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The voice of veracity
An article by Tim Pfaff in the Bay Area Reporter, Vol. 39, No. 5,
29 January 2009
http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=music&article=578
It's been a while since I've heard a singer's artistry called "honest," a word that once was used a lot more frequently. That doesn't mean that singing was more honest in the past, or that there was more honest singing in the past, though sometimes it's tempting to think both. Yet even if such honesty is hard to define, there's no mistaking it when you hear it. One of the most reliable sources of it today is the singing of Gerald Finley.
The last time I heard Finley live was at the War Memorial in the world premiere of John Adams' Doctor Atomic in the fall of 2005, with Out There riding shotgun. Since my review was never published, OT can confirm that I considered the opera "a bomb," groan intended. I still do.
But Finley's creation of the title character, nuclear-bomb overlord J. Robert Oppenheimer – a role the Canadian baritone has sung in every production of the opera since – haunts me to this day. You wouldn't call Oppenheimer "honest," but the Oppenheimer Finley brought to life on the stage – working with the archest of texts and most ungrateful of vocal lines – was true beyond a doubt. A portrayal forged deep in the soul, it transcended the stuff of the score and libretto and had a life, and a half-life, of its own.
The last time I was in America, in November, Finley was Oppenheimer again, in a new production of Doctor A at the Met. Somehow, between the San Francisco and New York premieres, the music industry's publicity machine had turned a work that pretty much everybody agreed had serious problems into a 21st-century masterpiece, to no one's advantage. The new production, by British filmmaker Penny Woolcock, was broadcast around the world despite being widely declared a major misfire. And even the opera's most vocal champion said that Finley "seemed vaguely ill at ease on opening night."
So, lucky me. Spared the schlep to the Apple, all I had to do was fetch my review copy of the original Peter Sellars Doctor in its new and somewhat improved Netherlands Opera incarnation (Opus Arte DVD). Superbly conducted by Lawrence Renes, and played and filmed with startling clarity and as much depth as there is to be found in the piece, it's as good a recording as the opera – which doesn't need the visuals, many of them problematic, nearly as much as it needs Sellars' characteristically probing direction – is likely to get. Finley, still far and away the best thing about Doctor Atomic, is by this stage so invested in the role, and sings it with such mastery and majesty, that it's not going too far to say that he improves the opera.
Even so, to see what Finley can do when creating a new role, the benchmark remains his mesmerizing performance as the troubadour Rudel in Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (DG DVD), arguably the best thing he and Sellars, individually and together, have ever done. To investigate his work in "known" contemporary opera, don't miss his portrayal of the title character in a Kent Nagano-conducted production of Benjamin Britten's Owen Wingrave on a 2001 Kultur DVD that had slipped my notice but that I discovered on the same trip to San Francisco – further evidence to support the case that the still-neglected opera is one of Britten's greatest.
Descriptions of Finley's Oppenheimer at the Met caught my attention enough that, while stranded in Japan waiting for the Bangkok airport to reopen, I willingly popped $30 US for the November-December issue of Opera Now, which had a two-page interview with Finley that I had already perused in the store standing up. The best interview with a singer I've ever read, it delved into the baritone's recently resolved vocal crisis with astonishing candor. One quote from Finley should tell you why I wanted this for the files:
"Essentially, singing is a primitive act – by which I mean it is naïve, honest, and gets back to first principles. As soon as you open your mouth, the person at the back of the hall knows either what you're thinking or what you're feeling. I do feel like this extraordinarily, amazingly placed human being that is a conduit for the main messages for what it's all about to be human."
Perhaps that explains why Finley's latest CD, of Schumann's Dichterliebe and other Heine Settings (Hyperion), is one of those recordings that silences criticism. It's as good as singing – of anything – gets. In that, it's like the live recording of Schumann's paean to married love, Frauenliebe und -leben, in the 1999 live performance by Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, that appeared almost simultaneously (both discs with pianist Julius Drake). Having no in-the-house live version to overshadow it, I'm happy to call it singing as honest as it gets.