Ah, leve-toi, etoile: Rolando Villazon brings star-quality finesse and charisma to a program of French opera arias.(recordings)(Sound Recording Review)

Rolando Villazo

"GOUNOD AND MASSENET ARIAS"

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Pida. Texts and translations. Virgin Classics 45719

Rolando Villazon truly knows how to sing quietly. For a tenor, this is no small matter. Although a soprano without a working piano might have trouble finding success, nobody today particularly expects a star tenor to sing at any level below a comfortable mezzo-forte. Villazon can produce dynamic levels that elude most of his colleagues, and he achieves them without recourse to falsetto or fakery. The distinctive baritonal timbre that characterizes Villazon in full cry is still present when he tapers the voice to a fine thread of sound.

This technical aplomb allows Villazon to sing with a delicacy especially apt for the French repertoire. The diminuendo that ends Romeo's "Ah, leve-toi" must surely be what Gounod had in mind when he wrote the piece. "En fermant les yeux," from Manon, often falls victim to either tenorissimo oversinging or tenorino preciousness, but Villazon's middle course strikes me as ideal. His fine-grained vibrato echoes the babbling stream of des Grieux's evanescent pastorale, and tumbles the phrases forward, one into the other, to form a cohesive whole. "Je suis l'oiseau," from Massenet's Griselidis, is three minutes of airborne magic. The martial strain of "Inspirez-moi, race divine," from Gounod's La Reine de Saba, easily could descend into bombast, but using a controlled mezzo-piano, Villazon keeps the piece ...