The Opera Grapevine: Beyond the Chardonnay

Out on the Fringe Are Singers Worth Toasting

Does opera have a chardonnay problem? Chardonnay, wine lovers will tell you, is a very pernicious wine, embodying all the evils of commercialization, globalization and the banality of contemporary taste. Its success in the United States is part of an ominous and homogenizing tendency toward a cloying, single, dominant idea of a good white wine. Chardonnay is everywhere, and everywhere it is oaky, creamy, smooth and undistinguished. "I'll have the chardonnay," we say when imagination utterly fails us.

In the opera world, one might say there is a tendency toward the vocal equivalent of chardonnay: a world of creamy, smooth, undistinguished and -- it's not too much of a stretch -- oaky sounds. It's the sound you hear in crossover singers or in pop-opera types such as Andrea Bocelli. Many of the same forces are at work: Vocal styles are no longer regional as performers travel, creating a bland, internationalized sense of good singing. And the market tends to follow success, so when a singing style becomes popular, it also becomes ubiquitous. It's a world where the serviceably "pretty" has become the definition of the beautiful, threatening to crowd out all the other categories of beauty, for instance, the exotic, the interesting, the gothic.

Put tenor Daniil Shtoda's new recording of Russian opera arias (from Delos) on the stereo, and it brings a shock. Here's a voice that isn't gorgeous by the usual definition of vocal beauty. It doesn't have the richness, fullness and warmth of what, for better and worse, might be called the Pavarotti standard, the effortlessly lyrical sound that defined the mainstream sense of good opera singing for the many decades of that artist's career. But it's not that Shtoda, a young Russian tenor, fails to reach that standard; he is singing with a voice, in a style, that defies those categories. He has a very Russian sound, and for anyone looking to escape the chardonnay circuit, it is extraordinarily refreshing.

Shtoda's singing has a quality that many of the Russian opera stars who work in the West often lack -- intensely pleading, with a thinness that never breaks, almost a wheedling tone. Tenors play characters that demand exactly this tone, characters caught up in their own slightly neurotic sexual neediness. Rimsky-Korsakov's exquisitely wrought aria, Levko's Song from "May Night," is representative: "Are you asleep, Galya? Or don't you want to come out? Are you afraid of somebody?" the tenor cajoles.

Levko's Song, a staple of Russian recitals, is the first item on Shtoda's disc, and it has a clarion effect on the ears. The sound is compact but intense, the phrasing smooth and elastic. He's not just singing Russian words. Russian is shaping the basic sound, giving it a slightly nasal quality that sharpens the edge of the voice. Sometimes this even suggests a hint of strain in the upper ranges; but as the ears adjust to the timbre of the voice, it doesn't seem strained at all. It is insistent, but not forced. And as this basic timbre becomes more and more familiar, it becomes more and more seductive. Shtoda, if he develops and overcomes some bad technical habits (he swoops and scoops a bit too much), could be a truly great tenor, though one will never mistake him for all the leather-lunged aspirants to be one of the next "Three Tenors."

Shtoda has been compared to other light, bright tenors from the past, including Nicolai Gedda and Fritz Wunderlich -- very high praise. But the voice has more in common with some decidedly more obscure singers from Russia. It resembles, in quality, the voice of Yuri Marusin, a veteran of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Marusin takes heavier roles and has a larger instrument. But the two share a haunting, bleating vulnerability in their expression that suggests a more than accidental connection. It is the delicious remnant of a truly distinctive, local idea of what constitutes a beautiful voice.

It's probably no accident, either, that Shtoda's recently released recital disc is issued by Delos, a small, scrappy label that takes chances that larger record labels won't. Opera is in an interesting moment. Large, star-driven efforts from the major labels are no longer directed at recording whole operas. But recital discs abound, usually featuring one singer and, more often than not, the same two dozen popular arias that define the core of each vocal type's repertoire. So it's not necessarily a bad time to hear the wealth of the operatic world. But to find variety amid abundance, smaller labels are essential.

Ondine, the Finnish label, has devoted several recordings to the magnificent Finnish soprano Karita Mattila. She can be heard on the major record labels as well in traditional repertoire. But there's something qualitatively different, better and more human about a collection of Sibelius songs she sings on an Ondine release, "Excellence: The Artistry of Karita Mattila." Sibelius is the great composer of Finland, and any Finnish singer will gravitate toward this repertoire. When she sings Richard Strauss, which, given the size of her voice, is her natural medium, her voice takes on a big, wintry quality, white and vast. It's a spine-tingling sound, rising above the orchestra with apparently infinite reserves of support and heft.

But when she sings these intimate Sibelius songs, the voice and the expression darken and take on a new luster. Sibelius wasn't trying to write songs that expressed a Finnish exoticism; they are very much European art songs. And like so many of the brilliant Finnish singers who have graced the world's stages, Mattila is a perfect chameleon, singing well in multiple languages, adapting to different styles and repertoire. But Sibelius draws out of Mattila something more interesting and inviting.

The same phenomenon, even more pronounced, can be heard in a recording by the Bulgarian mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova, "Bulgarian Soul." This time, the music is available from a major label, BMG, which was no doubt reassured by the cult success of a recording of Bulgarian choral music ("Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares" from Nonesuch) released 15 years ago. On most of her releases Kasarova focuses exclusively on the bel canto repertoire that has made her a star. But on her Bulgarian album, she takes up Bulgarian folk music, whose simplicity exposes the native beauty of her voice even more resplendently than the music of Rossini and Donizetti and Bellini. She doesn't force her singing voice to the extremes of throaty yet nasal production of the accompanying choir (the Bulgarian style is indescribably bizarre and beautiful), but the music definitely unleashes an edgier, darker and again more personal sound than she uses in traditional Italian and French repertoire. It's almost as if she's flirting with a folk sound that can never really be assimilated into her art singing, but echoes in the background, giving the voice a slight accent, a hint of remote origins.

The Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu can't quite suppress an exotic, knife-edge bite in her singing either. She is, for many opera fans, especially European ones, the reigning diva of the moment. But she's also a controversial diva (and not just for her temperament). There's a wildness in her singing that would very likely be tempered out of an American singer with her natural gifts. The voice has a slight, tremulous warble in it that grows when she pushes to the top of her range and swells to larger volume. It reminds some listeners of the vocal difficulty that plagued Maria Callas, though it is clearly more in control, and she can manipulate it as an expressive device. She may be the perfect embodiment of one of the paradoxes of great singing: Small flaws add to the value and character of the instrument because they underscore a frailty, or mortality, in the sound that makes it more human and believable. One can hear this grain of imperfection in anything she sings, but perhaps nowhere is it more beautiful and haunting than in a Romanian sacred song, "Tatal Nostru," ("Our Father," a setting of the classic prayer) on her album "Mysterium" (Decca). Again, it seems to be the comfort of the native language, and the native style, that unleashes the truth of the voice.

All of these voices come from the edges of Europe. The list could be longer: Ian Bostridge, an English tenor, has done wonders to win converts to the reedy, almost fey sound of the high English voice; Juan Diego Florez, a Peruvian tenor, a very promising young singer, is proving that the Rossini tenor, a distinctively brilliant and heady style of singing, can have broader appeal beyond the cognoscenti who favor the bravura bel canto style. So perhaps the chardonnay problem is more of a persistent but manageable threat than a manifest danger. As with so many things in art, there are two paths, one familiar and comforting, another dark and unnerving. Artists, and art lovers, domesticate the odd and exotic but can never quite assimilate everything. At the end of the menu, at the bottom of the recital program, is the residue of what can't be tamed.

In American singers, it may be the echo of Tin Pan Alley that creeps into the way a baritone sings a comic aria, or the irrepressible joy of Sunday morning in a Baptist church that can't quite be flattened out of an African American soprano singing Verdi. Perfection and cosmopolitan adaptability are often the enemies of everything that is distinctive in the voice. So are the impoverished expectations of the audience that everything will sound like the small and limited ideal they hold in their heads -- that every singer will sound like Pavarotti or Joan Sutherland or, today, Renee Fleming. Fortunately, art is a form of memory, retaining echoes of almost forgotten sounds. To love singing is to live for what cannot be suppressed.