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A fistful of tenors: Who will be the next ‘big three’? As the Argentinian singer José Cura returns to Ireland for the third time, Arminta Wallace finds out who’s making the most noise in the international tenor stakes.

(excerpts)

Saturday night at the Bastille Opera in Paris, and it’s show time. Inside the concrete foyer the middle classes mill about, programmes in hand; outside, Japanese tourists wearing optimistic smiles and hand-written “Cherche Billets” signs brave the sharp air of late maximum chic, and the place is packed to the doors. For a visiting Paddy, the excitement is palpable-on the opera thermometer, a new production of Carmen at one of Europe’s major opera houses has to rate somewhere between “overheated” and “feverish”.

The moment the curtain rises, however, it becomes apparent that this production is never going to make it into the annals of theatre history. We peer in dismay as interminable chorus lines dressed in 40 shades of brown repeatedly skip back and forth across a dimly-lit stage. We fidget discreetly to keep ourselves awake, and are just beginning to long for a few mantillas and a red flounce or two when, mid-way through the second act, and miracle occurs. Carmen’s lover Don Jose, sung by the Argentinian tenor José Cura, has taken center stage to sing La Fleur Que Tu M’avais Jetee – which, thanks to the seamless beauty of its melody and its extraordinary pianissimo finish, has become a showpiece aria. The moment he begins to sing, a profound silence settles on the audience. All fidgeting ceases. By the time he reaches the final, anguished “je t’aime”, Carmen’s is probably the only dry eye in the house. It’s a miracle, all right – the miracle of a top class tenor in action.

A beautiful, effortlessly powerful voice; a lithe, panther-like grace on stage; a commitment to the part so total that when we go backstage to congratulate him on his performance, Cura -- though he is, as always, the epitome of hospitality and charm –- appears drained to the point of exhaustion. This is what it’s like at the top of the opera ladder. The rewards are great: so are the pitfalls. For every tenor who makes it to the top rung, dozens get stuck on the lower reaches, or fall off altogether.

But has Cura made it to the very top? And if so, is he alone there, of is there a plethora of pretenders to the tenor crown? Over the next few years, will we see the emergence of “a new three tenors” to replace the unholy trinity of Domingo, Carreras and Pavarotti, mostly retired from active service after long and stunningly successful careers – or is the whole idea just an outdated marketing notion which will be quietly allowed to drop by a new generation of intelligent, clued-in singers? Neil Dalrymple, and agent with the London-based Music International, has no hesitation in placing José Cura in the first rank of today’s tenors, along with the Sicilian-born Roberto Alagna and new boy on the block Marcelo Alvarez. Below those three, he says, there’s a major jump downwards to the next level, where he picks out the Americans Jerry Hadley and Richard Leech, a Canadian helden-tenor by the name of Richard Margison, and the Hispanic bel canto trio of Raman Vargas, Luis Lima and Tito Beltran.

[…]

The Latin American countries are also producing beautiful, well-trained voices. Cesar Hernandez, from Puerto Rico, looks a bit like Domingo and has that sort of sound, and Octavio Arevalo, a young Mexican who just sang Nemorino for us, will probably be singing at the Met next season.” Another company which has always prided itself on nurturing young voices is Welsh National opera. Isabel Murphy, director of opera planning at WNO, says her top three tenors would be the British tenor Ian Bostridge, Roberto Alagna and the Argentinian Marcelo Alvarez, who recorded his debut CD, Bel Canto, with WNO last year. “There are some very interesting young British tenors, too – people like Paul Charles Clarke who also sings at the Met and around Europe, or the Welsh singer Gwyn Hughes Jones. Another exciting British tenor to come on the scene is John Daszak, who is singing Peter Grimes in our new production, and has also been booked to do the role at La Scala in the year 2000.” Such is the perspective from the opera house. But what about when you walk into a record shop in search of tenors on disc? Alan Blyth, a specialist opera reviewer with Gramophone magazine, says José Cura would be his number one, followed by Roberto Alagna and Marcelo Alvarez.

“Cura is a very good Samson, as good as we’ve had for many years, and the performances on his Puccini Arias disc were very fine...”

[Jonathan Peter] Kenny is himself a tenor buff, with a considerable collection of historical recordings and a soft spot for Pavarotti. “He really is wonderful. Of course he’s such a megastar, he can’t really come on in an opera without playing the part of Pavarotti – But he’s still a great singer.

“I first went to see José Cura in Stiffelio at Covent Garden. It was fantastic. I’d never heard of him, but he reminded me at once of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi – it was the vibrato, I think, and also the baritonal sound which suddenly surprises you by being able to surge upwards. I like his singing very much – I think it’s very honest and open and from the heart. Even from his discs he comes across as a very sincere and truthful performer.” 

“There are far more openings for tenors that for any other voice in the profession,” says Kenny. “There are fewer tenors around, and so there are lots of great roles. But it’s a dangerous profession, being a tenor. You have to sing in big theatres, before huge audiences, you have to make a big should and project your voice all the time. You’ve got to produce the top notes. The money notes, they call them. But you’ve also got to be careful because if you spend all your money notes at the beginning of you career . . ." 

It’s a sentence which hardly bears finishing.  

Soon, there will be no getting away from Cura. Next month he is the subject of a South Bank Show, and Verismo, his third solo album, a collection of 19th-century Italian tenor standards, is set to be heavily marketed.Cura's press pack comes complete with a glossy photo, head inclined downwards like the generic haircut pictures in a thousand provincial barbershops, designer stubble, a wolfish grin, and more styling gel than Ross Geller circa 1995.

But is he sexy? This may seem irrelevant. Surely the question is "Can he sing?" and yes, he can, but a few calls to people in various areas of the classical music industry confirmed that I, my female friends, my gay male friends and probably my mum too may be the target audience for tenors.

Traditionally the marketing wisdom has been that women buy books and men buy CDs. The trouble with classical music is the repetition of core repertoire, which is usually already covered in its audience's record collection. How do you persuade even the most die-hard opera lover to buy yet another recital disc?

Neil Evans, editor of Classic CD, finds the push for a new three tenors, or even a fourth one, every interesting. "I think they're trying to look at a new market," he says. "Whether it's there or not is debatable but from the interviews I've seen and from how they're pushing him, they are big on the macho, moody figure. Bocelli, Alagna and Cura are certainly being marketed in terms of mass appeal, in a sexual, romantic way. There's always been the Mario Lanza type, the popular light tenor - but Cura is more Clint Eastwood.

"The thing with Cura is he's quite able to acquit himself with serious opera aficionados as well. I'm a fan, I'm afraid. I don't feel with him that the marketing is outstripping his abilities, which you do get with a lot of musicians. At the end of the day, whether it's classical music or any other market, the product has to be good. With José Cura you've got a genuine talent who combines compelling acting skills, a wonderful voice and just happens to be highly marketable."

The record companies admit that good looks help. "Who would you rather have sing to you?" asked Talia Hull of Warner Brothers, quite reasonably. But Warner Brothers and EMI (the company of both Alagna and the pale- and-interesting Ian Bostridge) deny a conscious move to hype up the sexiness of their tenors - to women or men.

Bostridge, the most heavily promoted of the young English tenors, is a curious alternative tothe more obvious va-va-voom of the Latin lover. His career is built principally on Lieder recitalsand relatively little operatic exposure, so Bostridge's profile has had to be set in a differentniche. EMI's response has been to have Bostridge loitering diffidently in black turtle-necks, likean academic Hugh Grant. The company's uncharacteristically cautious comment on this departure from glitz and glamour was that Bostridge has "quite a few female fans".

EMI was recently featured in Private Eye over the homoerotic photographs of scantily clad "pretty young things" from its press department that it used to illustrate Szymanowski's King Roger. But Theo Lap, EMI's head of marketing, says he is uninterested in chasing the pink pound. "I don't think it's necessary. The gay audience and the gay population will already have a natural interest in classical music. They always have done, so they're even easier to reach than other groups. It would be money wasted."

So that's that then? Not according to one record industry executive, who wished to remain nameless but who reminded me of the high-camp photo- story that Vanity Fair ran way back in February 1995 to coincide with Farinelli, the ultimate castration-anxiety movie. Six male altos (Chance, Asawa, Gall, Ragin, Minter and Daniels) were presented in full 18th- century maquillage, draped across crushed velvet, luxuriantly lit and photographed by Pascal Chevallier, with the (we hope) tongue-in-cheek title "The High Boys of Opera".

"It's definitely there in the counter-tenor market," my source told me. "The packaging of Andreas Scholl's Heroes CD is disgraceful! You don't need this. Decca is up to something, and I think it will rebound." Aside from the allegedly camp portraiture of the (happily married and stolidly butch) Scholl, the executive believes that ladies of a certain age are the main target - 36-plus and Italian-American.

"The men are the thing at the moment," he went on. "In the 1960s it was the sopranos. These days, basses are out of it, so it's baritones, which means Dmitri Hvortovorsky who, if you look at his Phillips covers, is marketed as the yummy side of Russia, Bryn Terfel - your original Green Man - and tenors. Tenors have always been sold on their charm, particularly their Latinate charm. I don't think anyone tried to sell Pavarotti or Domingo as sex objects; but women melt when they meet them, they really do. Alagna is interesting because EMI have tried to market him-plus-Georghiu as love's young dream. I think there has definitely been a conscious attempt at that." So Roberto and Angela are the Tom and Nicole of opera. What about Cura - does he have what it takes? "Oh absolutely: (a) he's a very good tenor and (b) he's a really good musician. Of the younger tenors he is by far the most complete."

Things bode well for Cura. He has been steadily working for more than 15 years, and his live performances have consistently been acclaimed. In addition to the high Cs he is a competent conductor and a rather good orchestrator and composer. "It's not Hollywood! I wasn't discovered overnight in a pizza restaurant!" he snapped once with a none-too-subtle dig at Alagna's starry-eyed story. Verismo - operatic for "sh-- happens" - will probably be that rare beast: a popular success that has critical backing too.

Though Rodney Milnes of Opera magazine says he finds Cura's vanity astonishing - referring to his alleged habit of presenting only his left profile to the camera - he admits he's "a bloody good singer". Milnes is unconvinced that the phenomenon of the Three Tenors can or should ever be repeated. "I don't think it's all that operatic, honestly. The failure of Turandot at Wembley proved that. They are two different markets. They're selling records but they're not necessarily doing the art of opera any good. Cura is the strongest candidate for the fourth tenor if there has to be one, because he's a very good singer. If he does have sex appeal, then you can't blame the record companies for selling him that way. He knows it." "There is a definite push with operatic stuff to appeal to people who want to buy in a bit of culture, the nouveau riche, the women who want to buy a little bit of culture for their house," added the executive.

 

José Cura makes his debut at the Met this month

 

Opera

Rhoda Koenig

1999

Clutching the air, raging, heartbroken, Otello roars, “Clamori e canti di battaglia, addio!” and the chic London audience roars back its rapture.  When the concert performance ends, some of them don’t go home.  Worshipful women of three generation, clutching  roses and photographs (one grandmother is wearing a portrait on a chain around her neck), wait outside the stage door for José Cura, a prime slice of Argentine beefcake who has been wowing the ladies whenever he appears.  He sings all right, too.  Even if all you know of opera is Pavarotti’s singing “Nessun dorma,” you can hear the difference in the first three notes of Cura’s recording on his CD of Puccini arias. Instead of a stentorian declaration, his version is a dark-chocolate anti-lullaby, the R rolled with a promise and a threat.

Having triumphed at La Scala and Covent Garden, Cura, 36, will make his Metropolitan Opera debut this month in Cavalleria Rusticana.  “It’s a story that could happen even today,” the tenor says of this tale of guilty love and bloody vengeance.  “Samson, for instance, [a role Cura has performed and recorded to acclaim] dies, but he has a victory.  But for Turiddu, there is nothing.  This is a really tragic opera.”  Unlike the typical penguin statue in a concert opera, Cura throws himself into the part – and, of course, does so even more in a full-dress performance.  “To be a player it is very important to have had a difficult past.  Because then when you have to portray these kind of human disgraces, you know exactly what you are talking about.”

Cura’s past was cushy to begin with – he was born into a wealthy family in Rosario – but when he was eleven, he and his father were badly injured in a car accident.  The political upheavals of the seventies swept away the family money and security.  But Cura was always determined to pursue a career in music, at first composing and conducting.  (He continues to do both.  “When I sing I love to perform Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, but when I write I prefer more contrapuntal music, like Bach, or satire, like Erik Satie.”)

Though Cura has always been a singer, he decided to concentrate on the vocal aspect of music only at 26.  Two years later he moved to Italy for its greater opportunities of work and training, and has steadily moved up the show-business scale.  His wife (he married at 22) and three children help keep him on an even kneel, especially since she does not work in the opera.  “Thank God.  One crazy person in the family is enough.  Anybody who can stand on the stage and pretend he is someone else must have folly and the heart of a child in an iron cage.”  Well, that’s one way to put it.

Cura, who performed folk songs as well as opera earlier this year before an ecstatic Argentine crowd of 40,000, wants his art to be a popular one, but he is contemptuous of directors who impose an often alien relevance on the text.  “Boheme is a story of every day – you can do it in jeans.  But if I am going to do Aida, I want a pyramid and an elephant.  I don’t want to do Aida with a tank.  This is not modernism; this is ridiculism.  It is not a word, I know.  But it sounds good.”

Though Cura has been highly praised for his voice and his acting (compared favorably with Domingo and Gigli) some critics have called his simultaneous singing and conducting a silly stunt, or said he is too narcissistic, too flamboyant.  He finds these charges puzzling.  “One critic said, ‘Mr. Cura has to decide whether he wants to be an opera singer or a sex symbol.’”  Surely he couldn’t deny the latter?  (If he did, the promotional photo of him with soulful gaze and designer stubble would be evidence against.)  “No, no,” José Cura says, looking hurt.  “Why can’t I be both?”

 

Going Solo:  José Cura

A Moor for the Millennium

M. Pappenheim

LSO Living Music

1999

In May, José Cura sings the title role in Verdi’s Otello in three concert performances with the LSO.  The Argentinian tenor tells Mark Papenheim about the challenges of a part most singers leave until later in their careers.

Whatever you do, don’t suggest to José Cura that he is just an opera singer—or that his career has been a classic case of overnight success.  “I don’t consider myself to be just a tenor,” he insists, “I consider myself to be an artist who happens to sing, which is different...an artist who can also conduct and compose and take wonderful pictures if he wants to.  I’ve been preparing myself to be what I am today since I first went on stage at the age of 12.  That makes 24 years of hard work.  I don’t think anyone can call that too quick.” 

It is true he combines singing with conducting and composing—his second recital disc, Anhelo, a soulful collection of Argentinian songs, includes two of his own.  He has also been a semi-pro athlete, rugby prop-forward, bodybuilder and Kung Fu black belt.  But it still seems little short of miraculous that, at just 36 and only five years after singing his first major part in a standard repertory work, Cura has already notched up another 25 starring roles and sung in most of the world’s leading theatres, from Covent Garden to Chicago, via Paris, Vienna and Milan.  The statistics sound even more amazing when you consider that Cura had never seen an opera before he sang in one himself at the age of 22.  The opera was Massenet’s Manon, performed at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aries.  As one of two croupiers in the Act 4 gambling scene, all Cura had to sing was the phrase “Faites vos jeux, messieurs! Faites vos Jeux!” (“Place your bets, gentlemen!  Place your bets!”)  How many of those present, I wonder, would have bet money on his chances of returning to the Teatro Colon this April to star as Verdi’s Otello - - probably the most challenging and coveted part in the entire heroic tenor repertoire?

Even four years ago, when Cura made his sensational London debut with the Royal Opera as Verdi’s Stiffelio—taking over from José Carreras a part he would later pass on to Placido Domingo—I felt I was sticking my neck out as a music critic when I called him “an Otello in waiting.”  Yet so carefully, so confidently planned was the course of his ‘overnight’ career that, even then, Cure knew would return to London this May to sing Verdi’s Moor in concert with Sir Colin Davis and the LSO.

It was to have been his first attempt at the tenorial Everest, “in concert, nice and cool and easy, with the score in front of me, without risk.”  But, two years ago, Cura received an offer he simple could not refuse:  to sing his first Otello on stage, with the Berlin Philharmonic—under Claudio Abbado, no less—for just two performances in Turin.  After much soul-searching he accepted, but with one condition:  that he would sing just the two performances and not touch the part again until 1999, “so as to keep on growing, technically, as an artist and as an actor.”  Despite the avalanche of faxes which arrived the morning after, the worldwide offers that could have kept him singing nothing but Otellos for the rest of his days, Cura stuck to his guns.

Not that the reception was entirely uncritical.  The Italian national daily La Nazion may have headlined its review “A new Otello is born,” but some aficionados thought him too young for the part.  Yes, the optimum age for a tenor to sing Otello may be 45-50, but this way, when he reaches his prime, he will already have more than 10 years’ experience under his belt.  And anyway, Domingo, Vickers and Vinay all sang their first Moors in their thirties.  As for it being undersung, “I can be as loud as I want if I have to.  But I don’t think shouting is the solution to performing this role.”

In fact, the review he liked best was the one that said:  “Cura’s Otello owes more to Orson Welles than to Mario del Monaco.”  That sums up what he was trying to achieve, he says:  his ‘modern vision’ of a bel canto (rather than verismo) Otello—‘based as much on the Shakespeare play as on the Verdi opera, in terms of trying to recreate the last 24 hours of somebody who used to be a hero but is now breaking into pieces.”  If that annoys ‘conservatives,’ so be it.  “When you make art, you break some rules,” he says.  “I think that any artist who makes everybody happy should be very worried, because that means he’s not original.”

As for being called ‘The Fourth Tenor,’ Cura admits the title used to upset him.  “They are the old generation—a wonderful old generation—but we are the new.  Only time will tell what number we will be.”  In the meantime, the LSO can take credit for offering him his first bite at what looks like being the definitive Otello for the start of the third millennium.

Some artists read their reviews, some don’t.  Others say they never do.  But few are more ready or able to quote notices than José Cura.  Do you know – or care – who coined the phrase ‘Fourth Tenor’?  According to Cura, it was Alexander Waugh in the Evening Standard, and there were many more such citations during our first meeting in Palermo 18 months ago.  The occasion was the re-opening (after a quarter-century of Mafia-style delays) of the Sicilian capital’s magnificent Teatro Massimo.  On one hand the 36-year-old Argentinian tenor believes that openness between artist and critics can lead only to understanding on both sides, and he is genuinely interested in what is written about him, taking note of constructive criticism; on the other he gives the impression of enjoying all the publicity.  There’s an awful lot of it about this month – not only the new verismo album from Erato but also a South Bank Show television profile on October 17.  Er, and an article in OPERA. 

There is no point in criticizing the marketing people for capitalizing on his Latin looks – that’s the way of the world.  Nor is most of the hype unjustified.  Cura is one of the most exciting talents to have emerged in the ‘90s, especially tenor talents, where the ranks are not exactly swelling.  In the wake of the Three Pensioners, the main contenders for traditional tenor stardom also include Roberto Alagna, Marcelo Alvarez and Ramon Vargas (perhaps the most refined stylist of the lot, but a Donizettian rather than Verdian).  Cura, the most rounded musician of them all, has never been a lyric tenor, and is already proving most impressive in some of the heavier French and Italian repertory; with his dark-toned spinto voice it is not surprising that he has been marked out as the inheritor of Domingo’s mantle, even if he lacks the stylistic finesse the Spaniard had in his prime.

Some have even suggested that we have another Mario Del Monaco in the making – though not many of the Italian critics.  Until the recent concert performances at Otello with the London Symphony that so divided the British reviewers (Richard Fairman wrote in the Financial Times that he ‘set the drama alight…living the role as if on stage, while everybody else was giving a well-behaved concert performance’, while Rodney Milnes countered in the Times, ‘The man’s vanity is in danger of making him the laughing stock of the operatic world, and in failing to decide whether to pursue a career as a singer or a sex-object, he is short-changing fans on both counts’), Cura’s sternest critics were the Italians, fond of finding technical fault.  ‘Maybe there’s a bit of jealously now that they don’t have a “first international tenor”,’ he says.  ‘Some people attack me for not being Italian, others recognize that artists have no nationality, that we are artists first of all.  Some are trying to make the world believe that Bocelli is the best Italian tenor.  It’s a commercial situation, a desperate attempt to have somebody in the race.’

[...]

Indeed, Cura is more than ‘just’ a tenor, but that is one of his strengths as well as a potential Achilles’ heel.  Sometimes he seems to have the combined ego of a tenor and a conductor, but he is also capable of offering broad, musicianly insights of a kind rare in singers.  In the course of stimulating conversation, it transpires that even before Cura contemplated a professional singing career, he was studying composition and conducting back home in Argentina.

Cura was born in Rosario, Argentina’s second city.  ‘It’s a nice place, with a population close to two million, so there’s lots of music going on, but no opera.  It used to have an important opera house – Caruso sang there – but the theatre’s been closed to opera for about 30 years.  Earlier this year I did a concert there, which I hope will have helped to rekindle an interest in opera.  I’d like to give something back to my city – some of its old traditions’.  His own interest was nurtured at home.  ‘My father played the piano, including quite a lot of Beethoven.  Like the sons of all good families he’d been sent to piano lessons.  But he stopped playing after a car accident – I think it was an excuse.  My mother was always playing records, the pops of the classics and the classics of the pops, and I think that helped to make my musical personality.’

Beginning with ‘small melodies’ at the age of 14 or 15, Cura took up composition and went to study it at university.  ‘I’m strongly instinctive, and write what I feel like at a particular moment.  My Stabat Mater, which I wrote about ten years ago, was based on Gregorian chant but developed into something quite complicated, not very tonal.  My Requiem, which I did at 22, is neo-Romantic.  The two songs I wrote for my recent Argentinian disc are inspired by Neruda texts, so I composed really clear music – not new, but hopefully interesting – in service of the texts.  I’m different in every piece I write – as we move into the next century.  I feel strongly that once and for all we have to finish with these classifications, being this or that but not this-that.  We must all just do what we do, and do it well or not at all.  We’re breaking down the frontiers, we don’t need passports to go from Germany to Italy, so why put up barriers between different kinds of music’

Cura’s Requiem was a reflection of the world in which we grew up.  His studies were interrupted by the 198 Malvinas War, though he never had to go into the army.  ‘The call-up was a lottery, if you got the wrong number you went to war.  My schoolmates were mobilized but hadn’t got to the front before the stupid war finished.  None of my personal friends died, but I dedicated my Requiem to the people of my generation who were killed.  Later, singing for the first time in England was an interesting situation – the country was still supposed to be the enemy – but it was as if nothing had happened, and the reception was warm.’  Still at home, he was appointed assistant choirmaster to the head of the Rosario Conservatory, a man who had the foresight to convince Cura to undertake serious vocal studies.  At first he resisted – his heart was still set on conducting – but by 1991 he and his wife were on the plane to Europe, in pursuit of his new career.

They settled initially in Verona, and Cura recalls that ‘it was very tough for the first two or three years.  But that’s how it should be – you become more settled in your career if you do not get to the top immediately.  It’s like being dropped on the tope of a mountain by a helicopter – if you don’t suffer the climb up, the first wind takes you out.’  At the beginning he sang in some quite obscure operas, not necessarily inspired by his interest in new music.  ‘Well, I’m always looking for new things, but I can’t deny that I needed the work at the time.  So the proposition of singing strange things was attractive both to the musician in me and the man who needed to pay the bills.’  He made his debut at the Teatro Nuovo in Verona on 1 February 1992, singing the Father in Henze’s children’s opera Pollicino.  That year he also sang the comprimario parts of Remendado (Carmen) and Captain of the Crossbowmen (Simon Boccanegra) at Genoa’s Teatro Carlo Felice.  Concerts and the small role of Mediano in the premiere of Paolo Arca’s Gattabianca in Verona saw him through until his first significant engagement, Jean in Bibalo’s Miss Julie at Trieste in April 1993.  It earned him a first mention in OPERA: Giampaolo de Ferra praised his ‘faultless singing and acting’. 

Apart from fulfilling two more Trieste contracts, Sogno di un valzer (a.k.a. Ein Walzertraum) and Giuditta, Cura was set firmly on a path to the major houses.  He made his debut at the Regio in Turin in 1993 (Albert Gregor in The Makropoulos Case), sang Ismaele (Nabucco) in Genoa in ’94 and appeared that summer as Roberto in Le Villi at Martina Franca.  Meanwhile, he’d been back to Turin for a Forza Don Alvaro and to play Ruggero opposite Nelly Miricioiu in La Rondine, and he ended the year by returning to the New World; he was one of the prizewinners (alongside Brian Asawa) in Domingo’s Operalia competition in Mexico, made his American debut in a Lyric Opera of Chicago Fedora, and shared the platform in a vocal concert back at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.  Although Domingo has always been encouraging – he conducted the younger tenor’s disc of Puccini arias – Cura is anxious not to be seen as a protégé.  ‘You can’t really be a protégé of someone you meet only about once a year.’  And he is keen to be regarded as his own man, certainly not the ‘Fourth Tenor’.  Slipping into laddish analogies, he says ‘Those three guys were wonderful singers of the last generation, but you cannot put a Rolls Royce of the ‘60s with a new Mercedes.  Both are nice cars, but a new Merc is not the fourth Rolls, it’s the new Merc.’   

It is certainly the case that Cura has followed in Domingo’s footsteps, making major appearances in roles and sometimes even productions associated with him.  His London debut (1995) was in Stiffelio, and he has returned to Covent Garden for Samson et Dalila.  (He played a part, too, in the now defunct Verdi Festival, singing in concert performances of the 1857 Simon Boccanegra and Il Corsaro, showing the best, serious side of his art.)  Other important house-or role-debuts have included Cavaradossi at Torre del Lago and Ismaele at the Bastille (both 1995), Osaka in Iris in Rome (1996) and Enzo in La Gioconda at La Scala (1997).  He has returned to Milan for Manon Lescaut and Forza, and Turin for Otello, the role he took ‘home’ to the Teatro Colon earlier this year.  He has limited his visits to Argentina, because ‘if you are going to live somewhere else you have to make your home, and you can’t keep running back.  My place now is where I live [near Paris] with my [three] kids and wife.’

Verdi and Puccini are where Cura’s focus is at present, and he counts Radames (which he had sung on stage only once, in Tokyo, before stepping into Pavarotti’s shoes for the re-opening of the Massimo) as his biggest challenge so far.  ‘Radames is one of the toughest of Verdi parts – not necessarily heavier than Puccini, just longer! Apart from Manon Lescaut, Puccini’s operas are short and most of the tenor roles involve not more than about half an hour’s singing.  And Puccini is special to me, he’s a coherent, theatrical composer who allows the actor in me to create something really believable on stage.  I feel at ease with him, which is why he was a good subject for my first recording.  I’d lived with him, and it wasn’t just a piece of plastic like the recording because apart from one or two roles I’ve sung them all on stage.’ 

And what of Otello, its low tessitura and draining emotions?  ‘The difficulty’s not in the tessitura.  Because it’s written in a declamatory way it makes for extra fatigue on the vocal chords.  You have to articulate more, not just sing legato.  And late Verdi is always heavily orchestrated.  Its difficult with less good orchestras – you’re either up against a big noise or, in the pianissimo passages, singing without any sustaining help.’  And what of the opening, going on cold?  ‘The danger’s not vocal!  Yes, it’s hard, but the really hard thing is that Verdi prepares Otello’s entrance in such an enormous way – when you get there you are already over-stimulated, and liable to over-sing.  That’s the biggest risk of the “Esultate!” – you need to keep a cool mind when you hear all the fanfares.  But you also can’t sing it too softly – otherwise for the listeners, who’ve just been pounded by chorus and orchestra, it would be like having just seen a bright light and being blind for a few seconds.  And you have to save yourself for the draining end, which is tragic.  By the end of Samson, even if you die you’ve won.  At the end of Tosca at least you die heroically.  But at the end of Otello you die in misery, like a worm – you’ve been ruined in the last 24 hours of your life.  You’re a victim of racism, classism, jealousy – but it’s not straightforward jealousy like in conventional operas.  You’ve killed the person you love the most in the world.’ 

Cura’s strong stage presence would make him a natural in most of the verismo parts he has been exploring for his new recording, but how does he feel about the music itself?  ‘No single piece of verismo is a real masterpiece from beginning to end.  You have to accept that, in contrast to Otello, where there’s not a single note out of place, Pagliacci has wonderful music, but a few pages you’d like to cut.  In Fedora, Giordano wrote some wonderful pages, but there are many you’d like to burn!  The mistake is to take the snobbish side, saying it’s all rubbish.  It was an attempt to get away from old operatic clichés, and as in all new movements there were both good and bad things.’  Speaking of rubbish, what about Iris?  ‘The orchestration of Cavalleria is somewhere between that of a final-year conservatory student and a first-year composer, but it works because of its good libretto and satisfying, dramatic plot.  Iris is much better orchestrated, but the third act is weak and so the good melodies of the first two acts are wasted.’  Cura has been looking at some of the obscure works too, including Giordano’s Marcella and Franchetti’s Germania, a choice inspired by Caruso’s recording of the aria ‘Studenti! Udite’.  ‘For Germania, I’ve got only a copy of the manuscript.  I couldn’t find a published full score, and have been trying to work out the orchestration from the manuscript, which is hell!  But it’s very tonal, so there’s not too much room for mistakes.’ 

Time has come for the tenor to take stock, and apart from Don Carlos in Zurich in 2001, few new roles are in the diary.  ‘I need a couple of years to think.  I’ve done 25 new roles in three-and-a-half years, so now I need to decide which to keep and develop for my career, and which I’ll drop or reserve just for special occasions.  After the pressure of 25 roles, I need to give myself space to mature – I’ve been prepared as I can be for my important debuts, but I know that I’m only beginning with those roles.  The ones I really love – Cavaradossi, Otello, Samson, Radames, Don José, that kind of thing – I’ll take further, not only vocally, but to explore their psychology.  I think that ultimately one new role a year would be very healthy, and, having done most of the obvious French and Italian parts, I’m looking for something new.  Peter Grimes perhaps.  I’d like to dig into rare things, and find out what I could do with La Juive, for example, or Meyerbeer.  Maybe I’ll do a more dramatic version of Werther – we’re used to lyric singers like Kraus and Alagna, but I’m sure another kind of reading is possible.  De Reszke sang it, and he was also an Otello and Samson, so maybe I’m not too far from Massenet’s ideal.’  De Reszke was also a Wagnerian; would Cura move in that direction?  ‘Never!  Well, not for the moment.  I don’t speak German, and because I’m considered a decent actor I won’t sing in a language I don’t speak.  How can you express feelings phonetically?  I’d like to learn Russian, to do Herman.’ 

Domingo once said that a star wasn’t born but made by the public.  Cura, ever-sensitive to comparisons with some colleagues, would rather stress his long-standing credentials.  ‘A career is like an iceberg, most of it under water.  You have to have a solid base, but if you are lucky enough a big career develops.  No good careers are really sudden.  It’s two or three years since the world has known about José Cura, but there were another 20 before that.  I wasn’t invented by the media or my record company.  I’m the result of hard work and that makes me feel comfortable.’

José Cura
 

The headline in the newspaper says it all. 'LA LO-CURA!' it shrieks in big black letters in a deliberate play on locura (the Spanish word for 'madness') and the surname of the biggest star to come out of Argentina since footballer Diego Maradona. José Cura, the tenor, is back in town, and you'd have to be deaf, blind, and somewhat unobservant not to notice.

The idea dreamed up by his record company seemed simple enough: ease him into his debut appearance as Verdi's Otello at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, by taking him to his home town of Rosario to give a concert and spend time with his friends and family. It was meant to be a low-key affair, but then the media found out about it.

I join the throng in Buenos Aires and wait to get this new star's story - his desire to stay in touch with his roots, his accelerating career and the pressures of international fame. But from the moment Cura steps off the plane, a frenzy envelops him. His entourage is besieged by television crews from around the globe, including one from The South Bank Show. His gala concert is then mobbed by 40,000 adoring fans. Psychologically unprepared for such attention, Cura is left in a state of exhaustion and, reeling from the publicity onslaught, cancels all his appointments - including my interview - for the next 48 hours to recuperate.

It is hardly a surprise that José Cura's professional schedule has suddenly gone ballistic. The opera world has long been waiting for a new young tenor who not only possesses a voice of heroic proportions but has the physique to go with it. Cura clearly fits the bill. He is a superb musician, a fine actor and, crucially in these days of under-nourished 'studio voices', one of the very few singers around who can - as opera critic Rupert Christiansen nicely puts it - "raise the roof".

Cura's arrival on the international scene in the early 1990s sparked off a fiercely contested debate about the elusive 'fourth tenor' who would succeed the Olympian but ageing triumvirate of Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras - the other pretender to the throne being Roberto Alagna.

Born into a musical family, Cura showed early promise as guitarist and pianist, came to opera relatively late, at 21, and a professional career even later, making his debut at the relatively advanced age of 29. His career, though short, has been meteoric, helped along by his success five years ago in Placido Domingo's Operalia competition in Mexico - an entrée to the world's great opera houses. In only a few years Cura has learned more than 30 different operatic roles, almost all of them Italian and French because he refuses to sing in a language he cannot speak fluently.

Meanwhile his image has been bolstered by his life outside music: a passion for body building, an abandoned career as a rugby prop forward, and a black belt in kung fu. He has worked as a stagehand, a lighting man and a set builder. Seeing him on stage in the summer of 1999 in Verdi's Aida - the opening production of the Arena di Verona season - brought home to me how crucial Cura's athleticism is to his art. As Radamès he displayed the energy of a rock star, running from end to end of the enormous stage, parading his musculature at every opportunity and, in the opera's more lyrical moments, wringing every ounce of character from the role.

In Buenos Aires, Cura's imminent debut appearance as Otello at the Teatro Colón is an opportunity for me to clinch the long-awaited interview. Despite his evident nerves, and the chaos surrounding the dress-rehearsal, he turns in a performance that, vocally and dramatically, more than lives up to expectations - particularly strong on Otello's tortuous see-sawing between outward aggression and inward angst.

Hoping to snatch a few words with the tenor after the rehearsal, I wait amid a gaggle of admirers at the stage door. Here I met Jane Austin, founder of the internet-based club International José Cura ConneXion. Jane has been smitten with the man ever since she saw him sing the title role in Stiffelio in London in 1995. Indeed, she knows more about Cura than anyone - perhaps even more than the tenor himself: she tells me that, on the video he made of Otello in Turin, he leaves a smudge of brown make-up on Desdemona's forehead when he kisses her.

She also knows that, when José - it is always "José" to her - emerges from the stage door, wherever in the world it happens to be, he always finds time for a few words with her. Grabbing my arm as the crowd presses forward, Jane pulls me towards a tall, swarthy figure in an expensive-looking designer coat. He shakes my hand, says "Nice to meet you" in a strong Spanish accent while looking over my shoulder, then moves on to give a big bear-hug to an old friend.

The following morning, just as I think my chances of an interview have slipped away, the phone rings. Señor Cura will give me 25 minutes, but it's now or never. I find him in his hotel room, sinking low in an armchair in jeans and T-shirt while his wife, Silvia, attends to the phone - by the sound of it, fending off more requests for interviews.

"It's a crazy time, you know," the tired tenor said with the weariest of apologetic smiles. "When you are 'missing' for five years and all of a sudden you return to Argentina as a 'somebody' everybody wants to be there, everybody wants you in their newspaper, on their TV, in their magazine." Close up, I can see why we all want him. With his athletic, muscular build, high forehead and noble Roman nose bisecting a pair of dark, angry eyes, he corresponds perfectly to the romantic notion of what a young operatic tenor ought to look like.

In a recent review, The Times opera critic Rodney Milnes wrote that Cura should decide once and for all whether he wants to be a singer or a sex-symbol, apparently sending the singer into a fuming rage. The Independent on Sunday labelled him "an opera singer with a six-pack". To Cura, the physical nature of his work is just as important as the drama and music. "For me the body is essential. If you're an actor, which I am, the body is the instrument of your interpretation. The better you are physically, the better you will sound. Today if you are good-looking people think you are stupid, and if you are a genius you are ugly, dirty and wear glasses. Why can't we combine good looks with intelligence?"

Cura prides himself on his physique and has a personal gym at his Madrid home, although he admits that the demands of fame and the passing of the years are beginning to interfere more than he would like. "I'm not as fit as I was when I was a semi-professional athlete and weighed 20kg less than I do now. I try to live in a more or less balanced way, but when you are invited every day to a cocktail party or a dinner, and to this and that, then it becomes very complicated. Especially now that I'm close to my forties [he will be 40 in 2002]. The body changes, the bones change, and I'm losing my hair like everybody else!"

The question of age is an inevitable one for Cura, not least because in singing terms he was a late starter. But while his peers spent their twenties in the relentless pursuit of vocal perfection, Cura was doing other things. Singing, yes, but singing Beatles songs, Palestrina, spirituals, jazz - everything and anything, except opera. "The first time I opened my mouth to sing something that was more or less opera, I was 21. I didn't like it, so I gave it up. I didn't start again until I was 26."

Cura feels his unusual vocal education has helped him become the well-rounded, mature musician he is today. "It was a normal development, a normal way of arriving at my actual situation. I'm happy that I started my singing career at 26, and the big career at 31. Because at that age you are still young enough to justify all the investment and the hype, but you are old enough to be able to control it."

He has, it seems, got it all under control. Everything he did before the career kicked in, from sport to stage management, turns out to have had its raison d'être. Having worked as a lighting man, he knows where to position himself under the spotlight for maximum dramatic effect. Being an experienced conductor, he understands what conductors require of him. "If you want to be a complete artist these days," he reasons, "you have to master at least three or four different disciplines. Then you can be much more at ease in what you do."

Of all the other strings to Cura's broad bow, the one that interests him most is conducting. He has already started scaling down his vocal commitments so that by 2003, if all goes according to plan, he will be spending half his time singing, and half in front of an orchestra. He tells me this with a pensive seriousness, which suggests perhaps the decision is partly a response to the extraordinary pressures he has recently been facing as a tenor. "My schedule is booked up until 2005. But I am clearing out periods for myself for composition and for conducting. I have already conducted on Anhelo, my CD of Argentinian songs, and now I am starting to receive proposals from orchestras. Next year I want to do a symphonic record."

Any idea yet of the content? "Yes, but I'd prefer not to say. It might spoil the surprise," he says, his earnest demeanour immediately melting into a lighthearted smile. In Cura's current situation, it can't always be easy to keep seriousness at bay. But his life seems rich and varied enough to stop him losing touch entirely with reality. He also has a secret weapon that keeps him grounded. His family. He and his wife now have three young children - José Ben, Yasmine and Nicólas. Gesturing across the hotel room to where Silvia, her long brown hair hanging down to her waist, stands beside the window clutching a clipboard and a mobile phone, he says, as much to himself as to me: "The family base is so important. It's the only way to keep yourself sane as a human being. I mean, this life is very - no, it's absolutely - crazy. When you come off from a performance where there's a standing ovation and the crowd shouting 'Cu-ra! Cu-ra! Cu-ra!', and then you go home and have to change the baby's nappies, you learn to say, 'OK, the opera was fine, but this is fine, too'. That helps me keep my feet on the ground."

The Rise of the Big Voice

Musicality, looks, charisma - and marketing. It's going to be hard to ignore José Cura.

15 October 1999

There was an extraordinary scene at the end of the Puccini gala in Torre del Lago, the small Tuscan town on the edge of Lake Massaciuccoli. In the 3,000-seat open-air theatre, just metres from Puccini's summer villa, a scrum was going on. Hordes of middle-aged ladies were rushing to the stage, elbowing one another out the way and gasping to get a closer look at opera's latest pin-up.

The object of their excitement, the 6ft-tall former body builder, Kung Fu black belt and tenor José Cura, was pacing up and down like an oversexed tomcat, just centimetres out of their reach.

The man does exude a rare charisma. Throughout the concert he ambled around the stage as if he were rehearsing in his own living room and, at one point, he stopped to talk to a member of the audience. By the end there were shouts from all over as his admirers tried to engage him in conversation. And, more in keeping with cabaret artists than opera singers, he changed his jacket three times. In celebrity terms, this man is a natural.

Fortunately, he can also sing. His rich voice and impassioned acting style have broken hearts all over the world. Journalists have been unable to resist building him up as the successor to the Pavarotti-Domingo-Carreras triumvirate, baptising him "the fourth tenor", though Cura is resistant to such wanton comparisons. "They don't deserve to be compared with someone who is just starting to work and it's not fair for me to be put in a group of people who have been there for 30 years," he tells me. "If my profile is as high at 36 as Domingo's when he was 50 is not because I am doing three times as much work, but because whatever I do is automatically on the radio or the television. The media is constantly on the look-out for new talent."

But despite the praise heaped upon his singing, Cura feels that he is often unjustly attacked. Indeed, it is hard to get him off the subject of critics, particularly British ones. "They act like we are still living in the 19th century," he splutters. "They are conditioned by the idea that a tenor in a recital should be dressed like a penguin and standing close to the conductor at all times. When you break those rules you are committing blasphemy."

Some critics have also expressed a dislike for Cura's vanity, with particular reference to his alleged tendency to present only his left side to the camera. "It's so cheap!" he explodes. "I don't understand why to be an opera singer you have to be ugly and why to be a sex symbol you have to be an idiot. Why can't you look good and be an artist and an intellectual? Maybe it is because some of the people who write these things aren't very good looking."

Cura's marketing team have certainly seized upon his aesthetic qualities, recognising an opportunity to thrust opera in the faces of a wider audience. In the media he has been portrayed as the consummate Latin lover, complete with big biceps, puppy dog-eyes and a fiery temper. And, rather than the standard performance stills, his album sleeves depict him close up, his eyes all dewy and his head tilted forwards as if advertising some hair-rebuilding treatment.

Back at the concert, as the third jacket goes on, there are murmurings from the marketing executives that there is still work to be done on his wardrobe. "Yes, but we've managed to put an end to all the cardi's and ties," sighed one.

In his native Argentina, Cura studied classical guitar before training as a conductor. It was not until he started working as the music director for an opera group that he started to take his voice seriously. "Singing was just a hobby for me until then," he explains. "Everybody told me I was not good enough."

Then Cura won Placido Domingo's singing competition in 1994. Now, at 36 - an infant in operatic terms - Cura's has already tackled Verdi's Otello and his first solo recital disc, a collection of Puccini arias conducted by Domingo, shifted 150,000 copies.

Now he is ready to go global. There are wall-to-wall Cura concerts for the next six months, his third solo album 'Verismo' is out this week and, on Sunday, he features on the South Bank Show .

It took the 1990 World Cup to bring Pavarotti to the masses, but Cura has no plans for a sporting soundtrack. But there is an appearance on the National Lottery show planned, and he doesn't seem daunted by the prospect of climbing on the media merry-go-round.

"There is this enormous belief around the world that classical music is dead and I am trying to keep it alive," he says.

So how far will he go? Richard And Judy ? Blankety Blank ? "I will go up to the limit of quality. From the point where I feel that that starts to suffer, I will stop."

But despite his obvious desire to become the world's greatest tenor, Cura insists he remains a conductor at heart. "Technically," he says "I'm a composer and a conductor who has taken time out to sing. I will, hopefully, return to what is my real vocation."

Such humble interludes don't really wash for José Cura. The man is at his most interesting when singing his own praises and damning those detractors. Vain? Quite possibly. Charming? Utterly. But modesty would never have suited him.

 José Cura's album 'Verismo' is out on Erato Disques.

But he gets stiff competition from a few others.  Returning to the Met this season are two tenors who have recently emerged to thrill audiences -- lyric tenor Roberto Alagna in The Elixir of Love and heldentenor Ben Heppner in Tristan and Isolde.

Meanwhile, the New York City Opera, which was Domingo's first house here, is enthusiastic about three young tenors: Matthew Polenzani, Alfredo Portilla and Gordon Gietz.
 

Cura, at 36, is between Alagna and Heppner in voice type. He sings the hefty dramatic roles that Domingo sings, but not the German roles. He's from Argentina and his career has been mainly in Europe. His American debut was at the Lyric Opera of Chicago opposite Mirella Freni in Fedora in 1994, the same year he was one of five unranked winners of the Domingo-organized Operalia competition. He sang in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1996, adding Pollione in "Norma" and Don Jose in Carmen to his repertoire. He has sung Samson and Delilah in Washington, D.C.
 

Cura (pronounced COOR-a) is surprised to be thought an overnight arrival. He has been on the stage since he was 12. He's also a little disconcerted when he's called a hunk. But at 6-feet 1-inch, in T-shirt, slacks and running shoes, with the athletic look of a rugby player, which he has been, he isn't one of the short tenors who are the despair of tall sopranos.
 

"The fact I know martial arts means I'm in control of the balance of my body, which makes a lot of difference when you're on stage," Cura says. He keeps fit but isn't able to work out every day.
 

He has sung in Pagliacci -- and just recorded it -- as well as Cavalleria and says that he feels more at ease singing the music of Pagliacci, but it's easier to portray Turiddu in Cavalleria. He'll sing only the first three performances of Cavalleria Rusticana.
 

In Pagliacci, where Canio is an older man whose wife strays with a young man, Cura plays Canio as a violent husband. "One of the best compliments I had in my life was after my first Pagliacci, in Zurich, when people said I was disgusting. It means the portrayal was believable," Cura says.
 

"The message I try to give as Turiddu is that he's that kind of mixture that only a teen-ager can have. All of a sudden you feel king of the world, macho of the macho. When real danger comes, you call your mama. He's just come back from military service. He's 18 or 19. Now, you're close to being a man. At the beginning of the century, you were a kid."
 

When he sang Cavalleria in Italy, Cura's Turiddu called weakly for his mother when he realizes he'll die. That seemed logical to some critics; others thought he lost his voice.
 

Critical opinion often has been divided about Cura's interpretations. "I'm not out there trying to provoke people. I'm trying to go to the last consequence," the tenor says. "In Samson, in the first act, I'm a roaring beast. In the third act, I sing almost without voice. He is weak, blind, tortured, almost surely castrated. His soul is talking with God."
 

A critic who heard him sing Fedora at the Chicago Lyric slashed his performance. The bad notice crushed him, he says, but the Chicago audience lifted him again. After his second performance, he received the first standing ovation of his career. "I'll never forget it."
 

Cura sang his first Otello, that endurance test for dramatic tenors, at 34, in Turin, Italy.
 

"I knew I was maybe the youngest Otello ever," he says. "I knew because of that I was not going to be able to be extremely strong and loud. The only way for my voice to survive was to play a man who suffers with interior pain. Half the critics said I didn't have voice enough for the role and half said it was a nice new version of the role, which is what we need.
 

"I did my first Otello on live radio and TV and there's a video of it. Whatever stories say about me, they won't be able to say I have no guts."
 

He's the only tenor to have a video of his very first Otello.
 

Cura was born in Rosario, Argentina, into a wealthy family. His father, who owned a metals conglomerate, lost everything when the military came to power. Cura was 14. He was able to stay in school and study music -- six instruments, conducting and composing as well as voice -- but, he says, he quickly woke up to economic reality.
 

For five years, he taught bodybuilding in a gym, sang in the opera chorus evenings and worked in a hardware store Saturdays. His wife, Silvia, worked also, singing as a mezzo-soprano. They bought cheap diapers for the first baby.
 

In 1991, they moved to Verona, Italy, where he studied with tenor Vittorio Terranova. This year the family, now including offspring Jose, Jasmine and Nicolas, moved from Paris to Madrid, because it feels something like Argentina.
 

Cura has made three CDs for Erato. For the newest, "Verismo," he conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra of London while singing. Two of the arias are from Cavalleria Rusticana.

"Sharing this opening night with Domingo is a pleasure and satisfaction, a heavy responsibility, of course," Jose Cura says. "Hopefully, if God gives us good health, it's going to be a very remarkable evening."
 

---

Photo:  Opera singer Jose Cura lounges outside the Metropolitan Opera in New York City Sept. 14. Cura will become the first tenor since Enrico Caruso to make his Met debut on opening night when he sings the part of Turridu in Cavalleria Rusticana Monday.

The Place that Changed Me:  José Cura

Argentina's charismatic tenor finally finds public acceptance after a sell-out concert back home in Rosario

by José Cura

 Independent / 17-Oct-1999  

My home town, Rosario in Argentina, is the place that changed me the most, but not in the way that you might imagine. It was when I returned to my city to give a concert for the first time, after being away for many, many years. Last April I had the chance to sing in my city for the first time in my life.

This was something remarkable, not least because we exceeded our audience expectation of five to ten thousand and ended up with an audience of more than 40,000. The open-air concert was the largest ever held in my city and though we were expecting a "classical impact" we gained more attention than a pop concert.

When you leave your city because your people are not recognising who you are and what you are doing, to return years later as a success is the most emotional experience you can have. It gave me a sense that my roots are forever in Rosario and even though I had left I had not been forgotten.

If there's a moment, a place, an event or situation that put my life into a proper dimension again, it was this re-encounter with my home city.

I had left my Rosario back in 1983. I was 20 at the time and - as every young human being does - I was looking out to see what the hell I was going to do with my life. I moved to Buenos Aires and did all those "life- changing" things: I got married and had my first son. These are all enormously important but artistically speaking nothing happened until I went to Europe in 1991. After touring there for a few years my international career was starting to be big enough and important enough to make my fellow countrymen wake up. Only then could I go home again.

On returning I felt an immense sense of honour and anticipation rather than nerves. It was like being a chef who is asked to cook for their family. You're always happy to show eminent strangers and even friends how good you are in the kitchen, but when it comes to cooking for your mother it's another thing. It doesn't mean that you're not a good cook or that when you're in the kitchen you are nervous. It just means that when you have to demonstrate to your own people - to your family, to the people you love, to the people of your own country - that you are as good as everyone says, it's a critical moment. These are the people who know you, this is the guy that used to sell you your socks and your old family doctor or music teacher. Everybody knows your life from the very beginning and they know exactly who you are.

Just like your mother has the authority to tell you that "Jose, this piece of meat is no good", I felt that my countrymen could do the same when I returned to sing for them.

The applause at the hands of your family and your brothers is doubly important. It's not a question of artistic levels or hype anymore, it's a human question of being able to pass the test out in front of the people who knew you when you were nobody.

It was a very long month and in the run-up to the concert I visited my old school. My old teachers were still there and they suddenly treated me as if I were one of them.

I saw the pupils who were doing today what I used to do years ago and there was a real sense of completion. And then the surprise in the middle of the meeting to see five or six of my oldest school friends - people who I hadn't seen for 25 years. They all had their own story and when I asked after one man called Hector I was told that he'd died five years ago. I could suddenly see that, even being so young, life is passing and 25 years make a lot of difference.

When I played the concert in Rosario I invited all my old teachers onto the stage with me, because if I am what I am now it's as much to do with them as it is to do with myself.

Jose Cura (and his trip home to Rosario) was taped by British television for the Southbank show and appears regularly on arts networks around the world.   

 

“José Cura is arguably the most controversial of the up-and-coming generation of tenors.  Since his well-received debut disc of Puccini arias in 1997, he has been keen to emphasize that his talents do not stop him from singing and acting.  In Verismo, his latest disc on Erato, he conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra himself, just as he did in a concert with the same orchestra in a concert at the Festival Hall in March.  “And why not?” you may ask.  However, some critics have been less open-minded. . .

 

JP: Have you received criticism for conducting as well as singing?

JC: Yes, but that is one of the risks you have to take.  I know that there are people out there who are shaking their heads and saying “He’s not just singing!” But I am a composer and conductor as well and so I have to ask them “If I am able to do other things, and have the opportunity to do them, why shouldn’t I do them?”

 

Is the Classical Music world too narrow-minded, then?

I think we have to start allowing people to do whatever they think they can do, and then analysing the results afterwards.  If not, there are always going to be too many preconceptions. 

 I hate the word ‘tenor’ – O.K, so I know that is probably going to make a good headline for your article! I don’t hate being a tenor, but what I don’t like is that ‘tenor’ puts a trademark on you, from which you cannot move.  You know how it goes: “$10,000 reward! If you find this man, kill him!  He dared to move from tenor!”  It has become so commonplace in the last 20 or so years to attach labels to everything so that people can feel safe.  We must stop doing that.

 

When I was conducting the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall, one of the greatest compliments I have ever had came when the leader of the orchestra came up to me and said “I have been leading for 25 years and I think this is one of the concerts in which I led the least because of you gestures, your ideas and your authority are so clear.”  That means I must have been doing something, rather than just waving my hands to stop the flies from coming close to my face.  But it was easier for the journalists there to say “The orchestra sounded good because the Philharmonia is always good, whoever is in front of it” rather than “The orchestra sounded good and that is because maybe Cura is not that bad after all.”  Seeing someone sing and conduct at the same time was probably strange for most people, and some might not have liked it.  But please don’t say that the result was what it was purely because the orchestra is good and no more!

 What do you make of the other young tenors around?

Maybe saying this will cost me a lot of friends in the future, but I think the problem with my generation is that, in every sense and every generation, there is an enormous lack of charisma.  It’s one thing to put a lot of meat on the market, but it’s another thing to put meat on the market which has a different taste, with that touch of pepper that is not the same as the other recipes.  You do feel charisma, or lack of it – it is completely independent from the quality of the voice, the singing.

 

 Does charisma also include providing the unexpected?

The moment you do what people expect of you, you are in trouble, because you are probably not being honest with yourself.  After a couple of years you will look at yourself in the mirror and say ”O.K, I’m satisfying everyone else, but not giving myself what I want!”  I think that the people who really like you and follow what you’re doing will prefer you to be the way you are, even if you’re taking a few risks.

Well-rounded Tenor

Scoop

1999

Kevin Gregory

 

Being a smart tenor can be a mixed blessing.  The opera world is used to seeing prime examples of this thrilling vocal type arrive at the top, barely able to read music and with roles half-learned.  For his part, Argentinean tenor José Cura has contributed to a crossover album (see his collaboration with Sarah Brightman on Time to say Goodbye), but also once memorized the leading tenor role in La Forza del Destino overnight.  Moreover, he’s a conductor and composer.  So you can just imagine how he takes to some of the dopier roles in the obligatory repertoire for rising tenors.  For example, don’t talk to him about Giordano’s Andrea Chénier if you love the opera (because he doesn’t).

“You have great pages of inspiration and then, for a half hour, you have nothing.  Nothing!  You wonder what is going on!  So you have to give it charisma and lots of stage action.  And Fedora (Giordano’s other opera), apart from the moments everybody knows, depends entirely on the charisma of the singers onstage,” the 35-year-old tenor said one afternoon in his hotel room at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.  “I’ve sung Fedora a lot in the past.  In the beginning, I was asked to ‘cover’ José Carreras in Covent Garden.  Then I sang it in Chicago in ’94.  People have said ‘You are Loris! [the leading tenor character].’  They feel the character suits me.  But it’s a difficult pill to swallow.” 

Cura is too much a good sport, not to mention shrewd career builder, to give up the role just yet.  After all, he has opera pundits wondering aloud (and in print) if he might be a candidate for tenor superstardom now that the famous threesome (José Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti, and Placido Domingo) are edging toward vocal retirement.  Like Domingo, Cura is solidly trained, even going so far as to conduct, arrange, and compose some of the music on his current solo disc, Anhelo.  He’s the antithesis of the so-called “fire-plug tenor”; in fact, Cura is a statuesque bodybuilding and kung fu expert.  He’s known for imaginative touches in his characterizations.  But can he sing?

Put it this way: After some early doubts among critics, none other than Domingo conducted Cura’s debut disc of Puccini Aria as well as his Washington Opera debut in the fall of 1998 as the hero in Samson et Dalila (see Cura’s Erato recording of the opera).  The two tenors will also share opening night of the 1999 season at the Metropolitan Opera: Cura sings Cavalleria Rusticana, while Domingo sings I Pagliacci in the traditional double bill.  Might the two of them conduct for each other as well?  Cura would love to do it, “but I think the conductor is engaged already and wouldn’t want to be replaced.” 

The kind of nerve it takes to even consider making a dual Met debut (i.e., singing and conducting) is a key ingredient in maintaining operatic stardom, and Cura clearly has it.  While many star singers cling to their teachers for years into their careers, Cura has been circling the glove over the past four years, solving his own vocal problems as they arise.  But an important aspect of his psyche is his ability to forgive himself if things don’t always work.  “When you’re doing a film, you can always have a retake.  If you’re a painter, you cal always do it over.  When you’re a singer, there’s no second chance,” he says. “That’s an enormous point of stress.  We do make mistakes onstage.  In soccer, you can be in front of the goal and miss it.  You can be in front of a high note and have a problem.  You have to accept it.  When I go onstage, it’s like, ‘Listen guys, this is what I can do today.’  There’s only one way to cope: to be as well prepared as you can.  People used to say that I’m arrogant.  But arrogance is the mask of people who aren’t prepared.”

And Cura points out – in contrast to his image as an overnight sensation – that he has several years of training in Argentina that led up to his spectacular past four years, in the opera world.  He also has certain career controls build into his life.  With a wife and three children based in Paris, his U.S. visits aren’t likely to be terribly frequent.  All of his European contracts allow him to go home every three or four days.  “Not everybody is happy with that, but I’ve turned down a lot of things over that.  Even the Salzburg Festival.  They wanted me to rehearse Simon Boccanegra for a couple of months,” he says.  “That’s why I don’t sing much in Germany; they rehearse a lot.” 

One easy answer might be for Cura to establish himself in opera and then bolt to the concert world.  That appears to be happening with Roberto Alagna, a tenor whom Cura admires without reservation.  But Cura’s commitment to opera runs very deep: “If you have a race horse, you use it many ways.  But the moment you put it in a track for a race, he’ll be happy.  I can do whatever you want – sing concerts, pop music, do a movie, whatever.  But the animal in me only feels complete, satisfied, and fulfilled when I’m onstage.”

 

 

 

 

he first time I saw José Cura was last November, in Washington. A new production of Samson et Dalila at Washington Opera had begun with the chorus lying flat on the raked stage, then turning over in unison (like bacon self-turning in the frying pan), standing up and sitting down again. When they sat, there he was -- a towering vision in white, stunningly handsome, with a build like a Colossus, and exuding that quality so rare on the opera stage today -- charisma.

"Arrêtez, ô mes frères! Et bénissez le nom du Dieu saint de nos pères" (Cease, o my brethren! and bless the name of the Holy God of our fathers), he sang in a clarion voice that was powerful and exciting. His green eyes burned intensely, and when he compassionately put his hand on the shoulder of a Hebrew slave, I actually believed he could ease her suffering.

When the performance was over, the image that lingered during my train ride back to New York was of Cura as the blind Samson, grasping the young boy who was leading him through the crowd. I'm used to Samson holding the boy by the hand, but Cura clutched the child fiercely, clinging for dear life. The gesture was believable and brilliantly effective.

Before my Washington trip, I had been skeptical about the fast-rising tenor who was generating such juicy quotes as, "He comes as a 'whole package' -- exceptional voice, smoldering good looks and a captivating acting ability -- which a new generation of operagoers is clamoring for" (Antonia Couling in Opera Now). I, after all, had seen the great Samsons of Jon Vickers and Plácido Domingo; I was not about to be taken in by a Calvin Klein model, no matter how fine the packaging.

But José Cura is a genuine find: a serious musician with a burnished, baritonal sound. He is also an immensely charming yet shrewd man, with an obvious dedication to his art and an instinctive flair for drama -- especially as Samson, Don José, Andrea Chénier, Radamès, Des Grieux in Manon Lescaut and Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana. (Otello, which he first sang under Claudio Abbado in Turin in 1997, remains something of a work in progress.)

Turiddu is the vehicle for Cura's Metropolitan Opera debut, on September 27 -- the first half of a gala doubleheader opening night ending with Plácido Domingo in Pagliacci. The occasion combines the eagerly awaited introduction of New York audiences to the dramatic tenor whose voice and stage presence are a throwback to the days of Franco Corelli and Mario Del Monaco, with Domingo's eighteenth opening night at the Met, breaking the first-night record set by Enrico Caruso. The evening's two tenors have a special bond: in 1994, Cura was a winner of Domingo's International Operalia Competition, and Domingo has endorsed his younger colleague by conducting Cura's first solo recording -- the 1997 Puccini Arias -- and signing him on for both last season's Samson and this season's Otello at Washington Opera.

José Cura, the third Great Tenor Hope to make his Met debut in as many years, is the only one of the three likely to go into the record books as a successful debutant. (Roberto Alagna's nerves got the better of him in his 1996 debut in La Bohème; and Marcelo Álvarez's affably bland Alfredo got lost in the company's monster Zeffirelli production of La Traviata last year.) The fact that magazines and newspapers around the world, desperate for a successor to the triumvirate of Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras, have anointed Cura "The Fourth Tenor" irks the singer. "If I am the fourth tenor, who is the third, the second or the first?" he demands. "It's a title that doesn't mean anything."

In this age of hype, titles do of course mean something to the general public, but hype is a double-edged sword: while the accolades encourage a sort of frenzied anticipation, they also foster the honing of critical knives. Cura, who could do no wrong a couple of years ago, is now in the crosshairs of certain writers (notably Rodney Milnes, whose scathing review of the tenor's Otello appeared in the London Times last May 19). It helps that he has the good fortune not to be afflicted with stage fright -- even when a dress rehearsal has been a major disaster, or an opening night is fraught with glitches. Case in point: the first night of Samson at Washington Opera, when the temple came crashing down three bars too soon. Cura kept singing as if everything were going according to plan.

"My instinctive reaction was not to run away from the stage but to try to save the production," says the tenor, pausing mid-bite over a bowl of risotto at Café des Artistes in New York during our interview. "I'm never scared onstage -- there's nothing that can surprise me. I don't know if it sounds arrogant, but I'm so well prepared. I've been onstage more than half my life."

The singer has no doubt read a story or two in which he's been described as "arrogant," but at our first interview he comes across as cordial, polite, thoughtful, intelligent and humorous. He's obviously used to being interrupted by fans and people in the business -- at one point a well-known artist manager stops by to chat, shouting "Cura!" as he approaches our table -- yet somehow the tenor manages to stay focused on whatever question he's been asked, easily picking up where he left off.

True, Cura has strong opinions about the direction he wants his career to take, but he doesn't exhibit a pompous or overbearing attitude. He simply knows who he is and how hard he worked to get to where he is today.

ura was born in Rosario, capital of the Argentine province of Santa Fe, on December 5, 1962. His lineage is distinctively international: he's one-quarter Italian, one-quarter Spanish and half Lebanese. His paternal grandfather, for whom he was named, was born in poverty ("At the age of seven he was cleaning shoes at the corner of a road," says Cura) but became one the most powerful industrial leaders of Argentina, heading up a metals conglomerate; his father is a successful accountant.

Cura's earliest childhood memories are of listening to "all kinds of music," including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Beethoven, Mozart, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, and sitting at the piano with his father every night as the elder Cura played for him. "My mother taught me that there's not pop and classic, just good and bad music," he recalls.

 

 

Cura took his first voice and guitar lessons at age twelve and made his debut as a conductor at fifteen at an open-air choral concert in Rosario. Around that time he also began to write music. "I was just a musician," he recalls. "It was normal and spontaneous [to be conducting and writing music]. I didn't think about it. I just did it -- and enjoyed myself.

"In 1984, I wrote a Requiem Mass dedicated to the people who died in that stupid South Atlantic War in 1982. I was in the reserve army at the time, waiting to go to the Malvinas/Falklands, and I thank God the war was short. I have a dream that I'll perform the piece in 2007, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the war."

He began his formal studies in composition in 1982 at the National University of Rosario, where he continued his involvement with choral conducting and was encouraged by the chairman of the school to take up vocal studies. "He knew I wanted to be a composer or a conductor, but he told me that studying singing would make me a better composer and conductor." Cura won a scholarship to the School of Singing at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where things did not go according to plan.

"My voice when I was twenty was natural but pretty noisy," remembers Cura. "And because it was noisy, the first teachers I had were tempted to force it into the wrong repertoire. I remember myself singing Turandot, Fanciulla, that kind of thing. It was crazy! The natural and obvious result was that when I was twenty-three I had no voice anymore -- no more high notes, no more deep notes." Incorrect teaching had damaged his voice, and Cura was forced to change gears: "I remember saying, 'If singing is this kind of suffering, I don't want to sing anymore.'"

 

 

So at twenty-four, Cura -- by now married to Silvia, whom he had met nine years earlier, when she auditioned for his chorus -- took on a series of odd jobs to make ends meet. "I'd work in a gym as a bodybuilding instructor in the morning, in a grocery shop in the afternoon and in the chorus at the Teatro Colón in the evening."

But hadn't he decided not to sing anymore? Cura reflects on this between sips of a double espresso. "I think that God was always surveying and controlling my life and saying, 'You're going to be a singer even if you don't want to be a singer. It will take time to convince you, but you're going to be a singer.'"

When he was twenty-five, Cura was invited to be the musical director of a small local opera group that performed in schools and museums. "In one of the concerts, the tenor canceled. So I sang -- 'E lucevan le stelle' and the duet from Traviata. A tenor from the Teatro Colón, Gustavo Lopez, heard me sing that night and offered to introduce me to his teacher, Horacio Amauri." When Amauri heard Cura, he proclaimed, "A voice like yours comes along maybe once every thirty or forty years," and offered to give him free lessons.

"I worked with Maestro Amauri almost every day for two years, and that was the basis of my technique," says Cura. "He was a very tough teacher, very old-school. He believed in going into the center of the muscle and not just working superficially. It was good for me to be old enough -- and also experienced enough -- to know what I should do and what I should not do. After two years, I felt ready -- if not for a career, at least ready to earn my living in a more coherent way." One night Cura went home and told his wife, "We have to leave."

Today he confesses he had no idea where he was going or what he would do when they got there, "but I could feel the lion inside of me. The lion part was starving to work." The Curas sold their Buenos Aires apartment the first day it went on the market ("The economy was very difficult at that time, and we thought it would take at least two years," says Cura), pocketed the money ("which seemed like a lot at the time but is the equivalent of one night's pay today") and went to Italy. At the end of a month's time, they had gone through most of the money and -- as Cura tells it -- were ready to return to Argentina while they still had enough cash for the airfare. But as Cura was gathering his belongings for the return trip, he found a slip of paper given to him by a friend in Argentina. On it were the name and phone number of an Italian voice teacher.

 

 

"I called the number and told the man on the other end, 'Listen, in a few days I am leaving, but I would like to go back to Argentina knowing that somebody in Europe has heard me."

The voice teacher invited him to his studio and was so impressed with Cura that he introduced the tenor to an agent, Alfredo Strada, who in turn telephoned the esteemed voice teacher Vittorio Terranova (sometimes called "The Italian Alfredo Kraus"), saying, "I have somebody here who seems to be The Voice."

The only problem, says Cura, was that "at that point it was still just a big noise, and there was no professional style -- nothing that I could show to an artistic director to be engaged."

Terranova, like Amauri, agreed to take on the financially strapped Cura for free, and during the next year and a half he helped the tenor develop The Voice as we know it today -- dark-hued, sustained by ample breath, with a unique timbre and a virile, ringing top. There are still some problems -- in the higher register, Cura's tone sometimes thins out, and a few critics have faulted him for "too much heroic virility" and a certain lack of subtlety -- but opera-lovers in search of a spine-tingling thrill are not complaining.

The tenor's big break came courtesy of two contemporary roles, the Father in Hans Werner Henze's Pollicino, in Verona in 1992, followed by Jan in Antonio Bibalo's Miss Julie in Trieste. (The company had been ready to abandon the new work because they could not find a suitable tenor, but Alfredo Strada convinced them to take a chance on Cura.)

A month after his 1994 success in Plácido Domingo's Operalia, Cura made his North American debut at Lyric Opera of Chicago, as Loris in Fedora, opposite Mirella Freni. Although Cura has said he does not much care for the role, he received excellent reviews. He went on to make other notable house debuts in Stiffelio at Royal Opera (substituting for José Carreras at the 1995 Verdi Festival); Carmen at San Francisco Opera; and La Gioconda at La Scala. Today his repertory encompasses thirty roles.

Cura, who recently moved with his family from Paris to Madrid, limits his performances to about fifty a year. This season, U.S. operagoers will have to be quick on the draw if they want to see him at the Met (he sings only the first three performances of Cavalleria) or in one of five performances in March as Otello at Washington Opera. (He is also scheduled to sing the Moor at Palermo in December and at the Royal Opera in 2001.) As for future roles, Cura has hinted he'd like to have a go at Peter Grimes.

uring a second visit to the tenor one winterlike spring day -- in his dressing room, an hour before the final rehearsal of a concert Otello at London's Barbican -- he was excited about his new recording of verismo arias, scheduled for release in the U.S. last month. The conductor? "Somebody who is not very well known as a conductor but is a very good musician from my point of view -- called José Cura," he said, with a coy smile. This is not the first time Cura has conducted himself: he was at the helm of a thirty-piece ensemble for his 1998 CD of Argentinian songs, Anhelo ("Desire"), which includes the tenor's own settings of two poems by Pablo Neruda.

On that cold, rainy May day, Cura was looking forward to open-air performances of Aida in Verona. (The production's opening night was seen by a "virtual audience" over the Internet; on my computer screen it initially looked like ants dressed in blue, mouthing the words out of sync; by opera's end, however, Cura, who commandingly inhabits the screen, was positively sizzling -- until my computer crashed during the tomb scene.) He was also pleased about the prospect of spending the month of August in seclusion with Silvia and his three children -- José, Jr., eleven; Yasmine, six; and Nicolas, three -- before coming to New York for rehearsals of Cavalleria Rusticana.

"The Met has offered me some things in the past, but I wanted a good thing for my first appearance, and the fact that Plácido is singing too will make that night very special. Turiddu is a wonderful, tragic role. People think he's sort of a fanatic guy who is mistreating Santuzza. But we can't forget that he is the only real victim of the opera. He was in love with Lola before going to do his military service, and when he came back he found that Lola was married. He felt betrayed, he felt disappointed, he felt angry as a man."

Cura, who considers himself a theater animal, confesses that his acting abilities are entirely self-taught. "I find it most challenging to portray small parts of the human condition. I'm an observer, an analyzer of society," he says. "You mentioned how tightly I clung to the little boy when I was blind in the last act of Samson. I'm a father -- I know what it's like to cling tightly to a child."

Is José Cura the tenor we've been waiting for to lead us into the twenty-first century? Colin Davis seems to think so. "He's theatrical and very musical," says the conductor, who was at the helm for Cura's Barbican Otello and for the tenor's recent Erato recording of Samson et Dalila. "He has great physical strength and great emotional intensity. He simply cannot fail."

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