Sultry soprano Netrebko prepares for 'La Traviata' in San Francisco
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
Posted: 06/08/2009 Updated: 06/09/2009
World renowned opera superstar Anna Netrebko, waits for her stage call in "La Traviata" Outside, it's a blustery San Francisco afternoon. But inside War Memorial Opera House, it's a lusty night in 1920s Paris as Anna Netrebko, the Russian sexpot soprano, prowls the stage in her satin negligee, singing the role of Violetta Valéry, the doomed call girl of Verdi's "La Traviata."
She locks tenor Charles Castronovo, the lucky dude singing the role of her lover, Alfredo Germont, in an airtight embrace. She only sings at half-strength; it's just a rehearsal and she needs to save herself for Saturday's sold-out San Francisco Opera opening. Yet her rich burgundy voice, round and brilliant, a voice that drives opera fans to distraction, permeates the vast darkened hall.
She is just about opera's hottest star, gets photographed for Vanity Fair and looks like Sophia Loren, so sultry, the magazines tell us. She poses in swimsuits, signs beauty and fashion deals, and she must be one difficult diva. Wouldn't you think? Yet, when rehearsal breaks and she sits in her dressing room, the superstar confides, jokes, and talks about her 9-month-old baby, Tiago Aruã, and the "big poo-poo" he made on a flight from Vienna to New York (she has homes in both places).
He is "a chubby, healthy baby," says Netrebko, not some goddess, but a mom, 37 years old, juggling family and career.
"You have to be out of your mind to do this job," she says, staring into a big mirror as an assistant fusses. Netrebko has huge eyes and wears a shimmery, evening dress. "The normal people cannot work in this business. You have to be a little bit crazy."
Does she still get nervous before a performance? It's a stupid question: "There are thousands of people there to see you," she answers.
Netrebko's San Francisco performances, her first here in five years, sold out in a flash: nearly 16,000 tickets gone like that, and opera tickets aren't cheap. Some critics call her the new Maria Callas, the towering 20th-century soprano. What's certain is that her voice is fabulous, she knows how to act and she projects a kind of animal eroticism. Rolando Villazón, the Mexican tenor and her frequent onstage partner, has described her performances as "white fire."
"She is magic," said David Gockley, San Francisco Opera's general director. "She combines physical beauty and glamour with bona fide stage and vocal talent to give the whole tamale to the public."
Born in Krasnodar, a city in southwestern Russia, Netrebko, the daughter of an engineer mother and a geologist father, didn't grow up listening to much opera or classical music. But she always sang — movie songs, Russian revolutionary songs. Who knew that she would one day be included in the 2007 Time 100, the magazine's list of the world's most influential people?
Her bio reads like a Cinderella tale: She washed floors for a time at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, where conductor Valery Gergiev gave Netrebko her big break, setting off her rise through the world's great opera houses. And assuring her a life of stardom: hanging with Oscar de la Renta, ("He created a dress for me, a very nice man — and big opera fan") and receiving honors from Vladimir Putin ("I am given big medal, two times").
She is an ambassador for the Russian Children's Welfare Society and is proud of her 2008 endorsement of BMW clean energy cars. Her musical tastes run from Shostakovich to Lady Gaga ("She's cool. I like her.") And her shopping tastes run against fancy boutiques (—‰'Can I help you? Can I help you?' No!") in favor of Neiman Marcus. "Do you know this place called Union Square?" she jokes.
She knows San Francisco, having trained in the mid-'90s as a young artist in San Francisco Opera's Merola Opera Program. She loves the crab cakes at Scoma's on Fisherman's Wharf and enjoys going out on the town with her sister Natasha, who is here to help with the baby. (The father is Uruguayan bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, Netrebko's fiance).
The baby.
Speaking earlier by phone from Munich, Netrebko said her voice has grown far "meatier" since her pregnancy — as has her tummy.
"I'm a fat cow," she said, laughing. "Yesterday in the German newspaper, they put two pictures next to each other. Pictures of me. One very, very skinny, the other so fat, smiling and disgusting."
The weight issue has apparently arrived in San Francisco, where Netrebko is in only five of the company's nine "Traviata" performances — and where, prior to the dressing-room interview, four wardrobe assistants huddled in a backstage hallway.
"Anna isn't happy," one whispered.
The problem: Something about needing to better accentuate the soprano's figure, to bring out the shapeliness that audiences, and Anna, expect. Inside the dressing room, moments later, the assistant draped a large and luxurious fur stole around the soprano's shimmery dress. "Da!" she cried — "Yes!" in Russian — looking into the mirror.
Now she was ready for rehearsal — and feeling "stressed out," she admitted. But the fact of her stardom: "This is fantastic," she said. "This is the biggest pleasure for me, that people come. They come to hear me sing."
Re: Опера
Originally Posted by edik
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Does it? Or is it just a matter of prestige? 
