The antiheroine of Massenet’s Manon is opera’s Material Girl. It’s a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags tale of an ingénue who escapes from her convent, falls in love with a young but impoverished aristocrat, then is seduced by the bright lights and gambling dens of 18th-century Paris and the money, jewels and clothes to be gleaned from rich and randy old men with an eye for a bit of skirt. It’s appropriate, then, that the emerging superstar soprano from Krasnodar, in Russia, Anna Netrebko, should have sung her first Manon in a production by Vincent Paterson, who directed and choreographed Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour.
Last month, Netrebko triumphed in Paterson’s new Los Angeles Opera production, with Placido Domingo in the pit and the rising star tenor of his generation, Rolando Villazon, as her besotted young love, Des Grieux. And on Tuesday, just over a week after their last performance in LA, opera’s sexiest soprano-tenor pairing comes to the Barbican Hall for an arias and duets concert to promote their first joint album since Villazon defected from EMI’s subsidiary, Virgin Classics, to Netrebko’s company, Deutsche Grammophon. The German “yellow” label clearly sees Netrebko as their hottest solo property — her new album of Russian opera arias and songs, with the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre conducted by her sometime mentor Valery Gergiev, is just out. And her double-act with Villazon is being promoted as a potential “romantic lovers” dream team, the 21st century’s answer to Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti, and Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna.
Their rapport on stage — and it was hot in Manon — has led to much press scandalmongering, particularly in Germany, where Netrebko is already a household name, pursued by paparazzi on her much-publicised shopping trips. Even though Villazon is married with two young sons, their names have been romantically linked, and Netrebko has had to deny being pregnant by the Mexican. But although they clearly strike sparks off each other on stage and greet each other affectionately in public, Netrebko insists their relationship is professional and platonic.
“Three years ago in Munich, we sang La traviata together. It was only one rehearsal, but I think it was very good, and after that we met here in LA for Romeo and Juliet. Since then we have worked together a lot, and it has been fantastic.”
In January this year, when I met Villazon in Nice, he had just come from singing Puccini’s La bohème with Netrebko under Gergiev in St Petersburg, and he was raving about it. The poet Rodolfo in Puccini’s opera is one of the Mexican’s favourite roles — he made his UK debut in the part at Glyndebourne in 2003 — but this was Netrebko’s, and Gergiev’s, first Bohème. “I learnt Mimi in four days,” she says.
“I had one rehearsal with Rolando and Gergiev, but it was a huge success. And I helped Rolando with his Lensky ’s Yevgeny Onyegin for Covent Garden — with the Russian, with interpretation, with his character. Of course, I wasn’t his coach, but we were talking a lot about it.”
As Villazon drives me down the freeway towards Costa Mesa in Orange County, where he is going to hear his mentor, Domingo, sing Siegmund in the Mariinsky’s production of Wagner’s Ring, the tenor plays an early pressing of their duets album and the duet from Tchaikovsky’s later opera, Yolanta, which Netrebko and he are planning to sing together in concert in the near future (we might hear an excerpt at the Barbican on Tuesday). His enthusiasm for the soprano is sincere and touching. “I think Anna’s voice has grown bigger than mine since we first sang together,” he admits ruefully. Certainly, in LA’s huge 3,000-seat Music Center, Villazon’s Des Grieux had to work harder to be heard than his Manon did, but voices develop at a different pace.
They are more or less the same age, I remark to Netrebko, later. “Yah, yah, well he’s a little younger than me, about a year. I’m 35 now.” On stage, her Manon doesn’t look it. Paterson’s updated setting — a glitzy Tinseltown replica of Paris circa 1950 — has her metamorphosing from an Audrey Hepburnesque ingénue, via a sharply dressed Elizabeth Taylor, to the full blonde-bewigged Marilyn (or Lana Turner) for the gambling-house scene, where Manon is arrested as a prostitute.
Her London operatic debut was as Natasha in the Mariinsky’s production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace in 2001. It is a role she has now abandoned, like most of her native repertoire, but it announced her arrival as a glamorous young diva: she looked a ringer for Hepburn in the classic Hollywood film of Tolstoy’s novel. Certainly, her film-star looks have been ruthlessly exploited by her management. Before she sang Verdi’s La traviata, with Villazon as her lover Alfredo, at the Salzburg festival last year, her face could be seen in huge DG publicity posters in all of the expensive shop windows. Tickets for the production were exchanging hands on the black market for €5,000 — 10 times the box-office price — and brawls broke out among desperate hopefuls attempting to buy any scarce returns.
Willy Decker’s production, recorded for both CD and DVD, transformed Verdi’s consumptive courtesan into a modern operatic icon, wearing chic couture in minimalist designer-furnished surroundings. It was art imitating life, as Netrebko already had a reputation as a heavy-duty party-goer and shopper. She models clothes by Escada and Dolce & Gabbana and is one of the latest pin-ups for Rolex watches. “I know many people are unhappy I’m on the covers of magazines, fashion magazines, but I like it, it’s fun. I can’t see anything wrong if it doesn’t affect my singing.”
The exaggerated media attention — and unwelcome tittle-tattle about the nature of her relationship with Villazon — are the price she pays for the profile she enjoys in the German-speaking world, where two biographies have already been published and she is routinely compared by the press to Callas. However, Netrebko is intelligent enough to know better.
“Callas was a legend,” she says, “and I think they mean very well by writing that, but it’s not me. It’s a nice compliment, of course, but everything is different about me and my voice. I don’t want to be like somebody else, I want to be like me.”
She describes her voice as “quite heavy and quite high”, but for the big theatres it seems the classic lyric soprano, unusually bright and silvery in timbre but with the necessary easy penetration and flexibility for parts such as Gounod’s Juliette, Massenet’s Manon, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s Gilda and La traviata. Unusually for a singer of this type, Netrebko has sung, and will continue to sing, Mozart. When we first met, some four years ago in New York, she was singing the innocent young peasant girl Zerlina, in Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera, several months after she had triumphed in the more dramatic soprano role of Donna Anna in the same opera in Salzburg. “It was a mistake. I told my agent: no more Zerlinas.”
Yet, this summer, at Salzburg, she sang another Mozartian soubrette, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. “People were saying to me, we want something bigger than Susanna. After La traviata in 2005, they were not exactly disappointed, but I think a lot of people thought it was strange for me to be singing a light Mozart role after a dramatic Verdi one.”
Her choices of repertoire may explain why London audiences haven’t succumbed to the hype and ballyhoo that have made her an instant sellout in Vienna, Munich and Salzburg. She made her Covent Garden debut in the relatively insignificant role of Servilia in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, then replaced an indisposed colleague as Donna Anna in a revival of Don Giovanni; and, last year, there was her touching and beautifully sung Gilda in Rigoletto, a role she doesn’t plan to repeat. Although both Callas and Sutherland sang it early in their careers, the jester’s daughter is not regarded as a prima donna vehicle. Netrebko has plans to change perceptions here: after next June’s reprise of Donna Anna, she returns in 2007/8 for a revival of La traviata — with the handsome young German tenor Jonas Kaufmann — and the following season for Giulietta in Bellini’s version of the Romeo and Juliet opera, Capulets and Montagues, based on Shakespeare’s Italian source rather than the bard’s tragedy. Both are mouthwatering prospects. But when will we get to see her sing on stage with Villazon? “In a new production of Manon conducted by (Antonio) Pappano. I’m not sure I can say. It’s a secret, but it might be the 2009/10 season!” Netrebko’s engagement diary is fully booked for at least the next five years, and she has committed herself to at least two productions at New York’s Met under the new, thrusting management of Peter Gelb.
Although her official residence is St Petersburg, she rarely sings at the Mariinsky and now has an apartment in Manhattan. This year, she says, has been “crazy”, with four new roles to learn on top of all her partying and shopping. I ask opera’s Material Girl if she isn’t afraid of early burnout and her reply is both surprising and brazen.
“When I am on stage, I give everything. I’m not thinking, I must save my voice here, and I must sing a bit carefully there. I see a lot of singers who do that. Maybe because of that I won’t last long. But I don’t care. I have already been singing for 13 years, and I would prefer to sing 10 or 15 more, but to give everything, so people will remember me and my voice. I don’t want to sing young girls when I am 50.”
