June 19, 2005
Now Playing at the D.M.V.: Renata Scotto
By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH
WHITE PLAINS
You might not expect this city to offer much in the way of advanced
training
for opera singers, and for 11 months of the year, you would be right. But
not in June, when the Renata Scotto Opera Academy takes up residence here
at
the Music Conservatory of Westchester, inside the shell of a renovated
building the locals remember as the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The faculty includes top musical staff from the Metropolitan and the New
York City operas, as well as guest lecturers on bel canto, acting and the
physiology of the voice, whose knowledge complements and reinforces Ms.
Scotto's own.
But the face on banners by the entrance is that of Ms. Scotto, now 71.
Renata Scotto: junior colleague of Maria Callas; prima donna of the Met
from
the 1960's well into the 80's; coach and confidante of divas of the hour
like Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko and Deborah Voigt.
"Singing is difficult," Ms. Scotto says during a lunch break. "If it's
only
approximate, it's better not to do it at all. I want the singers to have
the
best coaching. I wouldn't do it with less. When I'm surrounded by the
best,
I'm happy."
Opera stars in retirement are forever weighing the present and finding it
wanting; it's human nature. Preferring action to complaint, the petite Ms.
Scotto has emerged as one of the world's foremost teachers of vocal style
and technique, sought after from Paris to Tokyo by way of the Verbier
Festival in the Swiss Alps and Helsinki.
The Scotto academy in Westchester was born of a chance encounter at a Met
luncheon a few years ago, when Ms. Scotto met Robert G. Heath, chairman of
the conservatory's board. Learning of a similar program she leads in her
native Italy, Mr. Heath invited her to replicate it in his community.
The White Plains edition is now in its third season. On Saturday, the 14
participants will appear there in recital. If the past is any guide,
talent
scouts will attend. Ms. Scotto is determined that her charges ****ne. She
has
their careers in mind.
While still in her teens, in her hometown, Ms. Scotto made her operatic
debut as Verdi's consumptive courtesan, Violetta, in "La Traviata," one of
the supreme challenges in the Italian repertory. "I was lucky to study
with
the best coaches," she says, "Antonio Tonini, Luigi Ricci. Coaches who
worked with Arturo Toscanini, with Tullio Serafin, conductors who taught
coaches how to coach. That doesn't exist anymore."
With masters like these, she had hours, weeks and months to examine and
absorb every nuance of the words, the drama and the music. Expertise like
theirs is not extinct today, but the time pressures of 21st-century
training
and careers demand instant results. Singers learn to cut corners, at a
cost.
If Ms. Scotto's three-week retreat cannot make up all the losses, it opens
young artists' eyes to what they have been missing.
For the academy, Ms. Scotto considers applicants who are still in school
as
well as artists already before the public. This year she has two young,
off-the-radar Russian sopranos she deems ripe for international careers.
She
has two singers already well established in their native Japan: a soprano
who wants to polish new repertory, and a tenor who wants to sort out fine
points of technique. Apart from a voice and a technique that show
professional potential, Ms. Scotto's main prerequisite is dedication to
in-depth study.
Flashback to an afternoon in April, when Ms. Scotto visited here for one
of
four rounds of auditions. Turned out in the sort of chic pants suit she
favors, silver-blond hair tied back in the usual short ponytail, she heard
a
dozen young singers. Her demeanor was one of professional, diagnostic
detachment. Not once did she wince when shouted at, or when pitch strayed
(as it often did). Only when a clueless lad swung into some bravura
Donizetti in English did she show a flash of annoyance.
She had firm words for the 17-year-old who arrived with her parents and
offered to sing "Un bel dì," that cry from the heart of Madama Butterfly,
another of Ms. Scotto's specialties: "Not even in the shower!" (Puccini
can
shred a young voice.) The beginner took her medicine gratefully, posed for
a
snapshot with Ms. Scotto, collected an autograph and went away happy. She
was not one of the two singers who made the cut that day.
Fast forward to the present. Ms. Scotto has been working with the tall,
striking Irish soprano Elizabeth Woods, whose previous training had been
with private teachers rather than at a conservatory. Her dark timbre has a
fascinating, tragic allure; as Donizetti's Anne Boleyn awaiting execution
in
"Anna Bolena," she immediately rivets the attention. Yet Ms. Scotto senses
far deeper possibilities.
In a master class with the visiting John Fisher, director of music
administration at the Met, the work Ms. Scotto has begun continues. One
charged phrase at the beginning of Anne's scene flies up to an electric
high
C, then cascades down in a scale. Under Mr. Fisher's animated guidance,
Ms.
Woods learns to land it not as a spike and an afterthought, but as a
single,
searing lightning bolt. "This is exactly the kind of thing I did with
Tonini
at La Scala," Ms. Scotto whispers in the front row.
Midway through the first full week, Ms. Woods says: "The first thing I've
learned is to sing out, to use the whole voice God gave you. Get the voice
out first. Then work on the detail, the color, the dynamic."
Not many students get through a 45-minute session without technical
corrections having to do with note values, exact pitches and rests; with
sup****ting the breath from the diaphragm; and with placing vowels high
(illustrated by pointing a finger to the alveolar ridge, right behind the
top front teeth). Ms. Scotto frowns on sliding, scooping, squeezing. Dry
as
all this may seem, it is on such minutiae that a genuine performance
depends. When a student hits the bull's-eye after a succession of close
encounters, the difference is between night and day.
But Ms. Scotto's instruction is not all about technicalities. It's about
the
voice as a vehicle of expression. It's about giving audiences something to
get passionate about.
"In my generation," she notes, "conductors started cleaning up the musical
values, but maybe they have gone too far. Opera has become a bit like a
symphonic concert. Too clean. Clean but cold. We need to go back a little
bit, to try to communicate some emotion, or the audience gets bored." In
her
glory years, Ms. Scotto epitomized that ideal, putting scrupulous
musician****p at the service of pathos and intensity.
Cristina Nassif, a recent graduate of the Academy of Vocal Arts in
Philadelphia, who is to make her debut as Violetta with the Virginia Opera
in September, is aiming for the same goal.
"What we're doing here makes such a difference," she says after a coaching
session. "Miss Scotto doesn't say, 'Listen to my recording.' She
encourages
us to push ourselves. She teaches words, inflections, the way you throw in
a
crescendo or diminuendo. It's all there in the score. If you're faithful
to
that, you can focus on painting a picture, saying what Verdi and the
librettist want you to say."
During Mr. Fisher's master cl*****, Ms. Scotto watches, her face
reflecting
concentration and grave approval. The soprano Zhanna Dombrovskaya learns
to
impart new spontaneity and point to Violetta's dreamy flights of vocalise.
The baritone Daniel Lee discovers the cause of his vocal fatigue: he is
breaking his phrases too often. And the sparkling soprano Liudmila ****kova
gets help with the tongue-twisting German of Zerbinetta's rapid-fire
patter
in Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos."
Though seldom heard from, Ms. Scotto is paying close attention, making
mental notes for follow-up. "Capisci?," Mr. Fisher asks a Japanese soprano
whose Italian is stronger than her English: "You understand?"
"Sì," comes the murmured answer, without conviction. Here Ms. Scotto does
pipe up, "Non dire sì se non capisci" ("Don't say yes if you don't"). She
knows how this gambit goes, and when sessions start running over, she taps
her watch. With Ms. Scotto, the trains run on time.
Or they would, if all her students met her standard of punctuality. Still,
a
moment to relax between lessons has its advantages.
"The beauty of studying an opera is to analyze," she says to the room,
conversational yet starry-eyed. "To analyze everything!" Her mind lingers
on
the passage from "La Traviata" that one of her Violettas has just been
working on. Under duress, Violetta is breaking up with her lover, Alfredo.
Writing a goodbye note, she weeps, her heartbreak captured in a solo line
for the clarinet.
"The clarinet!" Ms. Scotto marvels. "It's so deep in your soul. It gives
you
so much. The composers of the great operas - they are men of genius. You
must listen to everything. You must ask, 'Why do I say this?' 'Why do I
say
that?' 'What is the orchestra saying?' "
Her face breaks out in a smile that could light up the Met. "I wish I
could
go back to my career just to study again," she says. "This is the joy you
give me, you singers - to study again."
____________________________________
Thanks to Matthew Gurewitsch and The New York Times
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