José Cura, The Makings of a Hero

Diapason

Emmanuel Dupuy

February 1999

[Computer-assisted Translation // Excerpt]

A strong physique and a voice that ventures without risk into the heaviest repertoire allowed him to climb the steps of fame with astonishing speed. He is currently Don José at the Paris National Opera.

We discovered him somewhat by chance three years ago at the Bastille: in Verdi's Nabucco, he made Ismaél much more than a supporting role, with voice and presence to match. There was no doubt then that we would soon be hearing from this almost unknown tenor. And we didn’t have to wait long: a few months later, in Turin, Cura sang his first Otello at the age of thirty-four with the Berlin Philharmonic under Abbado! News of his triumph spread around the world, instantaneously making him an international star in one fell swoop. Since then, further successes in major theatres and recordings have confirmed the immense potential of this all-round artist, singer as well as conductor and composer. But do we really know him? Fortunately, José Cura is a man who likes to talk, and to find out who he is, all you have to do is ask him...

I began studying music in Argentina at the age of twelve: first classical guitar, then a little later composition and orchestral and choral conducting. By that time I was already singing a lot, mostly early composers - Palestrina, Gesuáldo - or songs by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel... Then, at university, I was assistant choirmaster. One day, as I was preparing the tenor section, the director heard me singing and advised me to work on my voice. At the time, I enjoyed symphonic works and religious music; opera didn't appeal to me at all. But I still took singing lessons to complete my musical training. That's how it all began. I had several teachers, some good and some bad. At the age of twenty-six, in Buenos Aires, I finally met the one who put my technique in place. It's a good thing it happened so late, because by then I was physically stronger. And as I already had a dramatic voice, I could tackle roles that might have been dangerous when I was twenty or twenty-two.

You have just mentioned your training as a conductor and composer. In fact, in your latest recital album dedicated to Argentine music, you conduct some of your works. How would you define your style?

I don't really think I have a style. I compose rather intuitively. The songs on the record you're referring to are traditional in style. I tried to write a fairly easy melody that enhances Neruda's poems and doesn't make them lose their force. But in the past, I've also composed somewhat more complex works, such as my Stabat Mater, Magnificat or Requiem, with the use of cries, slightly bizarre things...

Do you have any role models among today's composers?

If I have to identify with a movement, it would rather be with the first contemporaries or the last romantics; Janacek for example. I also greatly admire Penderecki's second period, that of the Te Deum or the Passion according to Saint Luke where he became more neo-romantic than at his beginnings.

Erato has just released your first full-length recording of an opera, Samson et Dalila. Do you attach much importance to recordings?

Obviously, because through the record we are immortalized, especially in this age of compact discs.  Recording is a way of saying to the world: "I've been here and this is what I leave behind." But for an artist like me, who is used to performing live, it's also presents frustration, because the record can't capture the physical aspect of the performance. In the future, this may be possible thanks to DVD which will allow you to record both sound and images.

Compared to the stage, there is also an artificial side to making a record. Does that bother you?

It all depends on the spirit in which you do it. For Samson et Dalila, for example, the sessions only lasted five days, which is not very long considering the length of the work. Originally, this schedule had been drawn up for financial reasons: these days, it's impossible to mobilize the London Symphony Orchestra, a choir, a conductor and an international cast indefinitely. As a result, we were obliged to record the scenes one after the other, making very few corrections. In the end, the result is quite spontaneous and retains a certain dramatic continuity. In my other recordings, I also wanted to retain a certain impression of naturalism. In my Puccini album, for example, there are moments when I cry, when you can hear my breathing and the tension in my voice. I wanted it that way to achieve a kind of compromise between the stage and the studio.

You took on dramatic roles at a very young age: obviously Otello, but also Samson and Radamčs. Aren't you sometimes tempted to return to more lyrical roles?

This classification - dramatic or lyrical – is more folklore than reality. Radamčs for example: for me, it is a lyrical role, even if we have often heard tenors sing it in a very shouted way. It's only in the duet with Amneris in Act IV that it becomes truly dramatic, becoming vocally heavier and even a little baritone.  The rest of the opera, Celeste Aida, the love duet with Aida, the tomb scene, etc.: it's all very lyrical. In Otello it's a matter of choice - I could do it the traditional way by trying to sing louder than my partners. But personally, I have a more internalized conception of the character. My Otello certainly owes more to Shakespeare and Orson Welles than to Verdi and Boito. What interests me is his psychology, the pain of a man who was a hero and who is now at the end of his life, broken. From the point of view of artistic commitment, it is very demanding: singing Otello’s death as I did with a thread of voice is much more difficult than screaming. We forget that Otello is not verismo but dramatic bel canto which requires authority of coulcur and accent.

Aren’t you afraid you took on the role too early?

No. All the great Otellos of this century - Vinay, Del Monaco, Vickers, Domingo - sang it for the first time when they were in their mid-thirties. If you have the voice for the role and above all the intelligence to understand how far you can go without burning yourself out, without trying to copy others, this is the ideal age. Because it takes at least four or five years before you become a great Othello.

How do you see your repertoire evolving in the coming years?

A famous tenor of the past once said that the voice is like a blanket: if you cover your feet, you uncover your head, and vice versa. This simply means that when you enlarge the midrange, you lose ease in the higher one. Whereas if you work more on lightness, it's the lower register that suffers. So there's a choice to be made, by style but above all by temperament. Personally, I'm more of a dramatic, romantic type, with a physique to match. I can be a comedian, but I don't think the public spontaneously identifies me with that type of job. When they see me on stage, they expect something strong to happen. That's why I've chosen a repertoire where the center of the voice is used a lot. So my future lies in Otello, Samson and Canio, roles in which the midrange and lower register are used more than the high.

Do you think you will later turn to Wagnerian jobs like Plácido Domingo?

I don't speak German, and I don't think you can sing in this language without suffering if you haven't mastered it perfectly. Domingo does it today, but only he could say what expressing himself in a non-Latin language costs him in terms of concentration. In the same way, when Russians or Germans approach French or Italian opera, it's clear that, with a few exceptions, they come up against limits. This is normal.

After Samson and Don José, are you tempted by other French roles? Les Troyens' Aeneas would probably suit your voice type. 

I've been offered the role. But I won't be doing it for another three or four years, because it's a very long work and right now I don't have the time to work on it. Before Berlioz, there's another experiment I want to try: Werther. In recent years, this is a role that has always been sung by lyric or light tenors. Yet there is a strong dramatic content to this character, and I believe that a voice like mine can bring a different dimension.

Clearly, you do everything not to let yourself be pigeonholed...

Labels are useful because you have to put people into [vocal] categories, otherwise you don't understand anything; it's obvious, for example, that I'll never sing Don Ottavio! But you also have to be open-minded. The dramatic quality of a role is not determined by the amount of decibels you produce, but by the situation, the psychology. I can experience a tragedy, see my child die and speak to him very softly. Conversely, I can scream to the four winds that I love my wife, and that's the most romantic situation ever. If I were a woman, I'd definitely prefer a tenor who sang Che gelida manina to me in a dark, Latin and virile way.

You have a reputation for being an excellent actor. How do you reconcile your stage work with the demands of singing?

Ideally, the two should be mutually enriching. But certain dramatic situations can jeopardize the sound production. This is the case in the millstone scene in Samson et Dalila, where the hero is chained, mutilated and tortured, on the brink of total collapse. If you really play the character with intensity, as I do, some of the notes may be a little unorthodox. But it's in keeping with the spirit of the situation: how can you expect a person going through such an ordeal to sing like a bird? These days, if you want to enjoy music in all its perfection, you stay at home and listen to records. When we go to the theater, it's to see on stage the pain, the joy, all the feelings behind the notes.

You have worked with some great conductors - Abbado, Muti, Colin Davis. What did you learn from them?

These encounters obviously counted for a lot. But in this profession, you're always learning, and not just from the great conductors. A few months ago, I gave a concert in Tokyo. At the end, I sang an encore of the first song I'd learned as a child: Yesterday by the Beatles. After a few bars, the last cellist in the orchestra stood up and began to improvise on my voice. He was quickly joined by one of the second violins and a violist. In a matter of seconds, a wonderful atmosphere of immense musical quality was created.

To create such moments, you need a certain charisma...

Of course. For me, the most important thing is the relationship with the audience. Whatever theater you perform in, if you give a lot of love, you're bound to get a lot back. When I sing, I really give my all. I recently broke my finger slipping on stage at the Washington Opera! You have to take risks. I'm sure that many of my colleagues are technically better, and some have more beautiful voices than I do. But I don't know many singers who give as much love as I do.

Carmen, Barbican, July 1998:  “It was chiefly a vehicle for the rich talents of the Argentinian tenor José Cura as Don José and the mezzo Olga Borodina as Carmen. As an example of two singers in prime vocal condition, it was impressive but the absence of theatrical space and spirit seemed to be an impediment to the full blossoming of their fated relationship.”  Telegraph, 18 July 1998, Geoffrey Norris

Carmen, Barbican, July 1998:  “This was Bizet confined to the concert platform.  But Sunday’s Carmen carried a fire and finesse that outclassed many a staging hung with all the trappings of a Seville the composer never visited. José Cura’s brigadier [was] careful to develop his José gradually and not give away too much too early. His tenor is fast developing the baritonal qualities of Plácido Domino and Cura uses them to powerful effect, making José end as a gored bull, tormented beyond endurance. Behold the humble prototype of the Otello that Cura is about to sing around the world.”  The Times, 15 July 1998, John Higgins

Carmen, Barbican, July 1998:  “The only unproblematic element was José Cura's José, getting the applause that befits someone on his way from the wings to center-stage as reigning Italian (-style) tenor. He didn't try to portray José as a psychopath, a notion which has to be imported into the part. Rather he remained the mother's boy with a surging libido, and insofar as there was any team to collaborate with, he was the ideal member.”  The Spectator, 15 July 1998, Michael Tanner

Not a Mama's Boy!

Die Presse

12 September 1998

Stefan Musil

José Cura, Argentinean musician, sings his first Viennese Don José 

[Computer-assisted Translation // Excerpts]

"My Don José is not this often portrayed mama's boy." The 35-year-old Argentinean-born tenor José Cura explains his view of Bizet's Don José, which he sings for the first time in Vienna this Sunday. "If you look at the original Carmen, you don't find a nice man who falls victim to Carmen. José has fled to Seville because he has murdered someone. There he meets this wild Carmen. It's about sex and life. These are brutal people, victims of themselves, their upbringing, their time."

It all began for Cura at the age of 12, when he learned to play the guitar and never dreamed of opera. One day he started composing and conducting and at 18 he studied music. His debut as an opera singer was only six years ago.

"I only came to opera when I reached a certain level of musical maturity. It just happened. Now I'm a musician who also sings. When I was young, opera was seen as something for old people. Today I believe that the image of opera is slowly becoming younger."

Is this image change also due to new types of singers like him? In addition to Argentinean songs, which he composes, arranges and conducts himself, he also sings Beatles songs.

"I think so. People used to go to the opera to listen to music. Today, everyone has a CD at home. Audiences want to experience theater.”

And he isn’t just talking about operatic cultural events.   “At an open-air concert in Amsterdam in front of 200,000 people, the pianist was supposed to play a piece between my performances. It was clear to me that the audience would become restless. So I just stayed on stage and listened. The audience was as quiet as mice and the cameramen were confused. When I then seamlessly started my next song, the audience was captivated and enthusiastic."

"Charisma and expressiveness are the most important things. All you need is a chair on stage. You don't need to flail around wildly to "vincero."  The energy has to come from the music. Standing still for two minutes and just singing, that's the challenge!"

A challenge that he has accepted in Vienna next season for Cavalleria/Pagliacci. And for Otello, which he will sing in Vienna on January 27, 2001, the hundredth anniversary of Verdi's death. That performance will also allow him to correct an impression that he finds very annoying: the recording Otello recorded from Turin, which was only intended for live broadcast and does not live up to his expectations due to the inadequate recording technology.

Speaking of Vienna: he loves operetta. In Trieste he sang Niki in Ein Walzertraum -  in Italian. He was also heard there in Giuditta. "Operetta in German, in Vienna? That's too dangerous. If you don't understand the part you're singing, you don't know the nuances either."

Don José

Scala

Jurgen Kesting

June 1998

 [Excerpt / computer translation]

Argentinean singer José Cura is facing a dream career. Scala met the "Tenor of the 21st Century" with the macho image.

Could I at least spare him a few of the usual questions?

"You know what I mean," says José Cura, "whether I am the fourth tenor? Whether I am the successor of the three? Or whether the pressure I am subjected to can be endured at all? This pressure that others seem to feel for me," he says ironically. "I am not burdening myself more than I can shoulder."

Well, his shoulders are broad, very broad even; they are those of a former bodybuilder. This Argentinean has nothing in common with the small, fat tenor type. The slender face, the dark eyes, the dark hair growing from the forehead - this is what the playmaker of an Argentine football team looks like. Cura is an athletic 6 foot 1 inch; his self-confidence is at least as big. He wears the black belt of the kung fu fighter - and the title "Tenor for the Next Millennium."

He is eating in the cantina of the Vienna State Opera; he has a rehearsal behind him, the interview in front of him and is expected at a signing for his first two records. He hastily forks a carrot, celery and bean salad with a little sheep's cheese; takes a cheeky macho look at the thighs of a waitress wearing an extra-short skirt and talks again to Beatrice Uria-Monzon.  From her, a beautiful French woman with medium parted dark hair, every man would like to hear that love is a wild bird.  But she only tells it to Cura--on stage.

Half an hour earlier, when she was still George Bizet's opera hero Carmen in the rehearsal room, temper animated her. In a scene in the second act, Carmen begins to understand Don José's possessive love. According to direction, she picks up José’s sword to throw it at his feet. But somehow the trajectory goes awry and if he had not reacted quickly, Partner Cura would have been hit in the head. "Excuse moi," she says again and again but he was thrilled.

He is still excited. "That's exactly what it should be like," he says, "what Carmen is really like, only in the theater we replace the action with an illusion. But what we need on the stage is real passion. Conventional demonstrations are not enough, and not just beautiful singing. A performance is only convincing if it creates a modern reality."  When asked how he imagined a passionate and realistic depiction of the scenes in which Desdemona is assassinated by Otello or Carmen by José, he replies with a laugh: "Of course there is no real action on the stage, but there is a depiction that convinces by energy, by passion."

He asks with a mild rebuke if I didn't notice that during the rehearsal in the scene, when Zuniga wants to arrest the struggling Jose. "What happens there? These are two excited animals fighting each other. You can't gracefully wield your sword with them."

He had performed the angry and nasty fight by literally lifting and tossing his French colleague, a lightweight, off the ground. "Both are singing blood," he says, "I don't want to fake that, it takes passion."

He uses the word "passion" at least 20 times during the conversation in the Ana Grand Hotel. Passion - that seems to be an idée fixe for him. He knows it matter if he gives less as the tenor than the toreador.   Opera, he says, will only have a chance in the future if credible characters are on stage. People who love and suffer, cry and laugh.  Who play "passionate" characters, convince with passion. As in old times, this also includes a few sobs and a lot of time for fermatas. In addition, he also likes to accept a few "dirty notes." Who expects that singing is always beautiful and precise when it comes to passion? Critics perhaps. But critics, he says, are people "who think they know everything but know nothing, but that's an issue in itself."

That is, albeit unspoken, the hint that he does not want to be asked any further on this topic. He understands the secret law, under which everyday chatter about the role of the star, the superstar, the megastar exists: that indiscreet questions are allowed, but indiscreet answers are one of the greater risks of the profession. When asked what his new position in the hierarchy of opera life meant to him, he replied: "Everyone is now taking the time to listen carefully to my words."

SCALA listens to the [singing] voice first. Using an Anglo-Saxon term, Cura is a "natural." A singer with a naturally placed voice.  He is reminiscent of Franco Corelli.  His is dark, voluminous and powerful, although not, as the Italians say, "squillante" - not radiant like a trumpet. The high C is a note for Sundays only. But the sound! It's an aggressive macho sound - or, as the Italians say, "a tenor with eggs."

The best tenor in the world? At least the most manly at the moment.

The Argentinean, born on December 15, 1962 [sic], was very late in starting his career, but then he started at the top. After training as a guitarist, he made his debut as a choir director at the age of 15; studied composition with Carlo Castro, received piano lessons from Zulma Cabrera and attended, in 1982 when he was not yet 20, the art school at the university in his home town of Rosario. The vocal studies that he started at the age of 21 on a scholarship in a youth studio at the Teatro Colón did not advance him. On the contrary, it harmed his voice. He continued to sing in choirs for a few years. In 1988 he began to study voice again with Horacio Amauri.

When he was rejected after an audition at the Colon Theater in 1991, he bet everything on one card. He went to Europe and found a new teacher in the tenor Vittorio Terranova (born 1945), who sang at all leading Italian theaters. In 1992 he made his debut in Verona in Hans Werner Henze's Pollicino. Two supporting roles in Carmen (Remendado) and Simon Boccanegra, a lead in Jan A. Bibalo's Miss Julie at the Trieste Opera, a performance in Leo Janacek's The Makropoulos Affair at the Teatro Regio in Turin (December 1993 ) directed by Luca Ronconi - everything was just an interlude. In 1994 he sang his first Verdi roles (Ismaele in Nabucco and Alvaro in La forza del destino) and won Placido Domingo’s Operalia.

Good news travels quickly in the opera world - and there is no better one than finally, finally, the long-sought successor of the three has been found. After all, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras aren’t getting younger, let alone getting better. Within three years, Cura debuted on leading stages in Italy, England, Austria, France, the USA, Australia and Japan; if you draw red lines between the cities in which he will sing over the next three years, the map would be like the flight network in the Lufthansa magazine.

How does he approach a role, especially when it is as difficult as Verdi's Otello, which he sang in Turin under Claudio Abbado at the age of 34?  Of course he heard "all the big guys" who sang the role, but there is no model for him, no "classic interpretation." Those who saw his Otello in Turin - and on television - could not have missed the fact that it was "new, modern and different. It is not based on the amount of sound, but on energy, on the unexpected, on colors, on presentation. Some who saw me found it unfortunate that I did not sing loudly. But it says so in the score, it’s just that nobody has followed that yet."

Of course, Arturo Toscanini always emphasized that half of the score is written piano. "Exactly," says Cura, "but nobody sings it that way. Nobody. It would be much easier for me with my voice to sing loudly all the time. But volume has to be metered. We have a wrong idea of the figure if we accept that he screams incessently. Otello is not a warrior, he was a warrior. Otello - those are the last 24 hours in the life of a man who was a warrior. 'Otello fu' - this is the key to opera."

He does not accept the objection that these words are among the last, that Otello sings them during his death monologue. "We see an Otello who used to be a hero. Already with his Esultate he is looking back on his last act as a warrior. Then we briefly see him as a loving man and then only as a destructive man - a self-destructive man. He's an outsider who can only be strong as long as he's useful to society."

He sees a "modern Otello" in the heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson. "They used him, made money with him and dropped him when he was having trouble." He wipes away the objection that Tyson has committed criminal acts, knowing that even his foolhardy comparisons will be listened to and easily turn into headlines. "You don't understand me," he says with a frown, "Friends must stand by you even if you have problems."

For 2001 - on the 100th anniversary of Verdi's death - he wants to record the Otello, preferably under Carlos Kleiber.  I wonder if there are any concrete plans? "You should never question me!" He will not give indiscreet answers. He doesn't consider Otello to be the most difficult part of his current repertoire, but instead Des Grieux in Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut. Otello is, of course, difficult because it is necessary to present a "credible character" but Des Grieux is very high, "the tessiture is terrible." It's understandable that he sees the role as a "killer": it does not suit his dark, baritone tone.

He will not sing the much higher roles of Arnoldo in Rossini's Guillaume Tell and Raoul in Myerbeer's Les Huguenots. He rejected the Aeneas in Berlioz Les Troyens - and he had to reject Radames, for whom he was under discussion in the recording of Aida planned under Nikolaus Harnoncourt - he was already booked and he is one of the exceptions in the capricious singing community who has so far kept his commitments.- he had already been booked and he is an exception to the capricious singer community by insisting on meeting his commitments. He finds Verdi's Alfredo (La traviata) and Puccini's Rodolfo (La Bohčme) uninteresting as characters, at least in "Conventional Interpretation." He sings Che gelida manina in a whispering half-voice and asks: "Should it be sung like a twelve-year-old?" He puts passion in his voice: Che gelida manina. "If I were a woman," he says, "I would ..." He doesn't finish the sentence, but you get the feeling that he is somehow suggesting erotic experiences.

How does he transfer the passion to the record studio, where there are no listeners? How does he act when no action is possible? "I have listeners. I sing for the orchestra's musicians, and I keep acting as I sing. It's a performance where you experience your feelings and your actions internally. You can film me in front of the microphone. I can't move like on stage, but I perform in front of the microphone. At a recording I set up the microphones so that I look into the orchestra. I stand and sing and act in front of the orchestra - the musicians are my audience and listeners."

Since he makes music all day, he has little desire to listen to records. However, as a fully trained musician - he composes, orchestrates and conducts - he begins by studying the score. Only when he comes to the question of execution, when it comes to difficult passages, does he sound "how others have solved this in terms of voice technology." His Puccini recital, he admits, is not perfect, "a few phrases are 'out of tune,' but every aria is alive." Why did he hold the high B on "Vicero" in Nessun dorma so long? " Would you please pick up the phone and call Franco Corelli? You can ask him the same question." This is a clever counterattack, but no answer, and so he comes to speak of the attitude of the critics ("If you do it, it will be held against you as a sin") and the psychology of the audience: "If you don't, it is held against you as a failure: "Oh, he lacks the high notes."

In Vienna, he tried to sing the first aria of the Cavaradossi in Tosca largely piano, "like a dreamy inner monologue by the painter.  I hit the B flat, then turned to the picture, and quietly finished singing, "Tosca, se tu." No applause.  Icy silence, almost a few boos.  The next performance I sang out and there was an ovation." The same thing happened to him when he sang the star aria (E lucevan le stella) lying on the floor, really quietly, as a painful farewell to life. "Silence. Total silence." In the next performance he sang out in full and was cheered.

He is happy when listeners form the judgment about a singer they have heard on records and in the theater. He doesn’t want to be one of those singers who work almost exclusively in the studio and then appear on stage - "I won't give you a name, but you know who I'm talking about.” He feels like a man of the theater and it is as a man of the theater that he goes to the record studio.

And conductors? There are those who do not understand voices and the others who are jealous of the success of singers. This is, of course, another topic of its own and not one for indiscreet answers. It is always crucial, he says, which singer a conductor has in front of him. "If my professionalism as a musician corresponds to the conductor's expectations, there are no problems."

Even with the Italian staff dictator Riccardo Muti, he had "brilliantly worked together on the first collaboration, in 1996 in Cavalleria rusticana. He was open, respected my work and gave me all the help I needed."

Carmen Sings on the WWW

Il Resto del Carlino

8 June 2000

[Computer-assisted Translation  // Excerpt]

RAVENNA - The Ravenna Festival launches a challenge: opera online. It will be Carmen, broadcast live (with the gap of a few minutes) from the Festival's official website in streaming audio and video made thanks to Nextra. This, for the initiated. For mere mortals, it means that a new era begins for opera as well, and that from now on it will be possible to turn on one's computer and watch the opera as if you were sitting in the theater (or in front of a television). Also for the initiated, the information says that, via a navigation menu, they will be able to go to the other pages of the site (protagonists, subject matter, libretto, press releases) and especially to the webcast, from where they can choose what kind of technology to use to view the event live according to the characteristics of their computer and connection. That said, let's get to the show.

The Carmen being staged in Ravenna (Pala de André) is obviously not a mere online phenomenon: the entire production of Bizet's hugely popular masterpiece will be a technological phenomenon, from its setting (there is no real stage and the spaces will be managed mainly on the basis of light effects) to the acoustic rendering (singers will have microphones so as not to create imbalance with the size of the spaces) to the functional one (the orchestra music stands are fiber optic). "It is a show we have been thinking about for six years: now we are finally able to realize it," says Cristina Muti.

The director is a regular at the Festival, Misha van Hoeche, who this time forgets his main role as choreographer and even deletes the dances from Carmen. “It will be a Carmen with the participation of the entire audience. Spaces without constraints make it easier for me. There will only be a symbolic platform where the show will come to life, establishing multiple relationships between singers, choir and audience. There won't even be extras."

Musically, we return to Giraud's version, with sung recitatives, rather than the opéra-comique scheme with dialogues envisaged by Bizet. A choice in agreement with the director Patrick Fournillier, who will direct the Arturo Toscanini regional orchestra.

The leadss are names known and dear to the opera public: the fascinating black contralto Carolyn Sebron and the very famous José Cura (who have performed together in Samson at the Regio in Turin); they will be joined by Mark S. Doss (Escamillo) and Chiara Taigi (Micaela). Two performances, tonight and Monday. Sold out, of course.