North Carolina, capital of tobacco and moonshine (homemade and illegal liquor typical of rural areas and myths folk), It is a place so American that the gold rush and Pepsi were born there. from there it is Anthony Roth Costanzo (Durham, 41 years old), a man who has managed to position himself as one of the most notable figures in a field as European, insular, customary, aristocratic, so remote from whatever Pepsi represents, like opera. “I came to classical music from outside: at an almost adult age, I had still only covered the margins of the world,” he recalls while walking through the backstage of the Teatro Real in Madrid, a place he knows well: in October he was part of the cast of Orlando, by Händel, and in July he starred in his own recital. “And by then she had been singing for years. At 12 she had done it with Pavarotti!”
In classical music, as in tennis (and more areas than it should at the dawn of 2024), origins matter. To be born far from the elite is to expose yourself to a lifelong sensation of being a tourist in your own skin. But being a tourist has its advantages. Things that have always been one way can be seen another way. And on the road from Durham to New York's Metropolitan Opera (Met), Roth has seen enough. Above all, how good it feels for opera to be seen from the outside and from other disciplines.
“At age eleven I told my parents, psychology professors at Duke University, 'I can't stay in North Carolina, I've exhausted the possibilities of everything I can do here.' I want to go to new york”. A miracle: that decision led him directly to Broadway, as a child actor. From there to the opera: A twist of the screw, from a composer as gay as Britten, at the 1994 New Jersey festival and the duet with Pavarotti at a gala in Philadelphia.
From there to the cinema: his voice caught the attention of James Ivory, who included a countertenor in his film A soldier's daughter never cries (1998) to sign him as the son of Jane Birkn and Kris Kristofferson (“of all James Ivory's masterpieces, I made the one that no one saw,” Roth laments today, although at least from there he developed a close friendship with Ivory that continues to this day ). And from there to cultural management: on filming he met Karole Armitage, legendary choreographer of Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Madonna (the video for Vogue) or Michael Jackson (the one from In The Closet) and convinced her to direct her first project as a producer, and, at the time, as a student at Princeton University. There is an erogenous point between high-brow cinema, opera and pop music and Roth lives there.
As a producer, he tries to mix opera with high-brow cinema and everything in between. Once, in London, he had put on a duet show with trans performer Justin Vivan Bond (Shortbus). “I wanted to sell tickets and, in the meantime, I went on Grindr [la aplicación de encuentros sexuales entre hombres gais]. Suddenly, I understood that I had a very easy potential audience in front of me. The thing is that people on Grindr are usually thinking about one thing. So I invited them to go to our show and, if they sent me a photo with the ticket, I would show them a photo of my member. “It worked pretty well!” When the show moved to New York, Grindr was an official sponsor.
To consider the weight that Roth holds today in the world of classical music would border on the eccentric. As a countertenor, he has sung at the Met, London's National, Madrid's Real, and with the philharmonic orchestras of Berlin, London, New York, and Los Angeles: reprise of revered institutions. He has appeared twice on NPR's Tiny Desk, won first prize at Operalia (Plácido Domingo's contest). The latest of his albums is nominated for a Grammy (his second nomination). And yet, he, call him strange, continues to consider his place in opera and the place of opera in the world.
What lies beyond institutional recognition? he asks. “In this story we are three: public, artists and institutions. And the connections between them are broken. Institutions do not attract the public. That's what I want to change.” Carnegie Mellon University has given him $650,000 to tinker with formulas to do just that. “On stage, I'm always thinking about people who have never been to the opera. What 30 seconds of the experience are the ones that are going to make you feel like you are living something exciting? The majesty of the auditoriums is attractive, but that is only for a very closed audience isolated from reality. Who is going to keep this art that is 400 years old?”
He quotes her voice. Roth is a countertenor, that is, his register is closer to the feminine ones than the masculine ones, in the tradition of the castrati. “As a child, on Broadway, he performed with a soprano voice. I learned to imitate to the nun who sang Climb Ev'ry Mountain in Smiles and tears [Roth formó parte del sonado revival de 1998] and, on every birthday, my mother always asked me for that song. I loved singing in that high register. Most men, at the age of 13 or so, usually decide that they want to be men, or are told that they should be, and that men do not sing in the high register. We associate the high register with the feminine and the low register with the masculine.”
He continues: “But my parents, psychologists as I told you, never imposed that idea on me. Singing loudly never seemed feminine or pejorative to me, it was simply something I knew how to do. Now that we're deconstructing the genre, we have an art form, opera, that specifically asks you, 'Can a man sound like that?' And it is not an abstract question. People often ask me: 'What is your real voice? What is your man's voice? ”He adds. “When, this afternoon, I sing orlando at the Real, and look, it is a place full of learned people, I estimate that only 30% of the public will have heard a man sound like a countertenor.”
And that surprise has a lot of potential. “Many people, and many ears, see opera as something very serious,” he explains. “But I tell you one thing. opera is not serious. It's something intimate. It is primary. We all have a voice: opera singers only use it at the Olympic level, it is an extreme sport in that sense. But let's go to privacy. Think that everything in this society uses a screen or a microphone, which is connected to a cable, which is linked to a speaker. Everything has that filter. Not the opera. We don't use microphones. The sound emanates from my body and enters directly into yours. It is, musically speaking, unprotected sex. “It is a penetration.”
How many interviewees would stop when faced with this metaphor? Not the one in front of us. “People don't understand how exciting opera is. The first ten minutes you will be bored no matter what. I am and I am on stage. But you have to allow yourself to get bored. Because we spend the whole day doing scroll on the mobile screen, 35 images per second and you need to let the pace of your mind slow down a little, which takes about 10, 15 minutes. If you survive those 10, 15 minutes, you can connect with that penetration that I told you about before. It's tantric sex. Instead of immediate gratification, you find one that is much deeper, more exciting, sometimes hilarious.”
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