Last summer was rocky on the opera stock market. If you want to damage a stock, say the word "cancellation." It feels like only yesterday (it was 1974) that Montserrat Caballe was in town to make her San Francisco debut as Norma and, from her station at room service, cancelled the run one performance at a time. She was a legendary "canceller" who, like the pianist Martha Argerich, seemed only to up the excitement around her subsequent appearances. Not all are as lucky.
Cancelling role debuts dents the reputation of even the best singers; true or not, the message is no-can-do. Last summer, during a Dresden role debut as Elsa in Wagner's Lohengrin that was as creditable (it's on YouTube, on its way to stores) as it was unlikely, Anna Netrebko cancelled Norma �" not just the two new productions that were mounted for her this season, but the role, as well as what was to have been her Bayreuth debut as Elsa this coming summer. Then the only other singer currently as bankable as she, Jonas Kaufmann �" who had previously startled the horses by cancelling his first Berlioz Enee at Covent Garden �" cancelled everything: his first Elgar Gerontius in Berlin, his first Offenbach Hoffman in Paris, and a run of Lohengrins and Meistersinger Walthers, all in the interest of taking care of a physical problem with his voice. With a 2017 debut as Verdi's Otello in the offing, no one else is feeling better, despite the tenor's assurances he will return to the stage Nov. 22, a date no American could love, not that he sings here anymore.
Unintentionally adding insult to injury, both singers released much-hyped solo albums. The Russian diva became the umpteenth singer (including Kaufmann) to release a CD entitled Verismo (DG). Its kitschy cover (Anna as the Ice Princess Big Bird) argued against its opening track, Adriana Lecouvreur's "I'm a humble servant of art," but it hardly mattered since everyone who cared went directly to her first recording of the Turandot killer "In questa regia." A bearded Kaufmann, suggesting a Pavarotti with looks, dropped Dolce Vita (Sony), a collection that looked like the Neapolitan songs his Italian tenor forebears had taken to the bank, but actually a perplexing if vocally classy bit of musical slumming. The singers have some making up to do with their adoring publics.
Kaufmann has been singing lots of verismo onstage of late (incomparably, to my ears), but although it's an article of faith in the opera world that singing Puccini is vocally risk-free if done correctly, I can't think of a singer who's made good on that. Still, most of Kaufmann's cancelling to date really has represented radical self-care in the vocal department, and all but the most disgruntled of festival ticket-holders are willing to let him cuddle those cords �" in exchange for that Otello and a Tristan. It's like anything else in 2016: anything could happen.
It's hard to imagine the target audience for Dolce Vita . Not only are there precious "Neapolitan songs," some are from Italian movie soundtracks, and a good number sound like tunes you'd find on the jukebox of a New Jersey Italian family restaurant. Of the 18 songs, I found that only "Volare" would not go down, no matter how hard I tried. But he pulls off the sobs and crooning intrinsic to this fare with taste, and there's an unmistakable honesty in his striving to do no more than put over a song. For me it was enough to revel in the sound of one of the most glorious voices of our century in a completely relaxed state. Once or twice. Die-hard opera fans will be better served by his Andrea Chenier in the Coven Garden outing of the production seen in SF this fall, which was due to drop on SF opening night, but Warner kindly delayed release a month.
Netrebko's Verismo arrives with predictable fanfare, with the look and sound of the kind of diva disc Terry McEwen used to produce. As it ends with a complete Act IV from a studio Manon Lescaut (with her hubby, effete tenor Yusif Eyvasov), I chose to reserve comment until after her first Puccini Manon at the Met on Nov. 14. I heard the broadcast from the beginning, but when she made her vocal appearance, I thought there had been a cast change and I had missed the announcement. It was like hearing a veteran character soprano vamping a teensy tramp wannabe.
The beat in the voice is now pronounced, pitches are proximate at best, there is no legato line, and occasionally she summons the small change for a money note. It's all there, meticulously sound-shopped by the engineers, in Verismo. I was in the house when she made her SF-American-international debut in 1995, when she gave notice of a thready soprano with an almost chilling accuracy of coloratura. A frighteningly inaccurate singer with a plush, plummy voice and PR that goes back to the Kremlin has replaced her. I, for one, would rather she got directly to Turandot �" not opposite Kaufmann's inevitable Calaf, please �" and be done with it.