Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Graves gives
meaning to ‘diva’By Ruth O. BinghamDenyce Graves Sings Carmen: Repeats 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Blaisdell Concert Hall. Tickets $15 to $50. Call 792-2000.
Special to the Star-BulletinTHE opera season seems to have opened three weeks early with a teaser by the Honolulu Symphony featuring opera diva Denyce Graves in concert.
"Diva," which means "goddess," suits Graves in all ways. She swept on stage in a form-fitting electric blue satin gown, gathered in front and back to emphasize her voluptuous figure, followed in the second half by an equally well fitting old-ivory satin gown and dramatically long shawl.
Graves' elegantly rich mezzo-soprano more than matched her gowns. Her smooth bel canto, ranging from deep, almost husky notes into clarion highs, rang, echoing off the back walls.
Graves sang a miscellany of 19th-century mezzo arias that conductor Samuel Wong called a "stream of consciousness program": "O mio Fernando!" from Donizetti's La favorita; "Voi lo sapete" from Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana; "Stride la vampa" from Verdi's Il trovatore; "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix" from Saint-Saën's Samson et Dalila; and "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle (the habanera)" and "Près des remparts de Séville (the seguidilla, which Graves calls the quesadilla)" from Bizet's Carmen.
Graves brought the concert to its climax with her Carmen, a role for which she is well known. Extra fricative breaths notwithstanding, the songs were skillfully acted, clearly enunciated and sumptuously sung.
Although Graves' lovely voice may not be rough-hewn enough for Azucena, Verdi's crazy old gypsy cackling her tale of horror around the bonfire, "Stride la vampa" fit well into Graves' tessitura and showcased her fine technique and control.
In Saint-Saëns' "Mon coeur s'ouvre ...," Graves exuded Dalila's honeyed seductiveness and when she sang "réponds à ma tendresse! (respond to my tenderness!)," the audience did, with enthusiasm. Clarinetist Scott Anderson's solo filled in convincingly for Samson's answering "I love you!"s.
All that surpassed Graves' voice was her artistry in controlling and shaping phrases. In "Voi lo sapete," for example, Graves' despairing "Io piango! (I weep!)" contrasted poignantly with her earlier soaring, rapturous "Ah! l'amai (how I loved him!)," neatly punctuating the aria's structure and message.
Graves closed the concert with encores from Jerome Kern's "Showboat" and George Gershwin's "Porgy & Bess" (with Byron Yasui on banjo), to the audience's delight, exiting with an unaffected little wave.
In juxtaposition, the orchestra's intervening opera overtures receded into entertainment designed to keep the audience from getting restless while waiting for Graves' return. That is no criticism: the orchestra played well, as did Mark Butin in a rare viola solo.
The overtures lent their potpourri nature to the concert. But then, the concert did not really need programmatic coherence: its purpose, handily achieved, was to allow the audience to surrender to the seduction of a beautiful voice.
Ruth O. Bingham has a Ph.D. in musicology from
Cornell University, and teaches at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
Click for online
calendars and events.
