This month, her Carol Vaness-A.(soprano Carol Vaness discusses performances of Samuel Barber's Vanessa)(Interview)

This month, her CAROL VANESS-A. The leading Mozart soprano of her generation has for some time been branching out into more unexpected roles, and her latest is the title heroine (if that's the word to be used for such a perplexing character) in Samuel Barber's 1958 work, which she will sing for San Diego Opera. Although she sang it once in concert with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, this marks the first time she'll be taking it onstage.

An interview with Vaness is always exhilarating--ninety minutes flew by without my once looking at the clock. And unlike some singers who speak about their roles in banal generalities, Vaness always cuts right to the specific. She admits that she finds Vanessa, with so much of its power coming from what isn't stated, a little bizarre. "Vanessa has this amazing inner drive--it's almost a kind of hysteria, like a child starting into the hormonal area. The challenge is that you have to decide what she is looking for when Anatol appears. She really has a shaky, childlike fragility--the way she covers the mirrors. And she's very quick to blame other people. Again, it's very childlike. Audiences want direct characters, I think, like Tosca--'I love you, I hate you, get out.' But Vanessa is never direct. In the aria 'Do not utter a word,' she spends the whole time talking around her final point, and then she declares her love in that one line--leave if you don't love me. And that aria catches her state of mind so well in the confusion of chromatics and rhythm! There are so many sections to it. It's a perfect expression of her confusion, and how it comes out in a childlike way."

Vaness's (often overstated) differences of opinion with colleagues as diverse as KATHLEEN BATTLE, GEORG SOLTI and ELIJAH MOSHINSKY have marked her as a singer who knows how to speak up for herself. Always she has gone ...