Angela v. Anna

If I were Angela Gheorghiu, I think I’d have a little Anna Netrebko doll on my dressing table, to stick pins in.

Or maybe she does, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Review the bidding: a couple of years back, Gheorghiu was the talk of the walk, in walks where people talk about operatic sopranos: she seemed to have nailed down the mainstream soprano repertoire, with performances as Mimi (La Bohème), Zerlina (Don Giovanni) and Adina (L’Elisir d’Amore). It was a performance of Violetta in La Traviata that first brought her to international stardom in 1994. The only person who could touch her in roles like this was Renée Fleming but she is half a dozen years older (and as of this writing, she seems to be morphing into the role of grande dame).

Anyway, here’s Gheorghiu on what seems like a roll when along comes Netrebko, ready to see her and raise her on every hand. She’s not perfect, Netrebko: she’s not as crazy as Callas and she is not as disciplined and thorough as Fleming. But there doesn’t seem to be much of anything that Gheorghiu does that Netrebko can’t do a little better.

The crowning insult must be the much noised-about performance of Traviata with Netrebko at Salzburg in 2005, which we caught up with here just this week (link). I’d rank it as the best Traviata and one of the best DVD operas I’ve ever seen—better, indeed, than the previous best Traviata I’d ever seen, the one with Sir George Solti at Covent Garden in 1994 starring Z(tad a) Angela Gheorghiu (link).

An irony is that in each case I’d say it is not the singer’s best performance: each is sustained (and perhaps enhanced?) by an overall framing that is even better. But after a look at Netrebko in the role, it is hard to think of a good reason to go back to Gheorghiu.

Netrebko may not be—is not—a perfect singer, but she seems to be a pretty good overall package. The New York Times ran a shrewd piece a few weeks back about how the Met is using her (or she the Met?) as a marquee item in its overall rebranding (link). Gheorghiu, meanwhile, got more publicity than perhaps she wanted when she got fired in Chicago for missing rehearsals. The story is that she had gone off to New York to see her husband in Romeo and Juliet, where he starred opposite Anna Netrebko.