Review of Eleina Garanca Carnegie Hall Recitial Oct 23 2018
From her start lines, pending the arrival of her lover, Araquil, Anita is basically hysterical; the libretto tells us she trembles while praying "with fervor and agitation." When Araquil finally enters, she holds his face in her hands "and kisses him wildly." Later on an entertaining 45 minutes in which Anita murders a general to secure coin for her dowry, and Araquil dies bloodily, the opera ends with her falling to her knees, "laughing and crying in her madness."
To learn that the mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca sang the function of Anita in a concert operation at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 25 is to know immediately that at that place was no trembling, no fervor, no agitation. In that location was no wildness. At that place was not, it goes without saying, a hint of crazed laughter.
It also goes without saying that Ms. Garanca sang lusciously; she always does. In the warm Carnegie acoustic, her vocalisation was rich and smoothen, shining and perfectly consistent through its range. As I left the performance, I ran into someone I knew. "I could listen to her sing the phone book," he said, and I had to concur.
The Garanca paradox–golden voice; utter blandness–is familiar to anyone who'south heard her, and lots of people accept. Slender and cute, the 34-year-quondam singer has quickly get one of the biggest stars of opera's high-definition era; only since January, the Metropolitan Opera has released two of her performances on DVD. There have been other lush-voiced singers accused of lacking dramatic urgency, Kiri te Kanawa and Renée Fleming amid them. But I tin can't think of another who matches Ms. Garanca's mystifyingly huge gap between technical ability and temperament.
Lots of opera singers are bad actors. Merely even the bad ones know that they should exist practiced, and they effort–sometimes actually, really hard. Indeed, our sense that their performances are lacking often comes from our perception of their endeavour.
Ms. Garanca, though, never seems to be straining; she'southward uncannily placid. She is currently starring at the Met in the title part of Bizet's Carmen, a revival of the Richard Eyre production she brought to New York last year, and fifty-fifty in a fully staged performance, she is vocally stunning and remarkably affectless.
Carmen, a passionate, headstrong gypsy and one of the best-known characters in opera, is famously enigmatic, but Ms. Garanca takes that quality almost to the point of anonymity. Information technology can often seem not that she's a bad actress but that she's not quite sure what interim is. From time to time, she sings actually loudly for emphasis, and she will occasionally lurch suddenly to point decisive emotion. But she mostly seems detached. Several scenes stop with her standing at the edge of the stage, staring wanly into the middle altitude. In the final scene, when her desperate ex-lover threatens her and finally stabs her to death, her prevailing emotion seems to be mild annoyance.
The small-scale gestures she has chosen to telegraph "character" are arbitrary to the point of absurdity. Would the earthy Carmen inspect, fancy-restaurant-way, the characterization on a wine bottle twice before drinking it? In a smugglers' camp in the middle of the mountains, no less? Or wouldn't she? Possibly she would. Who is Carmen? What exercise I know about her, when it comes down to it? What do I know most annihilation? Thinking likewise much almost Ms. Garanca can pb quickly from aesthetic questions to phenomenological and existential ones, the stuff of late-night anxiety attacks: What is a vocalism, actually? What is personality? What wine goes best with smuggling?
I began to wonder if Ms. Garanca is perhaps a sly genius, subverting theatrical convention and channeling Peter Brook in a covert critique of naturalism. In the stop, I do not retrieve this is the example. But information technology is however perversely fascinating to spotter and heed to her–to hear how good a phonation can be without letting in emotion, to see how far the beautiful can be from the interesting.
I thought of Elina Garanca the other day as I read a remembrance of the slap-up singer Shirley Verrett, who died Friday. "She was never a vocalizer ane looked to for soothing, condolement or lark," the piece, on the website Parterre.com, went. "She was there to distress, to disturb, to daze."
But nosotros do non live in a civilisation in which most people like to go to the opera to feel those difficult feelings. They want to be comfortable, and Ms. Garanca obliges with a voice of perfect richness and smoothness and a performance devoid of annihilation simply the broadest, most generic indicators of vividness or passion. Her beauty holds the middle in high-def close-ups, but missing are the things that make an opera work in an opera house. Even her ain description of her method speaks to our impoverished sense of what is possible with the art form at a moment when people want from it only caution and safety.
"I'm analytical, not wild," she told The Times last twelvemonth. "When I'm onstage my brain is running like a computer. There are different programs, for vocalisation, for interim, for my body, for the conductor, my colleagues, the staging. And in a pinch I just open a file, or many."
The artist as PC: She's the vocalizer of our fourth dimension.
zwoolfe@observer.com 
Source: https://observer.com/2010/11/the-garanca-paradox/
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