J.C.: I finally found a teacher, who understood my voice and from there I began creating, which is now my voice.

B.P.: Was this still in Argentina ?

J.C.: Yes, back in '88. It was Horacio Amauri. Then I moved to Europe and I continued with another teacher Vittorio Terranova. This was in '91/'92.

B.P.: What made you move to Europe ?

J.C.: If you want to be an opera singer of the Italian repertory and you want to be a good one, you must go to Italy. Because, unless you understand the idiosyncrasy, you will never understand, why they sing in a way and not in another. So, you have to live between them. You have to speak with them. If not, you will never agree, how they sing like that. Why Italian opera is so different to German opera. In German opera you do not have this big climax of high notes. You have it in Italian operas because Italian people like to shout. It is different kind of style. All people write in the way they are and you have to live between them, if you want to sing. If you want to sing Czech opera you have to go to Prague and you have to live in Prague. If not, you will never be able to understand Janácek. You will sing the music, but you will not understand, what Janácek wanted.

B.P.: I understood that you made an audition in '91 at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where you have been studying also conducting and composition, and they did not want you. They were not interested. Is this correct?

J.C.: In December '91 I made my last audition in Argentina and I heard people saying to me for the last time you must go and change your job. So I am off for Europe.

B.P.: Finally this was a push for your career . . .

J.C.: Now they want me there and I might come back to Argentina maybe in '99.

B.P.: You did already sing a Gala-Concert again at the Teatro Colón?

J.C.: I sang a Gala-Concert there in 1994.

B.P.: So you have forgiven them?

J.C.: I do not blame them. I think, it is normal. Every country has the same problem. You never respect the artists of your country. You think always that the artists of another country are better until everybody says that the artist of your country is good. With the orchestra it is the same. If you go to Prague, maybe everybody thinks that the orchestra from Milano is better than the orchestra from Prague. And the orchestra can come to Germany and they say that the orchestra from Prague is better than the one from Germany. It is always like that. Nobody is prophet in his country.

B.P.: Did you meet your wife already back in Argentina?

J.C.: I met my wife when I was fifteen.

B.P.: How long are you married now?

J.C.: Thirteen years.

B.P.: You have three children. How old are they?

J.C.: Ten, five and two.

B.P.: Does the ten-year-old already show interest in music?

J.C.: No, thanks God, he is a normal kid.

B.P.: But for you there was never anything else in your life?

J.C.: In my life I have done a lot of things. I have been a body-builder, an electrician. I have been a carpenter. I work in my house. I work in the woods. I have done everything. Look at my hands. Do you think these are the hands of a tenor ? These are the hands of somebody, who is alive, which is more different and much more interesting.

B.P.: You do the recitals in quite a different way. When did you start sitting on the ground and doing things like that? You are really acting.

J.C.: I was always bizarre. Nobody was able until now to make me do things I do not want. I am doing recitals not for a very long time, but from the very first recital I have done in my life, it was directly like that. I enjoy myself on stage, moving around, joking with the gunnies, sitting down. We have done a concert in '96 and I have done the Villi aria lying flat on my back in the middle of the stage. With Jeans and with my shirt out of my Jeans.

B.P.: When you say you are going new ways in opera, what do you understand with this?

J.C.: You have seen how I am doing a recital. I perform in the same direct way in an opera. If I have to fall down, I fall down. I do not care. I am direct. You will never go to an opera I sing and find me on the stage like that singing my aria. (Setting himself in position) No, never.

B.P.: The acting part has always been very, very important for you?

J.C.: Yes, if not, you stay at home and you can put a tape in. Why are you coming to theater?

B.P.: What do you prefer for the production, a traditional way, a modern way, or do you think it depends on the opera?

J.C.: You can do whatever you want on stage as far as you do something logical and with good taste. The problem today is that some directors use the stage to psychologize their phantoms and this is not good. As long as you are doing something reasonable and you are really believe in what you are doing, you can do anything on stage. You saw me during my recital just with one chair and all the feeling of Pagliacci was there - only with one chair. So you do not need a big thing. If you have an artist with charisma, an artist with aura and you put one chair in the middle of the stage, everything black around and everything will happen. And you can put a lot of things, fireworks etc., but when the artist has no charisma, nothing happens on stage.

B.P.: You have studied conducting and composing, do you think that you approach an opera in a different way than other singers, which do not have this background?

J.C.: It is not only me, every singer, who is a musician, will approach the opera in a different way. Maybe it is not in a different way, in the only logical way, you should approach music. You should be a musician to approach music. The new generation [of singers], thanks God, at least ninety per cent of the new generation, are musicians. I mean, not everybody is a composer or conductor that is very difficult. It needs a very big study, but at least they play the piano or they play an instrument or they can read the music. And that is very important.

B.P.: How is the situation for you, when you feel unhappy about the conducting. Do you say something to the conductor, when you do not agree?

J.C.: When you have a conductor, who is prepared, you can discuss and have a wonderful communion of work. When you have an asshole, there is nothing you can do. You have to impose yourself, if not, you will lose the concert. Because they can really do a disaster. If you have a genius, an Abbado, a Muti, one of those, it is so wonderful to work because you do not talk too much. When you have good people, you do not have to speak. You go and do the music.

B.P.: And with the directors?

J.C.: No, not even Abbado or Muti made me do things I did not want to do because for the simple fact, they never will like to do something that is not musical. So if I make them understand, what I try to do, it works. And, if you can prove to a conductor, even he is a big conductor, that what you are doing is worth doing and the try is interesting, they will accept it. I remember with Abbado we had for example for Otello a couple of discussions, how we do this, how we do that, and we sorted it out musically. With big people, you do not need that. The discussions are always with assholes. And thanks God, when you get up, when you get high in your job, you have less chances to find an asshole. You work with wonderful people because theaters try to take care to put the big singers with the big conductors, because if not you will go to have a mess and it will not go to work.

B.P.: Do you have the feeling that the conductors more recognize you because they know that you have the education as conductor yourself?

J.C.: Apart from people that know me for several years, a conductor you find for the first time is not informed about your musical training. He is not going to learn before you have met for a rehearsal, 'okay, let's see what he has studied, okay, he has studied ..., okay he is fine.' Listen, I have a wonderful anecdote. When I have done Cavalleria with Muti in '96, everything was wonderful. I was never out of bar. After the last day we went to dinner altogether and we were discussing a lot of things, and all of a sudden, he asked me, 'did you ever sing 'Carmen' ?' And I said 'of course, I also conducted Carmen' - 'What ?' - 'Yes, because I am a musician. I am a musician by choice and a tenor by mistake' and he said to me 'ah, now I understand, why in two weeks you were always in tact. I did not know you were a musician. Now I understand.' Sometimes it proves you that he has not to go to find out how good I was, see the status. He is going there with an open mind to do music. If the colleague is good, it is good, if the colleague is stupid, okay, then you have to .....

B.P.: You are still composing yourself and it is said you would prefer to do the composing for text. Is this right?

J.C.: Yes, I like composing and I like to compose with text because I am a singer and I enjoy composing.

B.P.: In which direction are you composing at the moment?

J.C.: I think that it comes close to the 2001. Next century. We have to finish for once with classifications. You write what ever you need or you feel to write or you paint whatever you feel or you need to paint. Because classifications always restrict.

B.P.: Where can we hear what you are composing?

J.C.: For example from the Argentinean recording we have recorded in the end of '97, beginning of '98. I have wrote two songs for that recording. Because they are songs about love and death I wrote simple, easy and enjoyable music for these songs. But, if you come across my requiem or my stabat mater there you have clusters and series. You have different music. So I think we have to finish for once with all these classifications as the way we have to finish with the limits between the countries. I mean it is ridiculous. Still today you are in the European Community and when you go to England you have to show your passport. So what a community is this ? Or to change the currencies, stupid, we have to finish with all the things that restrict people.

B.P.: You also said you would prefer the roles you have the feeling you can transfer something to the public. Roles you mentioned were Otello, Don Jose, Cavaradossi, Des Grieux. You want that the people go out and think about it.

J.C.: You saw myself on stage. Can you imagine myself singing for twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five minutes just like that (doing a great pose) without moving ? A Wagner-Oper or whatever? No . . . .

B.P.: This was not the question. The question was, what do you want to transfer, what do you think, when people coming out for example of these four operas, what they are going to take with them, what should they think about?

J.C.: This is nothing I can say because you will take what you need according to which is your life, which are your problems, what were your problems, when you enter in the show, and which are going to be your problems tomorrow. So you take your part, he takes his part, she takes her part. Every human being takes what he needs in terms on what he is living. So I never will be able to say, I want people going out having this remembrance. It is impossible to have this all under control. I mean if you are having a love-affair with somebody and you are seeing butterflies everywhere you will take home harmony and if you have lost two days or a week ago somebody you loved and you have seen Le Villi you will go out crying. I do not know. Every human being takes out what he is living at the moment.

B.P.: You were talking about emotions and that you want to show emotions and feelings on stage, of course, you do, but I thought there might be something you wanted to transfer to make people think about the opera, but it is more a touching feeling you want to produce. I had the feeling there was more behind.

J.C.: There is one thing I really want. Of course, there is a lot behind, but it is presumptuous to say I want to give a message and people take the message or nothing. I mean this is impossible. That is presumptuous. The one thing I want people to take or to have is they enter the theater in one way and they must leave the theater in another way. Whichever this way is. But, if the same people enter the theater and leave the theater in the same mood they entered that is frustrating. The music must have changed them, because you have open the music to them. Of course, if not, you have done nothing. If you finish a concert and you go to dinner and after two minutes you don't talk anymore about what you have seen, that was not a success. But, if people two days or a month after that still talking about it, that is a success. I had people saying to me we are still talking about the concert in Ireland, we are still talking about your Otello, we are still talking about your Cavalleria, that is wonderful. That is what you want.

B.P.: If I understand you right now, that talking about it - what includes that it was touching and how you performance was, but it does not necessarily mean that they talk about the contents of the opera, or the message or the moral of the opera.

J.C.: Listen, it is again the same history. If you are a butcher, if you are a flower-seller, and you have this culture you would talk about that, if you are a musicologist you would talk about other things, if you are a conductor, you will be talking for days about how the conductor moved his hands, if you are a flutist you will criticize the flute and if you are simple and normal, you will talk about the emotions. I mean everybody talks about the thing that touches more directly. There is one thing I would like everybody to talk about, yes, of course, and that is about emotions. I get crazy when people go out off one of my shows and the day after you read the critics and they say 'oh, wonderful, but the third note, the fourth bar or the second system was a little bit so and so, that is shit. It drives me crazy. It is so cheap, but, of course, cheap criticism is part of frustrated human beings. I think, we have to learn to go with it.

B.P.: Why did you chose to live in Paris?

J.C.: I lived in Verona for four years. And then, because Italian bureaucracy is like them, very messy, unfortunately, because they are a wonderful country, I got to move, I got to leave the country, and I moved to France because some people of the French government invited me to come to France, so that why we moved to France.

B.P.: As I understand one of your hobbies is to work in your house.

J.C.: Oh, yes, like every young couple - for years and years we have been renting and now finally we bought our house. And we bought the house of our dreams as it happen to everybody. I am normal like everybody. And now we are working in our house.

B.P.: So is it an old house?

J.C.: No, it is not that old, it is from the fifties. Forty years old.

B.P.: You are living now for three years in France, are you going more into the French repertory?

J.C.: I have two operas of the French repertory, which are 'Samson et Dalila' and 'Carmen'. Everybody says I would have to learn Werther. I do not know, because right now, Werther is sung by lyric tenors, maybe some mistake. I do not know, I have to study it and find out.

B.P.: You say that for you a lot of roles, which are considered as dramatic like Otello or Radames are not really dramatic for you. Which roles would you consider for really dramatic?

J.C.: I think there is a mistake in the classification. One thing is to be dramatic and one other thing is to be a shouter. You can have the most intense drama of your life in silence. And that is the mistake. People say Otello is dramatic, so you must go there and shout. Otello is the drama of a man, who after being a big general is breaking into pieces. It is the last twenty-four hours of a poor human being breaking into pieces. So how can you shout ? But, of course, when you are not able to act, when you are not able to transmit energy and sufferance without shouting, you shout.

B.P.: So you think there is not a really dramatic role in your sense because you said the classification is wrong.

J.C.: No, no, the roles are dramatic. What is a mistake is to think that dramatic is a synonym of shout. That is the mistake. Samson is a dramatic role, but Samson after the beginning of the opera, when he imposes himself as the leader, then he must do the most incredible soft singing. All the duet of the second act is soft, sensual singing, it is not shouting. And the role still is dramatic. So the problem is trying not to go dramatic as the synonym of shouting, of loud. You can be dramatic in silence and you can be joyful making a big noise. All depends on the energy. Most of the most dramatic scenes of theater, of cinema, of opera happen in silence.

B.P.: What future plans do you have. I mean singing Otello already with 34 years is fantastic but what stays for the future. What stays what is a challenge?

J.C.: Of course, I have been so lucky that in the last three years of my life I done debuts in 25 roles, so even if I still have another four, five or six roles I would like to do, I now have the chance of repeating those roles and improve them. And this is much more difficult than doing the debuts because you can do a debut and if it is good it is better. But people forgive you because it is your debut. People say 'okay, it is a good debut and okay he will be better in the future.' - Now, after I have done the debut, I mean the dangerous part is now that I have to show that each time I sing a role I am improving. And that is very difficult.

B.P.: You have done so many debuts at the big opera houses over the last three years, at the Covent Garden, at the Scala, at Vienna, how do you feel about this success, how do you stand it ? It must be overwhelming somehow?

J.C.: I have been doing music since I was twelve. I am now thirty-five, so I have been doing music for twenty-three years. Which is apparently surprising for everybody, and how from one day to the other, miracle, miracle, but this is not that true, because after twenty-three years of preparation, of trying to be prepared for the moment, now is the moment, Now, is the moment you know and the moment they see, but under that you have twenty-three years of work. That is why I am the way on stage. The way I move on stage is because I have twenty-three years of background.

B.P.: But, no matter how hard you have been working. To have these debuts at all the big theaters must be overwhelming.

J.C.: Of course, it is overwhelming and it is nice. I enjoy it. What can I do ? You want me to tell you that I am every time I go to theater I tremble. 'oh, God, I am in the Scala'. I really enjoy it. I really enjoy to be on stage.

B.P.: It must have changed your life.

J.C.: Of course, everything changes my life. This is changing my life. After the chat with you tomorrow I will be a different guy.

B.P.: I do not think so really.

J.C.: Of course, yes, everything that happens in your life, if you are intelligent enough to capitalize change your life.

B.P.: You said in an interview referring to sing Otello in a young age, because you were warned, that if you sing Otello, you would not like to sing any other role anymore, 'not the role is dangerous to the singer, the singer is dangerous for the role. How do you mean this?

J.C.: The danger of Otello is like the danger of being in touch with perfect things. It is like the danger of being in front of La Gioconda. It is like the danger to be in front of the most beautiful landscape. After that you say, okay, what now, what else ? That is the problem with Otello. My teacher Vittorio Terranova told me, the problem with Otello is not the singing. If you are a good actor enough, if you are intelligent enough, you will cope with the character. The problem with Otello is, that once you have sung Otello, there is no way to go.

B.P.: That was the question about the challenges.

J.C.: Exactly, it is the master piece of master pieces. It is like being a baritone and sing Don Giovanni. Where are you go then? Every other opera sounds cheap after that. It is like tasting the most incredible wine and after that every other wine is like bbbb [sic]. That is the problem of 'Otello', It takes you everywhere. It changes your life and what do you do then? Even the most incredible operas like 'Samson et Dalila' or 'Carmen' they have pages, where the opera goes down. 'Otello' is like 'ahhhh' all the time. You finish the opera and you cannot get out of the character. What can you do? That is Otello.

Cura, A tenor for the New Age

Cork Examiner

July 1997

Declan Hassett

JOSÉ CURA has been granted the freedom of Cork City’s collective heart.

Not since the great Benjamino Gigli, then in the twilight of his career, performed in the southern capital, had there been greater anticipation of an operatic concert. José Cura, at the height of his vocal powers, confirmed at the City Hall on Saturday night that he is the greatest dramatic tenor in the world.

The man from Rosario, Argentina, may never pass our way again after his final, three-city New Ireland tour appearance at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Wednesday. Audiences in the NCH, Limerick and Cork, can now say: we heard him and fell in love with the voice and the man.

This reviewer, since first hearing Cura in May, has been saying this was the tenor of the new age, the man for the millennium and there is little doubt.

The thunderous stamping of feet on Cork’s City Hall floor, the roars of approval, said it all at; everyone had been touched by the excitement and tangible sense that here was greatness.

Hard then, to be dispassionate about this opera gala special, made possible by impresario Barra O Tuama and Jack Casey of sponsors New Ireland, but some attempt must be made to recapture the occasion for those unable to be present.

The Voices of Limerick, under the direction of Colette Davis, (accompanist Moiré Grey), surpassed the high standard reached at the concert on Thursday. They opened with a sparkling Waltz song from Act I of Faust and ended with an appealing “Angelus” from Maritana, but it was their choral support of Cura and soprano Virginia Kerr which confirmed their class.

Ms. Kerr was not her usual impressive self in her opening “Ernani involami” by Verdi as there was a sharpness of upper register in this and in her Czardas from Die Fledermaus. However, her “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca was excellent and she was truly magnificent with Cura in the love duet from Otello and later in the “O Soave fanciulla” from La Boheme.

Cura, accompanied brilliantly throughout by Covent Garden music supreme, Alistair Dawes, was stunning from the first off-stage rendering of “Deserto sulla terra” from Il Trovatore and then his swaggeringly confident “Tutta parea sorridere” from Il Corsaro, both by Verdi. There followed an appearance by tenor John Scott in Scene from Act I from Norma by Bellini. He strode up the center aisle to send a current through the audience for his Scene from Act 2 of Le Villi, Puccini’s first opera. Here, he threw himself on his back on the stage and delivered one of the most haunting and disquieting arias heard in this 12 year series. The best was yet to come, with his aria “Cielo e mar” from La Giocconda bringing the proverbial house down.

There was more, much more, but to reveal the pearls form a necklace of encores might spoil the surprise for those going to the NCH on Wednesday. Suffice to say, almost an hour after the concert ended, the genial Cura, Ms. Kerr and other start, including narrator David McInerney, were signing autographs. Also present were members of Cura’s UK based fan-club. After this series their numbers will surely grow.

More than a tenor

Gramaphone

November 1997

Nick Kimberley

A new tenor’s in town and he dares to launch his first solo recital with “Nessun dorma.” But the Argentinian José Cura demonstrates that young tenors today have to have brains as well as beautiful voices.

Composers, they say, don’t understand singers’ needs, singers don’t understand what composers want, and conductors simply go their and conductors simply go their own way. Perhaps José Cura is the man to effect some kind of rapprochement between the three camps to singing after he had got a thorough grounding in the arts and crafts of both composing and conducting. Nor does he consider that he has put composing and conducting behind him: “I’m still a conductor,” he says, “and for the last five years, I’ve been working on composing an oratorio, Ecce homo. It’s about the last hours of Jesus’s life, but I haven’t written a note in two years: I’ve had other things to do. I’d call my compositional language ‘post-romanticism’, but enriched by my stage experience. I don’t care to be restricted to one style. We’ve passed through perfect tonality to neurotic atonality. Now we’re putting them all together, placing the notes at the service of expression, whatever the style. And as a singer, it’s important that I also put my knowledge as a musical technician at the service of the expression in what I’m singing.”

Cura’s decision to concentrate on singing was based on the reality of musical life in his native Argentina. “It’s difficult to survive as a composer or conductor anywhere in the world, but it was that much harder a decade ago in Argentina. I realized that the quality of my voice and the repertoire that I could sing would probably enable me to earn my living as a singer. Then in 1991 I came to Europe, thinking I was ready to be a professional singer. I soon found out that I wasn’t. I spent a couple of years in Italy in the incubator, giving concerts, taking small roles, developing my technique and, most important, my sense of style. Then in 1993, the opera house in Trieste wanted to stage Antonio Bibalo’s Miss Julie. They couldn’t find a tenor: the opera’s based on Strindberg, so it’s difficult to sing and difficult to act. Someone mentioned that they knew a lyric-dramatic tenor who could act: why didn’t they try him? That was me, and it was a big success. Then I did Janacek’s The Makropulos Affair in Turin, which marked the real explosion in my career.”

If it’s the voice that is now attracting attention, Cura acknowledges lessons learnt acquiring what are, for now his subsidiary skills. “When I conducted, I used to say that I never wanted to be a singer, because singers are hysterical human beings, always worrying about having a cold or a fever. But people suggested that I study a bit of singing. The voice is so important today, that even if I wasn’t going to be a singer, knowing about singing would be important to my future as a conductor. Now that I’m a singer and sometimes have to work with conductors who know nothing about singing, I understand why people wanted me to study singing.”

The conductor on Cura’s solo debut recording (of Puccini arias) certainly knows about singing: Placido Domingo. The two met when Cura won the International Placido Domingo Competition in 1994. Cura is not too concerned about being labeled “the new Domingo”. “When you’re an ‘unknown’, people’s instant reaction is to compare, Domingo was compared to Bjorling; Carreras to di Stefano. But all those singers are unique. Placido is a good conductor, even it he’s not a Muti or an Abbado. He’s a singer who conducts, which you can’t say about Muti or Abbado. The danger is that instead of me singing Puccini in my way, I would be singing Puccini the way Domingo used to. But Placido’s not stupid. I said, ‘I want to sing these things the way I want to sing then.’ And he said, ‘That’s absolutely fair, even if I’ve sung these phrases differently. Do it your way. I’ll follow you.’”

For Cura, doing it his way meant according each aria its dramatic due. “When I’m recording, I forget about where I am, I try to be the character. If I have to cry, I cry, if I have to sob, I sob, and if I have to crack, I crack. The listener must take it or leave it. I was listening to the playback, there was a sob here, a crack there, and the technical team said, ‘Do you want to leave those in?’ I said, ‘He’s suffering, he’s crying. That’s how you should sound.’ I’m sure many people will love it, because there’s emotion there. But it’s the law of the jungle that others will say, ‘That’s not clean, it’s technically at fault.’ People should understand that if it’s not ‘perfect’, it’s not a mistake: that how I wanted it.”

For those of us who can feast on a good tenor voice as if there were no tomorrow, this is (to put it crudely) the goods. But of course the question is: jus how crude is it? Such answer as the first track provides is not reassuring. A peculiarity of the programme is that it goes backwards. It starts with Turandot and recedes along a strict chronological line to Le Villi. That of itself is an attractive idea, but it means that the terminus is a long and somewhat inconclusive excerpt, while the starting-point is “Nessun Dorma!”. We all know what that means these days, and it looks suspiciously like making a bid for the market if not for the kingdom.

And it is not endearingly sung. A dark, rather throaty, a big and uncharming voice reiterates the famous command. As it takes the high As we realize (if we have not done so already) that this is special, rising easily and thrillingly out of the baritonal middle register. Of anybody in recent times, Franco Bonisolli is the tenor who comes to mind for comparison in this respect, and as though to confirm the association Cura holds his high B (“vincero”) for the maximum length compatible with holding on to the succeeding A for even longer. But he is a man with surprises in store. “Non piangere, Lui!” begins quietly and is thoughtfully phrased. Gianni Schnicchi, in the next track, brings something quite different, an incisive, energetic style, a clean-cut tone. Luigi’s music in Il tobarro suits him perfectly as later does Dick Johnson’s in La Fanciulla del West. In between are two short solos from La rondine, and just as one is meditating reproachfully along the lines of “And to think this was first sung by Tito Schipa!”, behold, all turns to lightness and intimacy. Rather similarly in the Tosca arias, “Recondita armonia” is stolid, almost routine (though at least the first and last phrases are duly moderated), but then “E lucevan le stelle” becomes the real expression of a man facing the prospect of imminent execution, and writing a poem.

So, we have here, in this 34-year-old record-debutant, a thrilling voice, an individual timbre, an unpredictable art. His ‘face’ wears too much of a scowl, though that can soften too. He does not give the impression of thinking about the person he is nominally addressing, but this is a solo recital and perhaps it would be different in a complete opera. He is accompanied here with uncommon sympathy by a conductor who, we do not need to be reminded, has a good deal more experience of singing that has the singer himself. How his individuality would respond to a Muti or Gardiner we will have to see. He has, apparently, two more discs in preparation. One thing is certain: we who eat tenor have two feast-days set aside.

Night of the Stars

By Placido Domingo on... José Cura

This is London

14 November 1997

My first introduction to José Cura came in February 1994 when my wife, Marta, heard him sing the role of Ruggero in Puccini's La Rondine in Turin. she came back and said to me: "I've discovered a sensational young tenor you should hear - he's fantastic."

I made a note of his name and was pleased to discover that he was on the list of finalists of the Operalia competitions in Vienna and Mexico that I would be attending later that same year.

Once at the competition, I could see just by watching the way that he communicted with the conductor that, although he was a young singer, he was relaxed, gave off an air of maturity and knew what he wanted. The quality of this singing and his sense of dramatic interpretation were breathtaking.

I was thrilled when José won the contest. It is always wonderful when the competition produces a winner who is a good singer, but when the singer is a tenor - and such a tenor - it is a great, great pleasure.

Since then, he has shown that his voice is capable of spanning a great repertoire and has toured the likes of La Scala and Covent Garden. Last year, in Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of conducting him for the first time in the role of Pollione in Bellini's Norma. Earlier this year, I acted as conductor on his debut recording of Puccini arias which think was a very rewarding experience for both of us. For me, being associated with José is very satisfying. He is a real discovery and I have no doubt that he will become one of the opera world's great stars.

Raging Cura

Matthew Gurewitsch

Live! Music

July 1997

His name may not yet rank up there with the world’s great tenors, but the fiery young José Cura is bound and determined that it will - and soon.

When the tenor José Cura writes his life story, this is a scene people will remember. The place: somewhere beneath the arches at the mammoth Arena of Verona, built by the Romans for barbaric blood circuses, appropriated in our century for operatic blockbusters, thronged to every summer by tens of thousands. Fresh off the plane from Buenos Aires comes a brawny young tenor. A black belt in kung fu and former trainer of bodybuilders with the looks of a Latin movie star, he has set out with wife and two-and-a-half-year-old son to seek his operatic fortune at the Italian source. For now, his humble aim is to land work in the chorus. The family has to eat.

“You have no working papers,” the she-dragon at the front desk coolly observes. “We can’t take you. Of course,” she adds, speaking to his back as he heads to the exit, “if you want to sing at the Arena, you can always come as a soloist. Ha. Ha, Ha.”

“I would know her out of a thousand people,” says Cura, who in just the fourth year of his career has shot to the pinnacle of his profession and shows every sign of staying there. Dressed for comfort in a loose gray sweat suit and sneakers, he occupies a meeting room in the offices of the San Francisco Opera with the relaxed, macho grace of a heavyweight on a training break, but the dark, brooding eyes give off the same slow burn that compels attention on the stage.

Since the Verona rebuff, the young fire-eater, now 34, has broken into most of the world’s top opera houses, earning the sort of reviews that might turn a guy’s head. His American debut came three seasons ago at Lyric Opera of Chicago, when Placido Domingo, then 53, recommended Cura as his alternate. The start of the latest season showed off Cura’s star quality in back-to-back debuts in California: first with the Los Angeles Music Center Opera as the two-timing Roman general Pollione in Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece Norma; then in San Francisco, as Don José, the deserting mama’s boy fatally smitten by gypsy heroine of Bizet’s imperishable Carmen.

After Norma, a producer from Universal Studios proclaimed Cura “opera’s Kevin Costner.” Maybe he was responding to the uncluttered, expressive clarity of Cura’s well-cut, open features or to his sculpted yet fluent body language. What the parallel fails to capture is Cura’s natural penchant for heightened rhetoric and the flourish of costume drama, his unaffected dignity within a grand manner. Give him parts with an extravagant emotional and dramatic trajectory: the hero of the Saint-Saëns biblical spectacular Samson et Dalila, say, towering in his pride, shattered in his shame, clawing his bloody way to triumphant self-immolation. This happens to be the role that will next bring Cura back to the United States, but not until 1998, at the invitation of Domingo, the newly installed artistic director of the Washington Opera.

Cura’s debut with New York’s mighty Metropolitan Opera lies farther off, tentatively on opening night of the 1999-2000 season. Prestige aside, ‘the tenor much prefers engagements closer to home, on the outskirts of Paris near the park of Versailles, where pre-revolutionary chateaus and manor houses jostle with more recent homes of comfortably bourgeois aspect. On the road, home-sickness can reduce him to tears.

It helps when he can hop a plane between shows to hug the kids and tuck them in. Besides, Cura likes his house: no Architectural Digest palazzo but a light, cheerful single-family affair, with snug bedrooms for José Ben, eight, Yázmine Zoe, three, and Nicolás, 13 months; a wide living-dining room with wood-burning stove (great for grilling the chops for Sunday brunch); and wall-to-wall windows opening on the toy-strewn yard. A metal gate in the wall at the far end of the yard opens on the Foret de Marly, formerly a royal preserve, shaded by trees that stand 60 feet tall. The gate is locked, of course, but the Curas have the key. And in the cellar is the control center for Dad’s career, containing piano, scores, phone, fax, punching bag and a king-size shower stall with the biggest showerhead you ever saw. There is also space for a personal sauna, which Cura will have put in, he says, when he has the money.

Cura is a youthful avatar of a breed opera lovers have been starting to think of as extinct: the dramatic tenor, Latin style. Such voices do not suit the lyric parts of those young, mostly sweet-tempered swains with little but romance on their minds. They are made, rather, for rebels like Samson, bullies like Canio in I Pagliacci, men of war like the jealous moor of Verdi’s Otello, all fraught with emotional baggage that would shred a lighter voice. Other dramatic tenors have found it tonic to alternate such punishing assignments with an occasional lighter one. Not Cura. “I’m a heavy dramatic guy,” is his comment on this score. Apparently so, and he has the voice to match: somber, rich, strong and free, with thrilling flashes of metallic brilliance. As commonly understood, the rare distinction of musicality means something like sensitivity and tenderness, a quality (as it were) of the fingertips, but in Cura, it is something more primal. Though sound and phrasing are gorgeous, his song seems torn out from the ground of his being, like the moan of a beast.

The title for his eventual autobiography, Cura announces, will have to be !Cantarás! - a decree of destiny hard to render in English. It probably captures the meaning best to say: You’ll Sing Whether You Want to or Not!

How so? Many a young musician’s talent declares itself early. Cura’s did not - or perhaps the people who should have recognized it back in his native Rosario, Argentina’s second city, were just not paying attention. At seven, young José was sent home by his piano teacher with a note advising his parents that he had no gift for music.

Yet in his teens, Cura picked up the guitar, quickly progressing from casual strumming to rigorous classical study. At 15, he made his first stab at conducting. But by then his goal was to compose. Over the predictable objection of his accountant father, he entered the Rosario conservatory, where he found the pace grindingly slow.

The first to urge a very reluctant Cura to train his voice was a chorus master at the conservatory who heard him vocalizing jazz improvisations during a rehearsal break. After five lessons, the novice was set loose on an audience of “other students and old ladies” with “E Lucian le stelle” from Tosca, a bittersweet reminiscence of love sung as the imprisoned hero awaits his death by firing squad. “I sang with instinct,” Cura recalls. “I liked the sensation of singing this lovely music. I liked the applause, the emotions. And so I decided to try to be a singer.” Besides, he figured, singing might come in handy in his composing and conducting.

Cura’s memory for the details of his formation, if accurate, verges on the staggering. His tales convey the pomp of life writ large - not from delusions of grandeur but from an innate, rather lofty sense that every personal history, if taken seriously, partakes of the mythological. Even the dedication to his wife on a photograph from Giordano’s Fedora, in which Cura made his Chicago debut, seems worded with an eye on posterity: “To Silvia, the only reason for my song and joy of my life.” And how many singers can one imagine doing as Cura did in the aftermath of the Falklands war, penning a requiem for his generation’s fallen brothers? It seems the act of a later-day Beethoven or Berlioz.

In retrospect, the early chapters of the Cura saga fall into classic patterns. Classic hard times in Buenos Aires, where a cacophony of inept teachers and functionaries of the renowned Teatro Colon destroyed our hero’s confidence, his high notes and his joy in singing, landing him back on the podium as music director for a little operatic ensemble. A classic cliffhanger when the scheduled tenor withdrew three days before a concert and Cura stepped in to save the day. The classic coincidence when Gustavo Lopez, a tenor from the Colón, heard him and pressed him to make singing his profession.

“Don’t tell me that,” was Cura’s disgruntled reply. “I’ve heard it all already.” We must leave what came next to the pages of !Cantarás! The teachers who taught Cura for the sake of the art, never taking a penny. The philistines of the Buenos Aires music establishment who cried, “You’re not a singer, you’re a shouter!” refusing him a place even in the chorus. And the last straw, when Cura auditioned for the Colón with the aria “Celeste Aida” and was told, “Well, maybe we can use you. . . . The voice is not so important.” The role for which they thought he might do had but a single line: “La cena e pronto” (“Supper is served”), surely the least memorable passage of La Traviata.

“I went home and said to my wife, ‘We’re going to Europe. We have to try.’” As we know, the doors there did not open instantly. He looked up distant aunts and uncles and cousins in northern Italy. “A poor relation from South America,” was the reaction Cura sensed. “Get rid of him.” Then there was that bitch in Verona.

But if the antagonists in Cura’s path loom like dragons, the helpers shine like knights in gleaming armor. In the nick of time, Italy fielded more: A voice teacher who gave him a hearing, a star agent who took him on, a final voice teacher who later explained, “I’m not your teacher, just your consultant.”

Vindication came when Cura triumphed at the finals of the second international Operalia competition, established by Domingo to identify the next generation of stars. From then on, Domingo, too, stood within the circle of Cura’s supporters and champions.

“He’s a tenor,” says an eminent conductor who admires Cura, declining to elaborate. Not that the implication is especially obscure, the fraternity being notorious for willfulness, stubbornness and vanity. (According to an old joke, they have resonance where their brains would be.) “He’s a tenor,” says a veteran opera director with whom Cura did not get along, who does not mind adding that he found Cura unresponsive and uncooperative. “Watch the way he hangs on to the scenery,” the director adds, catty but not far from the mark. Well, what performer doesn’t have his little idiosyncrasies? Here’s another: At curtain calls, Cura clutches his right hand to his left elbow as if cast ashore by rough seas, the lone survivor of a recent shipwreck. A strange note of tragedy at the peak of triumph, but it has its poetry.

In any event, Cura has about him the air of a man who will not be swayed, will not be rushed. “A great career starts here,” he notes, his finger at his throat. “But what sustains it is here,” now pointing to his temple. Consider the time he is taking to launch a discography. Apart from a live recording or two of rarities like Puccini’s Le Villi (Nuova Era) and Mascagni’s Iris (Ricordi), there is nothing by Cura in the CD bins. By now, one would surely expect a recital disc or two, but no. “It’s presumptuous to think everyone is waiting for my records,” he explains. “I want any disc I make to have a certain maturity. You have to earn the right.”

Consider, too, his attitude toward operatic business as usual. “I’m not an opera fan,” he volunteers. “If the interpreters aren’t really interested, I get bored.” As of last fall, the count of operas he had seen came to a pathetic five: Otello and I Pagliacci with Domingo; La Boheme; Aida (which he walked out on); Barber of Seville (which put him to sleep). Pagliacci he admired: “It passed like a movie.” Contrariwise, Cura has no use for movies in which singers (and here Cura does not hesitate to cite Domingo in Francesco Rosi’s widely admired Carmen) fall back on the externalized gestures of hackneyed operatic convention.

The standard to which he holds his own acting if rigorous. “I’m not an artist of useless gestures,” he insists. “I’m like in normal life. When I work on a character, I work from inside, from really deep.” His Los Angeles appearance unexpectedly proved the point. Few think Pollione a character of much depth; neither does Cura. To add dimension, Cura lent the Roman a touch of an affliction that also troubled Julius Caesar: epilepsy, viewed by the ancients as a dread manifestation of the divine. Thus a weak-willed cipher became a demigod bravely at war with his fate, and cardboard turned into flesh and blood.

On the cusp of the millennium, opera is witnessing an upswing in popularity that even 10 years ago few would have predicted. Supertitles and video and whiz-band directors are a big part of the story. But in the long run, the form cannot do without great voices ablaze with great personalities, unafraid to remake tradition in their own images. In the nature of things sacred monsters are never numerous. A few bright prospects notwithstanding - Cecilia Bartoli, Bryn Terfel, Karita Mattila - indications are that the species is dwindling.

And what of Cura? Certainly his path will not be easy. That, too, is in the nature of things. For a true culture hero, success and adversity are two faces of a single destiny. But if Cura prevails, opera in the 21st century will surely be the brighter.

José Cura: A Star Tenor Steps out of the Wings

Wall Street Journal

30 October 1997

Matthew Gureswitsch

“The dogs are barking, Sancho. That means we’re getting somewhere.” José Cura, the new tenor from Argentina, is quoting “Don Quixote.” At first sight, you might not peg him for much of a reader, but Mr. Cura is full of surprises. An athletic 6-foot-plus, a devoted husband and a father of three, he moves like the martial-arts instructor he used to be. In Hollywood, where the compliment means something, producers tell him he looks like a movie star (think Andy Garcia – a big Andy Garcia). While certain of his best-paid colleagues scarcely read music, Mr. Cura’s training includes classical guitar, conducting, and composition. He has penned, among other things, an ambitious requiem (as yet unperformed), dedicated to the victims of the Falklands War. Singing now keeps him too busy to write, but it has not altered his sense of who he is. “I’m a musician by vocation,” he declares, “a tenor by accident.”

No, he’s not another nice lyric, like the personable French-Sicilian Roberto Alagna, but a Latin-style heavyweight – a lirico spinto. His timbre is dark, somber, even forbidding. There is metal in the high notes. His is not an instrument for bantering trifles. As an actor, he hates “useless gestures,” which has brought him some brickbats in Italy, where audiences like to see more overt emotion, but praise in England, where they appreciate understatement. (Besides, Mr. Cura doesn’t mind pointing out the British really know theatre.)

The Piedmontese capital of Torino was crackling with anticipation in May when Mr. Cura, at the comparatively tender age of 34, took on Verdi’s Otello, the most daunting tenor part in Italian opera. In most respects, the show was an instant replay from the Easter Festival in Salzburg, a deluxe affair featuring the Berlin Philharmonic in the pit, led by Claudio Abbado. The only new face was Mr. Cura, taking over from Placido Domingo, the reigning Otello for two decades. Raising the stakes just that much higher, Italian national television was broadcasting the premiere live.

Otello is a killing part, and Mr. Cura doubts that he will return to it soon. But he was ready. From the commander’s first clarion cry of triumph to the suicide’s last broken phrases, the tenor never faltered. The love duet, shared with the radiant Desdemona of Barbara Frittoli, has seldom sounded at once so romantic and so swirling with danger. Along the way, Otello’s eavesdropping brought a shocking epiphany of self-loathing. The murder of Desdemona, accompanied by an embrace, was even more devastating that usual: an act of love too far gone to mend except in a double death.

An audience that had moved mountains to get tickets cheered the production to the rafters, reserving the loudest hurrahs for the hero. Among the throng that waited for more than an hour at the stage door to pay their respects stood a frail, top-hatted old man in opera cape and white scarf. Verdi’s ghost? The idea did not seem far-fetched.

Immediately, fans started asking whether the telecast would be issued on home video, a question rumored to hinge chiefly on the royalty demands of the Berlin Philharmonic. The issue loomed especially large in view of Mr. Cura’s surprisingly short discography. In this age of instant recordings, there was nothing out there for consumers to take home – nothing, that is, but Puccini’s early and obscure Le Villi (on Nuova Era), a sort of operatic Giselle.

“You have to earn the right to make an album,” Mr. Cura remarked around this time last year. He was in California for back-to-back debuts, chalking up triumphs in Los Angeles as the Roman general Pollione, two-timing seducer of Druid priestesses in Norma, and in San Francisco as the masochistic mama’s boy Don José in Carmen. “It’s presumptuous – how do you pronounce that word? – presumptuous to think everybody is waiting.” Still, he thought he might do a Puccini CD before too long, Puccini being something of a specialty of his. In 1996, he had headlined a three-hour “Puccini Spectacular” in Australia, playing to sold-out stadiums in Sydney and Melbourne. Big chunks from La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, Turandot. Trucks of scenery, trunks of costumes. Cast of hundreds. Four leading sopranos. One tenor.

The debut disk, recorded by Erato a month after the Torino Otello, went on sale this week, and Puccini it is. Beginning with “Nessun Dorma,” it includes every remotely excerptable tenor solo in the Puccini canon, whether it is technically an “aria” or not. While every day it seems, recording companies are pushing another wannabe, proudly presenting material by a half dozen or more composers, all of which end up sounding depressingly the same, Mr. Cura does the opposite, finding specificity in selections that might at first glance seem too much of a piece.

His hushed tenderness in the farewell to the world from Tosca sounds entirely unlike the yearning dignity in another such farewell from Fanciulla del West. The carefree playboy in Manon Lescaut (not perhaps, Mr. Cura’s strongest suit) sounds nothing like the carefree playboy of Madame Butterfly. And despair, Mr. Cura shows us, come in countless shadings. (It is not only the heroines whom Puccini tortures.)

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