Rinat Shaham

I fell in love with Rinat Shaham the artist in 2003, upon seeing her daffy, tender Dorabella in BAM’s Così fan tutte. I fell in love with Rinat Shaham the woman soon after interviewing her for Time Out New York in 2004. She is an earthy, deeply kind, winsome, well-grounded, and (yes) dazzlingly beautiful human being.

Rini is now a cherished friend, so I no longer write about her when I am paid for my scribblings. In 2006, I could not bring myself to blog about her Carmen at New York City Opera—Rini was wonderful, but the show as a whole evinced avert-your-eyes-and-ears awfulness. (I wish that the Met and City Opera would drop Carmen and, for that matter, all French operas from their repertory, until and unless they make a solemn effort to stop doing violence to French music.)

In any event, over the weekend, along with drinking the best coffee I’ve had outside of Italy and visiting not one but two great yarn shops, I once again had the privilege of hearing Rini sing. With the Philadelphia Orchestra, she performed Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”), which she repeats Tuesday at Carnegie Hall and Wednesday and Friday in Philadelphia.

Rini lived Bernstein’s music in a way that I’m at a loss to describe. I want to focus on two key words: first, Y’rushalyim (“Jerusalem”), whose sins and widowhood the prophet bemoans. As Rini sang Y’rushalyim, it was sinuous, graceful, and radiant, like a princess—yet mournful. It was at once covered with ashes and lit from within. How many artists can convey such complexity of feeling?

Similarly, the symphony’s penultimate word—Adonai (“Lord”)—unfurled from the hush of veneration to a searing reproach, ever shimmering with awe.

I was so spent after Rini’s performance that I could focus only intermittently on Jennifer Higdon’s The Singing Rooms, a new work for violin, chorus, and orchestra. Jennifer Koh (like Rini, a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music) played with extraordinary ferocity and a kaleidoscopic range of colors.

Higdon set a series of beautiful poems by Jeanne Minahan, and I quote from one of them:

Three windows offer two versions of the day,
the first: cool and sweet, a blue cascade
of watered light,
the second: bright heat barely held back
by the venetian blind…

Both are here, though you
cannot be:
that heat, that long shade of blue.

At Curtis, Rini sang in an alumni recital Brahms’ “Zwei Gesänge,” Op. 91. In “Gestillte Sehnsucht,” her voice took on the rich, dappled colors of the forest, lush in the sunset’s golden glow. In “Geistliches Wiegenlied,” we heard a different voice—maternal, virginal, yet fervently protective of the infant Jesus.

In coming months, Rini repeats her Carmen in Stuttgart, portrays Cherubino in Valencia, reprises the Bernstein in Paris, and makes her La Fenice début as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia.

Comments

[vilaine fille]

Dear Leyla,

She will be Dorabella next fall in Paris. See you there?

With much love to you,
v.f.

[Leyla Gencer]

Dear Vilaine,

I loved her in the BAM Cosi. Your enthusiasm for her as an artist and as a friend make me want to see and hear more of her.