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The Voice on the Couch
by Matthew Gurewitsch
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(continued from page 1)
How many tenors would have dared to do this? Most like to clothe their characters in a little sentimentality. In Mr. Villazón's brave performances, Don Carlo and Don José were stripped bare. Yet he kept the audience with him.
''What allows me to send my emotions to the audience, I think, is that I can control the tigers inside me,'' Mr. Villazón said. ''Instead of letting them eat me, I make them pull my car. I suppose I can do that because with my analyst I can take out the dark side of myself and look at it and frame it and give it the right dimension.
''All of us have something inside that we don't like. But it's not a monster. It's just a piece of you. You have to love it and accept it. Being able to do that in psychoanalysis gives me the freedom to create a complex character onstage, with all its colors.''
As for the craziness of Don Carlo and Don José, Mr. Villazón sees them in quite distinct terms. Mr. Decker, the director, wanted to import as much as possible of the historic Don Carlo, an inbred, violent mental defective hard to square with Verdi's romanticized loser.
''I adored that vision,'' Mr. Villazón said. ''The music goes from pianissimo to fortissimo every three bars. Don Carlo lives in extremes. Everybody expects great things from him, but he's completely lost. It's as if a worm had been told that he's a butterfly. He tries to fly, but he's stuck to the earth.''
Don José, by contrast, is a natural born killer: a core truth he fights as long as he can.
''That's the monster in him,'' Mr. Villazón said. ''He tries to fight it. He joins the army looking for discipline. He doesn't like women, but when Carmen chooses him, he's as attracted to her as is everyone else. But she's a Gypsy, an outlaw. She lives in the world he wants to reject.
''In our production, whenever we see him draw his knife, he's horrified. Whose hand is this? What am I doing? Except when he stabs Carmen. The monster in him has won.''
Audiences are often dazed when they see Mr. Villazón come through an ordeal like Don Carlo's or Don José's not drained but on top of the world. At curtain calls, he simply beams, rushing the footlights with all his colleagues in tow. Ian Judge, the British director of the Los Angeles ''Roméo,'' is seeing that exuberance now in rehearsal.
''That's the first thing you notice about Rolando,'' Mr. Judge said. ''His boundless energy. He's a clown, consistently funny and entertaining. If any singer is having a gloomy day, it will immediately vanish, because Rolando is bouncing off the wall. But the moment we get down to business, all that energy is instantly channeled into the work.''
As ''West Side Story,'' Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Lurhmann have established, ''Romeo and Juliet'' makes perfect sense as a story of gang warfare and teenage suicide. So Mr. Villazón might well have an excuse to tap into the reserves of self-destruction he has been exploring lately. Is he doing that?
''He's pushing it as much as he can,'' Mr. Judge answered. ''Personally, I've always believed that Romeo is Hamlet in love. So yes, you could say that we're looking for self-absorption, self-destruction.''
For Mr. Villazón, Romeo is the epitome of adolescence. And he can't wait to get back onstage.
''In adolescence,'' he said, ''everything is an opera. You have no skin. Everything is erotic. Everything hurts. I was pretty crazy myself as an adolescent. I wrote tragic love letters to this woman who had a boyfriend and was older than me: poems about the dark landscapes in my soul, blah, blah, blah. I said I was an old man in my soul. Every cliché you can imagine. And I thought about suicide, very romantically.
''I love Roméo. He's a great adventurer. He always goes all the way. I've sung him before, but after Don Carlo and Don José, he'll be different. He's a luminous character -- I always knew that. Now I want to find his dark side.''
© 2005 The New York Times.
Published on Sunday, January 23, 2005
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