joven tenor ganador este año del premio Tucker...alguien lo ha oido y puede darnos su opinión?
Graciassssssssssssss
It was the summer of 2002. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis was assembling a new production of The Magic Flute, but there was a problem. Stephen Lord, the company’s music director, couldn’t find the Tamino he wanted. “I heard a lot of tenors,” he recalls, “and I despaired. I knew in my ear what was needed, and no one seemed right. Then along came this tall young man. All he had to do was sing two phrases in his audition. I knew he was the one after the first two notes, and I hired him on the spot. I had experienced that sort of thing only once before, when a young soprano named Voigt sang the first phrases of Ariadne for me. You know it when you hear it.”
That Flute in Missouri (significantly not Die Zauberflöte) became a milestone in the career of Eric Cutler. The tenor was only twenty-six at the time, and his prior experience had been a bit remote. Having grown up in Adel, Iowa, and graduated from Luther College in Decorah, a small liberal-arts institution four hours away, he hardly regarded himself as an operatic sophisticate. “You could call me a bumpkin,” he proclaims. The modesty doesn’t ring false.
A regular guy’s guy, he still likes to fish, to play golf, tennis and softball. Of course, he always loved music, always found the Saturday-afternoon broadcasts from the Met hypnotic. His life began to change drastically after he won some important singing contests. (The citations continue to roll — most recently the $30,000 Richard Tucker Award.) Still, he harbored self-doubt for a long time. “I suffered from imposter syndrome,” he now admits. “No matter how well I did, I worried about when people would find out I’m not a great opera star. I’m just a kid from Iowa.”
Just a kid with an exceptionally suave yet hearty lyric tenor that scales the heights with special ease and compelling ardor. Just a kid who loves and obeys the laws of bel canto articulation. Just a kid who does his homework, respects the past and savors lessons to be learned from old recordings. Just a kid who stands six-foot-four, commands the stage without seeming to try and appreciates the dangers of moving his career too far too fast. “I think I know what I can and cannot do,” he explains.
Cutler’s debut in St. Louis endured some distractions. The hyperactive production stressed gags at the expense of pathos. The ensemble proved uneven. Still, no one could overlook the elegance of the hero, a Tamino more reminiscent, perhaps, of the forceful Helge Rosvaenge than of the more delicate Anton Dermota. Then there was the soprano Sarah Tannehill. One critic — O.K., this critic — reported that she “stole scenes cutely as an unusually sexy Papagena.” For once, the little bird-woman, not the princess, ultimately got the prince. Tannehill and Cutler are now married and apparently living happily ever after in Chicago.
At the grand old age of thirty, Cutler currently finds himself in demand at many of the world’s leading houses. “Explosive” is how he describes his sudden career progress. He still hasn’t acquired the trappings, however, of supertenor ego. That may relate to the safe, sane and relatively slow way he started out in New York. After enrolling in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Met, he approached the fast track to success with basic caution.
Admittedly, his first appearance at the Met, on April 5, 1998, was hardly cautious. It was the National Council Winners Concert, and it involved two arias — “Una furtiva lagrima,” plus Faust’s “Salut! demeure,” complete with exposed, climactic top C. (“No,” Cutler confesses when prodded, “I didn’t try the di Stefano diminuendo.”) Presiding in the pit was Charles Mackerras, one of Cutler’s idols. In the circumstances, a novice might have sunk. “I’d never sung with an orchestra before,” he recalls. “This was absolutely surreal, crazy.” Still, this novice swam in obvious triumph. When it came to his initial assignments in full operas, however, he remained relatively safe and reasonably anonymous, cast as the first prisoner in Fidelio, a spirit voice in Doktor Faust, a knight in Parsifal, a clown in Ariadne and a minor master in Meistersinger.
These days, some ambitious neophytes might find such experiences demeaning. Cutler found them useful. “I learned so much,” he recalls, “just by standing and watching.” He doesn’t seem to protest too much.
He credits his preparation to three mentors. The first was Miguel Pinto, a vocal coach at the University of Northern Iowa. Cutler spent a year there before moving on to Luther College, an institution primarily noted for its choral tradition. There, Cutler began his work, still ongoing, with Edwin Andereck, a former tenor with no other stellar pupils. Finally, there was a fortunate encounter, courtesy of Lindemann, with Diana Soviero, an extraordinary singing-actress turned pedagogue. “She knew how to breathe,” Cutler recalls, “and I didn’t.”
The big breakthrough arrived with the historic Met production of La Juive, on November 6, 2003. “That has been the artistic highlight of my career,” he declares without hesitation. The opera was presented primarily as a vehicle for Neil Shicoff, who had achieved enormous success in Vienna as Eléazar, the sacrificial goldsmith. The Met assigned Cutler the contrasting duties of Léopold, disguised prince of the Empire. He turns a bit cagey when asked about his working relationship with his senior colleague, who had been an early role-model via the Texaco broadcasts. Cutler expresses only enthusiasm, however, for the altitudinous opportunities Halévy gave the nominally second tenor. Léopold ascends to frequent B-naturals and Cs, even a D. “It’s almost like ‘Mes amis’ in La Fille du Régiment,” Cutler reflects. “Most listeners don’t realize how hard it is, and how high.” His happy memories are compromised only by sorrow at the recent death of the conductor, Marcello Viotti. “A wonderful man,” he says softly — “a class act.”
Cutler’s success with Léopold led, no doubt, to his current assignments at the Met. No more walk-ons for him. This season he undertakes Tamino in repetitions of the fanciful Julie Taymor production of Zauberflöte, which he has never seen, plus Andres in Wozzeck. Tamino is getting to be a signature piece (it already brought him success in Glyndebourne), but he’s curious about the staging innovations. Andres represents uncharted modern territory for him. “The part is short, but it’s really a tough challenge.”
Neither assignment compares to the one set — “God willing,” he sighs — for the following Met season: Arturo in I Puritani. Even with traditional transposition (a half-tone down in the duet), the tessitura remains stratospheric, the need for suavity crucial. Cutler, who first charted Bellini’s treacherous territory during January in Palm Beach, calls Puritani “the hardest god-damn piece in the repertory. It’s just insane,” he adds. “You look at the music on the page and say, ‘Are you kidding me?’” What about the infamous top F — repeat, F — in “Credeasi misera”? He says he certainly won’t attempt it full voice, as Albert da Costa did in his historic, unintentionally comic recording. Cutler knows that version well. And he’s a bit wary of resorting to falsetto or voix mixte, even though doing so bears good musicological precedent. In this instance, omission might prove wiser than emission. In any case, he is eager to work out the inherent problems with conductor Patrick Summers, whom he admires extravagantly, and to partner the vaunted Elvira scheduled for this revival, Anna Netrebko.
Just as every clown, we are told, wants to play Hamlet, every light tenor presumably wants to become a heavyweight. It’s a dangerous proposition, as Giuseppe di Stefano and José Carreras, for starters, might attest. Even a paragon such as Rolando Villazón, though not in a rush, has his eyes and vocal cords set on a distant Manrico in Il Trovatore. Cutler swears that he entertains no such fantasies. “I’m an absolutely lyric tenor,” he declares. He acknowledges that voices can get deeper and darker as they mature, but he cites the lofty example of Alfredo Kraus, whose repertory never really changed. “I’m working on Gounod’s Roméo for Sydney,” he says, “and that’s probably my beefiest part. It’s important to know what one can and cannot do.”
He already sings virtually all the Mozart heroes, which many experts regard as vocal balm. He supports the concept in theory yet adds a curious, refreshingly candid qualification: “Mozart is very close to my heart, but I don’t think Mozart is necessarily what I do best.” The problem, he explains, involves the composer’s moderation in matters of range. “I have this extended top. In some ways it’s the best part of my voice, and I can’t use it much in Mozart. Mozart seldom takes the tenor above the passaggio.”
As a singing actor, Cutler is intrigued by the newest trends in operatic stage direction, even extreme manifestations. So far he hasn’t been asked to do anything outrageous onstage, he says, and he might draw the line at performing nude. Still, he’s open to adventure and loves collaborating with a thinking-person’s director such as Jonathan Miller, his dramatic boss for Così Fan Tutte in Brooklyn. “Either you love working with him,” he says, “or you hate it. For me, it’s a little piece of heaven. He’s sheer brilliance.”
Munich’s State Opera recently unveiled a controversial — O.K., scandalous — revision of Rigoletto. It takes place on a quasi-planet of the apes, and the Duke of Mantua turns up as some sort of space-gorilla. What would the kid from Iowa do if cast in a production like this? He pauses, then answers in tones that mingle sincerity, urgency and possible desperation. “I’d try very hard to make it work.” That’s Eric Cutler’s way.
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic MARTIN BERNHEIMER covers music in New York for the Financial Times and Opera magazine.