DIVA PARADE.(Metropolitan Opera)(Concert review)

The Metropolitan Opera season lumbered to a close with a gala in honor of Joseph Volpe, who is completing his term as the general manager of the house. With its mixture of bedazzling vocalism and befuddling lapses of taste, the event captured in microcosm--if a five-hour evening can be called a microcosm--the artistic vagaries of Volpe's tenure at the Met. It also offered up opera in raw, pure form, its theatricality stripped away and its complexity minimized. Vocal jamborees of this kind have the appeal of a tribal ritual: favorite singers parade across the stage, and fans respond with ovations of minutely graded intensity. PBS broadcast the gala on June 1st, but, in a perfect world, it would have played on Fox, with explosive graphics, yammering commentators, and an atmosphere of gladiatorial bloodlust.

During the not infrequent lulls in the program, I got to thinking about opera's odd position in American culture. Although the art is hardly popular, styles of singing that are described as "operatic" are integral to the pop mainstream. Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban sing to millions, purveying a hybrid genre that has been dubbed "popera." Simon Cowell, the acidulous producer turned music critic who dominates the hit show "American Idol," has organized an act called Il Divo, in which trained opera singers bleat pop tunes. Cowell's projects have succeeded in making America sound like a gaggle of opera queens: at water coolers and barbecues across the U.S. of A., people chastise singers for waywardness of pitch (or "pitchiness," in "American Idol" lingo), weigh the relative importance of technical precision and expressive force, and indulge in other forms of intermission second-guessing. There was a curious moment during this year's "Idol" auditions when a young woman named Heidi Fairbanks came out singing "Caro nome," and not badly, either. She was sent home, but she sounded less out of place than you might expect.

For a long while, during the macho decades of rock and rap, it seemed as though vocal floridity had been drummed out of pop music. But it turns out that there is an abiding hunger in the heartland for high notes, melisma, fioritura, and the rest. So why don't more people warm to the grand original? One problem is that there is no way of capturing opera's elemental thrill on television, or even on a recording. To hear a great singer such as Karita Mattila throw the emotion in her voice across the hundred and eighty-five feet that separates the middle of the Met stage from the back row of the Family Circle is not an experience that can be reduced to digital bytes. This is part of the reason that opera remains an open secret, at once ubiquitous and unknown. There is also the issue of opera's obsession with the past, where most people understandably do not want to live. None of the arias that were sung at the Volpe gala were written after 1936, four years before the outgoing general manager was born.

If there was a consensus "winner" at the gala, it was Natalie Dessay, who sang the climactic sleepwalking scene from Bellini's "La Sonnambula." Like most bel-canto showstoppers, it ends with rapid runs and brilliant high notes, which Dessay dispatched with ease. But the true magic came in the slow aria "Ah! non credea," in which Amina sings to a withered flower in her hand, and enters into a lingering duet with a lone cello. Dessay sang it as if with one breath, unfurling a long, luminous ribbon of tone. This singer has experienced difficulties in the past few years, having had operations on both of her vocal cords. If her voice no longer sounds as effortless as it did nine years ago, when she had her first major success on the Met stage, as Zerbinetta in "Ariadne auf Naxos," she has compensated by finding a darker, richer vein of feeling. It was almost disconcerting how good she was; you ...