'I will have a belly'
About halfway through our conversation, José Cura reckons he can spot my angle. I have just asked him the “A” question: would you, as many of your critics suggest, say you are arrogant? (Since Cura is a body builder, a martial arts expert and a former rugby player, this is a courageous question.) He slumps a little lower on the sofa, slows the speed of his already deliberate delivery, and embarks on a lengthy reply, the gist of which is that he is not arrogant, but “disgustingly – is that how you say it? – secure”.
He rolls the phrase around; it becomes a recurring theme. “I love this because I can see the title of your article – ‘Disgustingly secure’ – which of course will drive people to the conclusion that I am arrogant,” he says at last.
Cura, the Argentinian-born tenor tipped as the successor to Placido Domingo, appears to both love and hate the media. He is everywhere at the moment: a fortnight ago he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he has just released a new disc called Verismo (a selection of arias by turn-of-the-century composers such as Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Giordano), he is on the cover of this month’s Opera and Classic FM magazines, and on Sunday he is the subject of the South Bank Show.
All that adds up to a lot of press, which Cura does willingly, sympathetically, but a little suspiciously. He has been stung several times. In the interview with Opera, for example, he made a throwaway reference to Roberto Alagna – “I wasn’t invented by the media or my record company, or discovered in a restaurant” – which he now regrets. The interview, he explains, was conducted many months ago when he and Alagna were not on the best of terms; now they have decided they are “fighting the same fight” and the remark is ignoble.
I interviewed Cura in Madrid, where he has just moved with his wife Silvia and their three children. He talked fluently in English, which is at best his third language, not worrying as we approached the end of the second hour that he had to go immediately to a rehearsal for Otello at the Teatro Real. Cura will make his Madrid debut there on October 29, and the work will dominate his musical life for the next two years.
He is a star and knows it. He has a streak of arrogance but tempers it with wit and a hint of self- deprecation; he likes to talk, appears to want to engage, and puts me sufficiently at ease to ask the even more dangerous “B” (for beefcake) question.
Here goes. “At your Barbican performance in May, one critic said you had to decide ‘whether to be a singer or a sex object’. Which is it to be?” There is a pause and a calmly delivered answer: “Looking in a certain way can be useful, but it can be a double-edged weapon. I am pleased to be able to look like the characters I perform, but I am also aware that behind the way I look is a musician fully prepared and technically ready. We have to separate things. I will lose my hair – I am already losing a lot – I won’t be young any more; and maybe I will have a belly. That doesn’t mean that my whole career was based on the way I look. Believe me, you can look the way you look, but that is no way to cope with Samson or Otello or Andrea Chénier from the beginning to the end unless you are a good singer and a good professional. You won’t sing Otello or Samson just with your face.”
The question arises because Cura is pretty good-looking – though at 36 there is the first evidence of that belly – and has a powerful physique, which he uses to good effect on stage. He considers himself as much an actor as a singer, and says proudly that after his third performance at the Met a famous Broadway actor (he won’t say who) came to his dressing room and told him he was the best actor-singer he had ever seen.
The way his record company markets him – putting as much stress on his pectorals as on his arpeggios – also encourages critics to take the singer-or-sex-symbol line. The new disc comes with a fetchingly rugged photograph of Cura on the cover, and a curious picture of him crawling across the floor on the back. He takes the sensible view that it’s all part of the business of selling records. “If you want to ride this kind of bicycle, you have to go for it,” he says philosophically.
He describes the record business as a “balance between good art and good business – the line is very subtle and a lot of recordings fall on one side or the other”. He has thus far recorded only one full-length opera, Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Dalila, and three more commercial discs – a Puccini collection, a record of Argentinian songs, and now Verismo. That reflects the expense of recording entire operas and the difficulty of justifying such recordings in an already overcrowded market, but in the next three years he plans to record Otello and Andrea Chénier, as well as a Verdi tribute and a “high-class crossover” record to keep the accountants happy (his Puccini disc sold more than 150,000 copies).
The other tricky area to negotiate with Cura is the “C” question – why does he so often insist on conducting, as he did at the Festival Hall earlier this year (he also conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra on Verismo)? Opera magazine’s John Allison is damning about his Festival Hall appearance: “To all but his most ardent admirers he looked more than a little ridiculous, standing with his back to the orchestra, arms flapping like the wings of a big bird trying to get airborne, and – crucially – singing with less than his full, thrilling power. He appears not to recognise his own limitations.”
Why bother, I ask him? Surely, being a great tenor, a potential successor to the Big Three, is sufficient? There are two answers: self-expression and self-improvement; power and performance. First, power: “The musician and the conductor in me wants to give his own version of these pieces, not a shared version. At least in my recitals I would like to be solely responsible for the results, good or bad, so I can say they are my recitals. It’s also because I belong to that rare group of human beings who used to be called kamikazes, who like to experiment and take risks.”
Now, perhaps more attractively, performance: “I strongly believe that by conducting, I will be a better singer; that by being a better singer, I will be a better conductor; and that by understanding the rules of composition [oh yes – he also composes] I will be a better conductor and a better singer, at least in terms of understanding what I’m singing. I will be the complete artist.
“I know that I will never be a technically perfect machine for producing notes. Maybe I can’t, or maybe it’s not in the nature of my voice or personality. It is more in the nature of my personality to be as good an actor as I can be and then put the notes on top of that. I will get reviews complaining about that note which was not perfect from now until the end of my life. My advice to reviewers is to stop wasting their energy trying to find the wrong note in my performances because they will always find one. The moment that I start to read that I was not committed on stage, or that I was boring on stage – that is the moment I will start to really worry.”
In fact, Cura does fret about reviews – he was so hurt by the review in the New York Times of his Met debut as Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana that he reckons it affected his second performance – but he says he is getting better at coping with criticism. The “disgustingly secure” side of his character is emerging, plus the inner strength he says he developed while trying to make his name in Argentina.
He was born and studied in Rosario, the country’s second city, but his parents’ business foundered with the military coup and recession in 1976 and he had to work hard and take on family responsibilities. Then in the early 80s he had a falling-out with the opera school in Buenos Aires and chose to study privately. Eventually he headed for Europe with his young wife to find – after many travails and with the help of first prize in Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition in Mexico in 1994 – fame and fortune.
There is perhaps one last question to ask him – the “D” question. Does he have the drive and determination to make it to the top and stay there? Does he really want it enough? One desperately wants him to demonstrate his commitment, to say that he wants to be the new Domingo. But that is precisely what he will not say. “The pressure is not about the need for someone who can pick up the mantle,” he says. “That is something that happens naturally; it has been happening for ages and will happen again. I would like to keep this rhythm of career for another 10 to 15 years, but parallel to that I have a private life that is very intense and very nice and very important. I have three kids and have been married for more than 15 years, so in another 10 years or so I could already be a grandfather if God wants that. At a certain point in my life I will want to enjoy my family and my kids and my private life. That is not to say that at 50 I will give up singing, but I may want to take it easier.”
So is that the life expectancy of a great voice? When will he be in his prime? When will his Otello reach its perfect pitch? “Good question. I don’t know,” he replies at once. “I will tell you when it happens. What I can tell you is that I’m not at my best now, that’s for sure. I can feel that every performance is different than the performance before. I’m still learning; your muscles are still developing. Your technique is still developing. It’s a never-ending story, thank God, because that is what makes it interesting.”
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