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Elissa Poole, The Globe, 16 March 2007
Characters' weaknesses feed singer's strength
A word that surfaces again and again in interviews with Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley is "vulnerability."
"I'm always looking for it in a character," Finley says, in a recent telephone call from his home in England. "There's a vulnerability we can respect, or at least acknowledge, in most of us."
Known for tackling lead opera roles as well as new compositions, Finley is in such demand as a singer that it took the Vancouver Recital Society five years to secure a performance date (Mar. 18 at the Chan Centre).
Finley, who approaches contemporary music as a privilege, not a duty, has been probing the weak spots of substantial operatic characters. One is the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in John Adams's new opera Dr. Atomic, a role Finley premiered in San Francisco last year (and will reprise this spring in Amsterdam and Chicago, and again at the Met in 2008). Others include Chou En-lai from Nixon in China, another Adams opera; and the fragile, deluded medieval poet Jaufre Rudel in Kaija Saariaho's exquisite, unsettling opera, L'amour de loin.
At the same time, Finley even cherishes the vulnerability in such characters as the Count from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro or Gérmont (père) from La Traviata. Vulnerability is also the key into the protagonist of Schumann's Dichterliebe, the song cycle he'll perform in his recital in Vancouver, the third stop in a North American tour that culminates in Finley's Carnegie Hall debut March 23.
"Dichterliebe deals with the exuberance of a young man's passion," he says. The 47-year-old first sang the cycle as a young man himself - just before he left his hometown of Ottawa to study at the Royal College of Music in London.
"Schumann immediately identified with Heinrich Heine's poems because of his feelings for Clara. He could sense how ghastly it would feel to lose so intense a love. I revere Dichterliebe because it has such a wonderfully taut link between words and music - two masters coming together and offering nothing short of perfection."
Strangely enough, many singers seem prepared to sacrifice that perfect marriage of poetry and music for the false ideal of an unremittingly gorgeous sound: Words sometimes get swamped in luscious tone. Not so with Finley, which is one of the reasons he commands so much respect as both a recitalist and an opera singer. He lets us hear every dazzling vowel, adding an array of subtle shades to his already richly hued voice.
Vancouver audiences will have the additional pleasure of hearing Finley's sensitivity for detail unfiltered by translation: All of the second half, including songs by Ned Rorem, Charles Ives and Samuel Barber, will be in English.
"For me it's almost about trying to recreate an immediate response to every poetic phrase," Finley says.
"It's one of the great challenges we have in the song repertoire, especially where technique has to be left behind in some way." Finley mentions singers such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whom he admires for creating sounds that are simultaneously "vulnerable and manly."
"Listening to recordings of some of the older lieder singers has been dramatically revealing," Finley says.
"And I was fortunate because I got to hear the middle and later parts of the careers of singers like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elly Ameling and Hermann Prey. Their live performances were electrifying."
Finley's admirers might say the same of him.