Corrado's Aria and Cabaletta Tutto Parea Sorridere... Sì! De Corsari Il Fulmine

Home , Cabaletta, I due Foscari, Michael Fabiano

INTERVIEW TO MICHAEL FABIANO by Santiago Rodrigo Hilara

Opening today at the Teatro Real in Madrid, the concert version of Verdi's rarely heard Giovanna d'Arco and never before presented in the theatre, boasts an expert cast led by legendary tenor Plácido Domingo in the baritone role of Giacomo alongside Michael Fabiano as king Carlo VII. "I love these early Verdis. This Giovanna d'Arco is number ten of the Verdis that I've sung. I'm not halfway there yet, but I'm getting there", Fabiano says, in reference to the twenty-six operas the composer from Busseto actually wrote and the American tenor's deep interest in his music writing. When given the Richard Tucker Award in 2014, the opening piece performed by him at the the Gala was Corrado's aria and cabaletta Tutto parea sorridere... Sì! De Corsari il fulmine... from Il Corsaro, a declaration in some way, foreshadowing his future undertakings. This new commitment in Spain for Fabiano may come as the cherry on top a mere month and a half after the release of his first solo album, Verdi & Donizetti: Opera Arias, under the label Pentatone. Unlike many themed recordings these days, this collection of arias exudes an essay-like quality, a truly studious approach, albeit an appropriately passionate one, to singing late Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi and how their styles may have informed one another. Michael Fabiano.- In fact, when I first wrote my notes, that was the word that I used: "This is a study on late Donizetti and early Verdi". Then we didn't quite stick to early Verdi and to late Donizetti - it opened a little bit. At the beginning, I wanted it to be specifically from 1840 to 1860. That narrow. But then we ended up going as early as 1835 and then 1862, because we needed to fill the album with music that was appropriate and good. I didn't put Nabucco, because there was nothing from Nabuccoto sing. Un giorno di regno, I could have put - I thought about it -, but didn't do it, in the end. We orginally had Attila planned. I due Foscari was on the album. I Masnadieri was half recorded and we ran out of time.

- How much time did you have to record? - Fourteen hours, over a number of days, but very compact in time. I think that's the lesson learned: the next time I do it, there will be more time for me to take a break, because recording several days in a row is not easy. Next time, I would want more time off in between sessions. That was hard.

- You do actually speak of that in the very candid promotional video of the album. You speak about the difficulty to keep up a certain level of energy during the whole of the recording sessions. How did you manage it in the end? - Coffee (laughs). It was a combination of things. First, I had to remind myself of the gravity of what I was doing, so I was very conscious of the fact that we were doing something for posterity. That required an intense focus the entire time. The second is that every character that I sang had an emotional weight, except the Duke really, that required an intensity for me to deliver it well. If I just delivered the notes and the rhythm accurately, and I sang it well, I'm not so sure people would have liked my album so much. I just don't. So I felt I needed to imbue a lot of passion into the disc, and that's something that I learned on this album, something that I have to learn to meter better, because it can really get the best of me in studio if I have to take something nine times... like thirty bars of music, and do it nine different times. That's heavy, and I just can't do that all the time.

- Also in the video, you're working with tenor Neil Shicoff. Had you worked with him before? - Yes, Neil and I worked quite a lot together.

- What would you say he brought to the album? - In the film, because it was largely about me and not Neil, you don't see it. Neil did his best to get my voice just firing in all cylinders. He sang a lot of the same music that I've sung for the balance of my career. I'm starting to go into Talesof Hoffmann this year - he was maybe the world's greatest Hoffmann in my opinion from 1985 on. He's a great Cavaradossi, and he's a great Werther, and he's great in La Juive. So what I get from him is some vocal technique, but more 'Why do you sing this way and how do you do it?', and that's not necessarily technique, but an approach to singing. I would call him more of a guru than a teacher. He's elevated above a teacher, because he's done it for 45 or 50 years, and he knows the rigours of being on that stage and how much pressure comes with it, and that just knowing how to sing is not sufficient. Both tenors have in common a bigger-than-life, emotional and committed approach to performing. With that in mind, Carlo VII may not sound the most fitting character for Fabiano in terms of personality. In spite of its à-la-Trovatore firy cabaletta closing the opera's prologue, this king comes across as a rather bland character. - Carlo is a kind of fallen king in this opera. He's not a hero and he's not an anti-hero. He's in love with Giovanna, but he is not a man definitively by the sword, which I'd much prefer. He gets there, but he gets there by way of Giovanna d'Arco. The real hero is her.

- He's instrumental to the story. - Absolutely! But he's a passive instrumental partner to the story. She's the active one. In many operas, it's not the woman who's the active one. Verdi loved the sopranos, so he tended to give a lot of sopranos the active position in the show, even if they're not the title role. Carlo is a noble person, and I think he's a good guy and that he fights for the country and does all that, but SHE carries the opera through.

- Now, many specialists have agreed on the fact that this is not one of Verdi's most inspired operas. - He didn't even like it that much. If you read his letters, you will see that Giovanna d'Arco wasn't at the top of his list. He wasn't happy with Oberto, he hated Alzira, he did not like Il Corsaro, Giovanna d'Arco was not something he was that proud of. Foscari, for example, is right before Giovanna d'Arco, which he loved. Alzira was right after - (he) hated it. So these two that were back-to-back were no good. Then there was Attila, which he seemed to be happy with, and then Macbeth came - Macbeth was number 10. That one was a good one for him.

- And what would you say the big difference between Foscari, which you performed in Madrid in the past, and Giovanna d'Arco is? - Oh, it's interesting, because they are within months of each other, right? Giovannad'Arco misses, for me, his progressive look at music. In Foscari, for instance, at the beginning of the second aria that the tenor sings, he uses only two instruments that play one and half a minute interlude - two string instruments. It sounds from some other epoch. It doesn't sound like Verdi. And there is a number of moments like that in Foscariwhere you can sense he's thinking about something else, but he hasn't totally figured it out, yet. And then, Giovanna d'Arco seems to be more back to

formula, aria, scena, aria, scena, duetto, scena, triowith a little bit of a lamenting scena, finale, you know... simple formula of late Donizetti and early Verdi. And he didn't really, for me, have the real transfer into a new period, into Luisa Miller, which is his 14th opera. [Luisa] Miller, in the last act, is just a different opera, a different type of writing, it doesn't stop, there's no fixed moment where we can start clapping. It's clear that he was doing something else, and that was right before Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata.

- And even before that last act, theatrically, he seems to be building a completely different kind of ambience. - Sure, even in the scenaof Rodolfo in the second act. The music in between the aria and the cabaletta is crazy. It is not the standard bridge music that you hear in other of his other works. To me, Stiffelio feels more like a passage... and then in Rigoletto, during the storm scene, after the quartet, it's clear that he's doing something else. The Duca feels like early Verdi, but when Rigoletto sings, I can hear Verdi in a new direction.

- Why would you say Giovanna is worth performing then? - First of all, I think all Verdis are worth performing, every single title, even the ones that Verdi himself did not like. I think that all of his music ought to be heard, because even with those works that don't stand the test of time, we can understand why the other HAVE stood the test of time. If you're the leader in government or if you're a member of Podemos party or any other party, if you don't understand your past, you don't understand the current, then you don't understand the future. The observation is the same for opera - if you don't understand the bad, you can't understand the good. So I think we have to perform them, because it's going to inform us about what we can do better in the great works. Next season will introduce us to Fabiano's take on Hoffmann when he performs it at the Opéra de Paris, and as he has now decided not to perform Il Duca di Mantova anymore, he will also start losing some Bohèmes, giving way to more Don Carlo (he is scheduled to perform the character in Paris and London), Tosca and Un ballo in Maschera in later seasons, and more French repertoire (we will be able to witness a live transmission of Manon from the Met in late October alongside Lisette Oropesa in the title role). Fabiano's commitment and investment in music exceed the realm of the stage. For the last part of our interview, we had the opportunity to discuss how the educational enterprise ArtSmart, co-founded by him with John Viscardi, came to be, after a failed attempt at developing an application that would enable artists to find last-minute jobs. "I didn't run the technology company to supplant agents or managers, but did it to be in addition to their jobs. We created a mobile application with a development team, and I learned the art of raising money from venture capitalists, which is very hard. I had a lot of horrendous rejections, sometimes after 15 seconds and it was just a lot of learned lessons of how to present to these people." Fabiano confesses that working on the original project took a lot of money and three times as much time as the one spent on his opera career, having started it in 2012 and culminating in 2015 before the app was even launched, when his engineers requested their salaries to be doubled, which he couldn't afford. "And then I had this four-month period when I didn't know what was going to happen. And I asked myself, 'Why did I do this?' And the reason was because I wanted to help artists realize their own dignity, their studies and their work. Because when people work, I feel that their dignity is fulfilled. I'm fortunate enough that I had a great teacher at the beginning and people that supported me along the career. Yes, I have talent - it's not the greatest talent in the world, but it's a good talent, but I also have the right people facilitating me through. A lot of people don't have that opportunity." After pondering a series of options, it became

clear to Fabiano that a new program could be set up so that talented artists were integrated into the school system in order to teach children in the inner city. "So my motivator for the program, ArtSmart, wasn't originally kids, but artists that needed work. Some of the funders that I went to for corporate purposes three years prior for my tech company, who would not invest in me, when I said 'I started an education initiative - would you be interested in participating?', right away I had $25,000 checks from them, without even having to even do anything. It was crazy. Because suddenly the purpose had shifted." Next year, they are going to teach 20,000 lessons to children in 30 public schools all over the United States, operating during the school day "on the side of every other teacher to make kids feel that music is instrumental to their lives." As the program intends to show children how music and culture are indeed instrumental into culture and life, as well as a motivator for success, ArtSmart offers them one-on-one lessons. "We have one teacher to one student. We don't teach lots of kids. One teacher teaches one kid at a time, so we function as a mentoring organization, and every one of these kids, for an hour a week, basically, gets the time to be themselves freely with someone privately. And a lot of these kids don't even have parents, they live in foster homes or they live with their grandma or someone else, because their parents are in jail, so to have someone that they can really look up to is... incredible."