Soprano Angela Gheorghiu Returns to Santa Monica in Grand Style
/By Truman C. Wang
3/5/2023
The glamorous Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu returned to Santa Monica’s Broad Stage on Saturday, March 4, as part of the “Celebrity Opera” series. A true diva in the best sense of the word, Gheorghiu, all decked out in fine jewelry and a hot pink ball gown (first half), a flowing white chiffon dress with gray highlights (second half), exuded the glamour of the golden age of opera, and gave a memorable performance with her customary intensity and endless supply of soaring soft high notes.
Recovering from a recent illness, Gheorghiu might not sound quite as secure vocally as I had heard her in the past – there were noticeable issues with pitch, intonation and low notes. None of that mattered, in my view, when the grandeur of her style and her wonderful musicality remained unimpaired. Song after song, be it art songs (Massenet, Hahn, Schubert, Strauss), arias (Handel, Offenbach), or folksongs (Donaudy, Ponce, Danny Boy and Romanian songs), Gheorghiu impressed with her intense and expressive delivery. Her skillful use of the acuti, messa di voce, portamento, etc. (all tricks of the trade in the nineteenth-century art of bel canto), coupled with her intensity of declamation, made her singing, however flawed, an unforgettable experience. Time and time again, one was transfixed by her stage presence – her gestures, stances, turns of the body, even flashes of the eye which mirrored the emotions and pathos of the words she was singing. In Toselli’s Serenata, her utterance of the words “non più” (“of golden moments that exist no more”) and the gesture and look of despair with which she ended the song revealed the greatness of her art, vocal warts and all. For comparison, one needs only to look to the wonderfully flawed Maria Callas and Beverly Sills, or Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran in the nineteenth century.
Joining Gheorghiu were her fellow compatriots pianist Alexandra Dariescu and violinist Alexandru Tomescu. They provided entertaining solos and duets in between Gheorghiu’s musical numbers. Two Puccini encores – “O mio babbino caro” and “Donde lieta uscì” – were given with tragic intensity, elevating Puccini’s two ‘Little Girls’ to heroic stature. The enthusiastic audience shouted, in vain, for “Vissi d’arte” but Gheorghiu declined with a smile, saying she will be singing Tosca at the Met in a few weeks (April 8, 12)
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.