You'd think an international opera star who just spent New Year's Eve singing Johann Strauss in Vienna would find a trip to Providence pretty humdrum. But earlier this week from New York, soprano Nancy Gustafson couldn't wait to hop aboard a train to Rhode Island.
"I'm really looking forward to Providence," said Gustafson, who spent the 1970s as an undergrad at Mount Holyoke and as a singing waitress on Cape Cod. "It has such history."
This will be the Chicago-reared singer's second visit to the state capital. About 25 years ago, as a college student, she attended a Brown-Harvard football game with her boyfriend.
Now she's back to sing Richard Strauss's heart-rending
Four Last Songs
with Larry Rachleff and the Rhode Island Philharmonic. She'll also be giving a free master class tomorrow afternoon at 4 at Rhode Island College's new Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts.
Gustafson, who describes herself as having a "big lyric" voice with a "dramatic stage presence," is best known for her roles in Wagner (she made her debut in
The Ring
at San Francisco Opera) and Czech composers Dvorak and Leos Janacek.
But her childhood dream was to be Barbra Streisand or Julie Andrews. In fact, she said, that's still her dream.
One of her most flattering moments was to find composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in her dressing room asking her to open
Phantom of the Opera
in Los Angeles. Gustafson was tempted, but she would have had to cancel a lot of commitments, including one to sing at the Met. "It was too early in my career to start cancelling a lot of dates to do a musical."
She does, however, get to sing some Llyod Webber on a
Pavarotti and Friends
CD.
On that disk, she teams up with the famed tenor in a rendition of
Moon River
,
taped during a live concert in Italy. The only trouble was that she wasn't planning on doing the duet. A pop singer who Gustafson would not name walked out of the concert, leaving Gustafson about 20 minutes to prep for the number with Pavarotti.
Listen to the CD with a critical ear, she said, and you'll find some fudging in the lyrics.
European debut
You'd think Saturday's Philharmonic performance at Vets Auditorium would seem like a picnic compared to singing
Die Fledermaus
on its composer's home turf. Austria's chancellor was in the audience for New Year's Eve, not to mention fans who look upon the music of the Waltz King with the same reverence as schnapps and schnitzel.
Gustafson made her European debut in Paris singing Fledermaus and shared the stage with Joan Sutherland in the opera during the famed diva's farewell at London's Royal Opera. Still, to sing what might as well be the Austrian national anthem on Austrian soil is a little scary.
"I suppose the American equivalent would be being a foreigner cast for
West Side Story
,"
said Gustafson. "I was a nervous wreck."
But when it was suggested Gustafson could take it easy in Providence, she laughed. Not with a work so challenging as the Strauss songs.
For starters, this is music by Richard Strauss, the supremely gifted composer of tone poems and operas, not one of the Strausses who gave the world an endless string of frothy, frivolous polkas and waltzes.
Richard Strauss, born in 1864, stunned the music world in his early 20s with what was to become an astounding set of tone poems -- bold, demanding scores such as
Don Juan
,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
and his autobiographical
A Hero's Life
. He hit his mid-life stride as the composer
of Die Rosenkavalier,
one of the greatest and most popular operas of all time.
Fallow periods followed. But at the end of his long and remarkable career, in the late 1940s, Strauss produced one of his most astonishing creations, the autumnal
Four Last Songs
for soprano and large -- make that very large -- orchestra.
It's strange to think of this lush, tuneful music as coming so late in the last century, long after the emergence of atonality. There are more than a few passages that hark back to his tone poems of the 1880s and '90s.
In the final song, in which an elderly couple watches two larks frolic in the evening sunset, the final line asks, "Is this perhaps death?" It is at this point that Strauss quotes the melody from his youthful tone poem
Death and Transfiguration.
Lots of rehearsal
Gustafson has sung these pieces the world over, but said she always finds them a challenge, requiring lots of rehearsal time.
For one thing, the singer is more team player than soloist, just another element in the rich tonal fabric Strauss has woven. That means she has to interact with a host of players.
Then there's the problem of being heard over 80-plus instrumentalists. But the emotional demands the music makes may be the biggest challenge.
"It's a very emotion-filled piece," said Gustafson. "I can barely make it through without a tear welling up."
Nancy Gustafson appears with the Philharmonic Saturday night at 8 at Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Avenue of the Arts, Providence. Tickets range from $25 to $48, with discounts for seniors and students. Call 831-3123.
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