As the musical season creeps to a close here in New York, I’ve been thinking back over what most impressed me. Rossini and Mussorgsky sung by Ewa Podleś were, without question, the year’s high point for me: music-making of such spiritual intensity, visceral force, and utter mastery that everything else seemed trivial by comparison.
Well, yes and no. There was Dima’s captivating program of romantic and patriotic Russian songs. Some fifteen years after I first heard Hvorostovsky perform “Ochi chorniye,” my response remains precisely the same:
Please, sir. Ravish me now.
Someone whose favorite singers are Callas, Schipa, Supervia, and Paolo Conte clearly doesn’t give a rat’s ass about beauty of tone. Still, Hvorostovsky’s sound—Byzantine in its gem-encrusted blackness, posh but fraying at the edges into a n’er-do-well snarl—never fails to set my skin a-tingle.
(By the way, that’s just the effect that Hvorostovsky’s voice has on me. Factor in the delightful person, and I’m afraid that my aged, infirm nervous system simply shuts down beneath the onslaught.)
When all is said and done, though, what most made me smile this season was the début of Giuseppe Filianoti. Lucia, like most Italian opera, is outrageously ill-treated at the Met. But in ran this blessèd young man, burning with the severe fire of an Alfieri, vehement and meltingly tender by turns, and I was suddenly transported back to the early ottocento, when audience members would sob and faint at a powerfully delivered phrase. Filianoti gave us many such moments, which I count among the most moving and exciting of my opera-going life.
According to this page, New Yorkers will be hearing Filianoti’s Tamino, mirabile dictu. (He is pictured, right, in the Parma production of Die Zauberflöte.) Filianoti is Edgardo at La Scala to the great Mariella Devia’s final Lucias, and will portray Hoffmann in Hamburg. (That I may have to travel to hear. Can you say… dementia?) He will sing Mozart’s Tito in Torino and is also interested in portraying Peter Grimes down the line.
My interview with Giuseppe Filianoti appeared in Sunday’s US Italia Weekly but won’t be available online for several days, so I offer it for your amusement now.
The season of stealth: That is how the Metropolitan Opera’s last term with General Manager Joseph Volpe at the helm may be remembered. Strenuously hyped new productions of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale flopped. Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, engrossingly played but wrought of warmed-over-modernist murk, joined the Met’s long line of expensive and instantly forgettable commissions.
And yet, what for-the-ages splendors lurked in the Met’s less ballyhooed revivals. There was Così fan tutte, in which Barbara Frittoli’s luminous Fiordiligi brought the flesh and fire of italianità to Mozart and da Ponte’s rococo confection. There was Verdi’s Falstaff, whose every miraculous measure glinted and fizzed under the peerless guidance of James Levine. There was Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, whose finale for once truly burned with the darkness and menace of desire.
And there was Giuseppe Filianoti. “A sensational, if unheralded, debut,” raved Opera News of his Edgardo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The tenor from Calabria “acquired a fan club in the upper balconies by the fifth performance,” wrote Alex Ross in The New Yorker. Back home, a headline in Il Giornale proclaimed Filianoti “the hero of the Metropolitan Opera.” He returns to the house this month as Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore on May 13, 17, and 20.
Just 31 years old, Filianoti offstage has the quiet, unassuming demeanor of the geeky kid who used to get beat up in high school. Dressed simply in a sweater and jeans, wearing glasses, he gives off none of the glamour or intensity he radiated in Lucia. As Edgardo, Filianoti hit the stage running, his cape swirling behind him. He brandished a sword with reckless panache. He caressed his leading lady’s face with rapt tenderness and sat before her spellbound, drinking in her every word. Some viewers spoke of silent-movie histrionics, but what Filianoti offered, and what Met audiences hailed with grateful roars, was open-hearted surrender to the passion and grandezza of Donizetti’s masterpiece.
By the way, Filianoti can sing, too. With prodigious breath reserves, he spins long, beautifully tapered vocal lines. His enunciation is superb—his asides in Lucia rang out with stinging force—and his tone is firm and well-produced from bright top notes all the way down to a rich, manly lower register.
The tenor recently portrayed Massenet’s Werther for the first time. Like any young artist, he has room to grow in this exacting role, but his silken phrasing and inward, achingly vulnerable ways portend greatness. An accomplished Mozartian—he is a grandly assertive Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni and an admired Tamino in Die Zauberflöte—Filianoti reportedly has his sights set on Stravinsky’s Tom Rakewell. With any luck, U.S. audiences will have the chance to hear him display the full range of his talents.
US Italia Weekly spoke with Filianoti in December, near the end of his Lucia run at the Metropolitan Opera.
Are you pleased with your Met debut?
I’m very happy. Europeans often say that audiences in the U.S. go for sensational effects. But I sang the way I’ve always sung, taking great care with musical values, with my phrasing, and the success came by itself.
What are your next New York engagements?
Next year, at Carnegie Hall, I’ll perform an opera that I adore, Cilea’s L’Arlesiana [with Opera Orchestra of New York]. Then I return to the Met in 2008 for Lucia and in 2009 for Rigoletto.
Tell me a little about your background.
I studied at the conservatory in Reggio Calabria and at the Accademia della Scala. I also have a degree in literature.
Are there certain artists or conductors from whom you’ve learned a lot?
I had the good fortune to meet Alfredo Kraus at a master class in Milan. When I first sang Lucia, I called him and said, “Maestro, how do you see this opera?” He said, “[Edgardo] can be understood as either a dramatic or a lyric tenor role. I always sang it as a lyric, and if you see it this way, concentrate above all on your phrasing.” That was the impetus that brought me to the role.
Among conductors, first and foremost, without question, is Maestro Riccardo Muti. I’ve sung several operas with him, and when I was at the Accademia della Scala I covered roles and attended his rehearsals. He has a vast knowledge of the repertoire and, above all, always tries to draw out of the score what the composer wanted. In fact, when he pointed out certain things to me in roles I had already sung, I said to myself, “How is it possible I didn’t see that before?” He gives great importance to the text.
Which singers of the past do you admire?
Alfredo Kraus, of course. Also Aureliano Pertile: His “Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali” is engraved in my mind, so utterly beautiful in terms of phrasing and style. I admire Gigli for his exceptionally beautiful voice, Caruso… Tito Schipa is extremely elegant. My method is to find singers who emphasize elegance, placement, bel canto.
What operas do you hope to sing in the future?
I’m very happy with the roles I perform now. I don’t want to sing dramatic roles, but I do hope to continue the work that, happily, some of my colleagues have undertaken—of restoring to certain operas their original interpretations. Trovatore, other works by Verdi, by Bizet: A tradition of verismo interpretations has been handed down that is utterly foreign to these operas. It’s too soon for me, but I would like to sing Don Carlo and Un ballo in maschera.
I was discussing this with my colleague Ramón Vargas, for whom I have the greatest admiration. I said, “Ramón, we have to get back to singing after a certain period of urlatori (howlers).” It’s hard, because many people who think otherwise make a bigger splash with the public, but we love music and must press on with our work.
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