ROBERTO
ALAGNA
1963 - The press often tried to call him The Fourth Tenor. But he has forged his own
path from the very beginning, and while much of the press is of his own making, he
consistently refuses to be categorized.
Born in France to an immigrant Sicilian family, Roberto
Alagna grew up in a musical family which he describes as opera on his mother's side,
popular music on his father's. All the Sicilians living in the area would get together on
weekends and sing - Roberto says his voice was the worst in the family: "Incroyable,
eh?" In his early teens, he began to sing in cabarets from midnight to 6 a.m.,
studying music by day. When he first started attracting attention in voice competitions,
he was shocked. "No one in my family was impressed with my voice..."
He made his professional debut with the Glyndebourne
Touring Opera as Alfredo in La Traviata. The night before he first appeared, he
sat in the hall watching another opera on stage - his first. "The first opera I
saw was almost mine!"
The early part of his operatic career focused on the
traditional lyric tenor roles. Alagna is intelligent, curious and passionate about
operatic history as well as knowledgable about his own voice, and he stretches outside of
the narrowly defined box many in the opera world want to place him in. He's sung the
heavier Verdi roles along with Des Grieux in Massenet's Manon, and his way with
both arias and popular songs on his many recordings take from his experience in reaching
and holding an audience in his cabaret days.
Several of Alagna's stage appearances and many of the
recordings are made with his wife, soprano Angela Gheorghiu. You can object to the
"Golden Couple" media hype if you like, but it's impossible to deny their stage
chemistry or the near-perfect blend of their voices. Maybe the best example of that?
Mascagni's Cherry Duet at the James Levine Gala was pure magic. |
