(This review appeared in the Straits Times on Monday 7th Noevmber 2016)
Singapore seems to be awash with
opera at the moment. We had Turandot a
couple of months ago, The Flying Dutchman last month, and this weekend sees
L’arietta’s production of Operacalypse Now!
Welcome as such an upsurge in
operatic activity is, none of it has quite captured the classic image of
Italian operatic grandeur as powerfully as did a recital held in Singapore School of the Arts Concert Hall last Friday
evening.
The Belgian company Dredging
International Asia Pacific marked its 20th year of operations in
Singapore by inviting two Belgian musicians and their American guest to present
a programme celebrating, in the first half, the great Italian tradition of Bel
Canto in excerpts from operas by Bellini and Donizetti. The second half offered more popular fare in
the guise of famous arias and duets excerpts from Verdi.
Belgian coloratura soprano Elise Caluwaerts
and the American tenor Franco Farina send out such strong operatic vibes that
you can’t imagine them doing anything else.
If you saw them on the top deck of a no.65 bus you would still know they
were opera singers.
For her part
Caluwaerts has one of those gloriously flexible voices which can simper like
the most innocently naïve young girl, ooze tenderness like the most seductive
of lovers, spit venom with all the passion of a wronged wife and shake with murderous
rage at the behaviour of errant husbands.
She did not hit all her top notes successfully, but missed them with
such self-assurance you could not be certain she was not doing it on purpose. Her vivid personality and the drama she
brought to her performances totally swept aside any tiny vocal imperfections.
Farina is a huge stage presence
both physically and vocally. Indeed, so
powerful and far-reaching was his voice that even when he was deep in the wings
behind a solid closed door singing the off-stage part of Verdi’s classic Sempre
libera, he still dominated. As one of
the audience, perhaps more used to dredging than opera, suggested over the free
Belgian beer in the interval, “How could I sleep with all that noise going
on?”
Using just the piano lid as his
prop, Farina brought the whole world of opera to the concert hall platform by
means of a twist and turn of the body and wonderfully descriptive facial
expressions. His mischievously delivered
La donna e mobile was truly unforgettable.
Discretely accompanying them at
the piano and occasionally urging them to keep to the well-dredged channel of
tonality, Belgian pianist Kim Van den Brempt chose as his one solo item the
nearest thing Chopin wrote to an operatic aria – the Etude Op.25 No.7 (it was incorrectly given in the programme as Op.25 No.5 but as nobody seemed to be reading the programme, that probably did not matter). This was a delicate and subdued performance
which was the perfect foil to what was otherwise an evening of high pressure
and high octane Italian opera.
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