Interview, Javier Camarena on Signor Gaetano

One of my personal favourites from this year's rich crop of operatic recitals was Mexican tenor Javier Camarena's brilliantly curated and executed Signor Gaetano, released on Pentatone last month: taking in rarities such as Caterina Cornaro, Marin Faliero and Giovedì Grasso as well as the much more mainstream L'elisir d'amore and Don Pasquale, it's one of those albums which shines a new light on artist and composer alike, with Camarena every bit as impressive in the darker and more dramatic fare as he is in his sunnier signature-roles of Nemorino and Tonio.

In a break from rehearsals for La favorite at Bergamo last month, Javier spoke to me about the significant role which several Donizetti heroes have played in his career to date, why he believes that the majority of the composer's seventy-plus operas really deserve to be more widely performed and enjoyed, the sheer joy which he found in working with the period instruments of Gli Originali, and some of the new discoveries he unearthed whilst researching the programme with the Donizetti Foundation...

Donizetti’s obviously been a very special composer for you in terms of your journey as a singer – when did you first realise you were so well matched?

The first opera I learned as a student was L’elisir d’amore, and my professional debut was in La fille du régiment, as was my European debut (at the Teatro Real Madrid) in 2014 - Tonio became one of my main roles, and I basically sang it solidly for the next five years! I think that was the point when I just realised how comfortable it was for me to sing Donizetti; I had so many beautiful successes with that amazing opera, and also with Lucia di Lammermoor which is one of my favourite operas to sing nowadays.

Tonio aside, I began my European career singing primarily Rossini, but he’s not a composer I was ever completely into in terms of comfort - maybe it’s my perfectionist soul, but I was always hyper-aware of each individual note and so all that coloratura made me constantly anxious. With time and experience that did improve a little, but with Donizetti it’s so different: I finish every opera feeling satisfied and happy, rather than mentally exhausted!

Was it around that time that you started planning this pair of albums exploring some of his lesser-known operas?

The project’s been five or six years in the making, and I’m kind of glad that we waited for all the essential ingredients to come together and let it cook for so long…We have Riccardo Frizza conducting the period instruments of Gli Originali, which brings us as close as possible to the sound-world of an orchestra in Donizetti’s time; the other two vital elements were the participation of the Donizetti Festival here in Bergamo and of course the support of Pentatone. So it was a case of the stars really aligning: all of us really believing in the power and magic and excitement of Donizetti’s music. A great deal of love and admiration for him went into this album, and I’m very happy that the project that I imagined so long ago is finally seeing the light of day!

It makes such a difference hearing this music on period instruments! I love that rustic quality of the bassoon solo at the beginning of ‘Una furtiva lagrima’...Does it involve a vocal and mental reset for you after performing several of these roles with modern orchestras for years?

Oh, it’s amazing - the sound is so soft and warm and caressing that it feels like your voice is wrapped in silk! Part of that is down to the slightly lower pitch: to the untrained ear the difference barely registers, but for the voice it’s a revelation! You mentioned ‘Una furtiva lagrima’, and when I sang that with this orchestra I really felt like I was singing half a step down - of course it’s nowhere near that much, but the sensation is completely different and the voice feels so relaxed. The participation of this particular orchestra has made the musicological goal of this album even more valuable.

Tell me a little more about that musicological goal…

It was actually the process of working on my previous album Contrabandista (exploring the now virtually unknown music of the Spanish tenor/composer Manuel García) that cleared my head for this project and focused me on what I really wanted to do: bringing little-known repertoire to new audiences. Donizetti’s name might be familiar to most people (far more so than García's!), but he composed over seventy operas and only a handful of them are regularly performed.

When we talk about him we usually think firstly of L’elisir d’amore, secondly of Lucia di Lammermoor, thirdly of Don Pasquale, then maybe the Three Tudor Queens…and after that it becomes harder and harder, because even something like Linda di Chamounix is not exactly a well-known opera. And people do still talk him down: you hear a lot of ‘Oh, it’s good enough music but it’s not like he was a genius!’ and ‘He’s not even the best bel canto composer out there!’, and I really wanted to disprove that!

What I set out to do with Signor Gaetano was to present his evolution as a composer: the album covers a period of fifteen years (and nine operas), and you can really follow the journey he takes from being under the supervision of Rossini to developing into a composer with his own distinct style. And another thing I was keen to showcase is how wonderfully he wrote for tenor voices – he writes wonderfully for all the characters, but the things he wrote for tenor are very special and I wanted people to see just how exciting this music can be. Just listen to that scene from Marin Faliero and you’ll hopefully see what I mean: I think this is the only recording in history of this aria in the original key, so that it goes straight to E flat in the cabaletta. It’s always transposed down and done with cuts, because it is really hard to sing as originally written!

You mentioned Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor being one of your favourite roles to sing at the moment, and you’re clearly relishing the other excursions into more dramatic waters on this album after your earlier triumphs in his comic roles…

He wrote for different kinds of tenors, ranging from lightish lyric to the more heroic spinto sound that you need for Caterina Cornaro and Maria de Rudenz, which I think deliver some of the most thrilling moments on the album: it’s such visceral music, and so dramatically well-assembled. And that dramatic instinct is something I really love about Donizetti’s music: when you listen to ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ the melody seems so straightforward, but what Nemorino is saying in this moment is so deep and so moving! When I looked into the history of the opera I discovered that Donizetti hadn’t originally intended to have an aria for Nemorino there, but once they began rehearsing he realised it was dramatically necessary – and of course it became the climatic moment of the entire opera!

I think his sense of theatricality was really quite groundbreaking in its way – we have to remember that at the time Donizetti was living, the opera was still very attached to the commedia dell’arte tradition. Even if we have historical characters involved, they’re usually playing out a situation that never actually happened: you see that in the confrontation between Maria and Elisabetta in Maria Stuarda and in the situation with Leonor de Guzmàn in La favorite, where everything has to revolve around the love-triangle that you get in commedia dell’arte regardless of historical accuracy. Donizetti understood that and knew how to work with it, but he also went beyond that to create music-theatre that’s genuinely dramatically involving.

At the other end of the scale, what a treat it was to discover that comic one-acter Giovedì Grasso (which sounds scarcely less virtuosic than some of the more dramatic operas!). How did you unearth that, and where does it sit in terms of Donizetti’s output?

Rossini wrote a couple of short comic operas like La scala di seta and L'occasione fa il ladro, and I began wondering whether this was something which was also part of Donizetti’s history…I was so thrilled to come across Betly and Giovedì Grasso, because they’re so sparkling and full of life. French people and German-speaking people are so proud of their operetta traditions, and to me these works are Donizetti’s version of that; they’re so different from his full-scale operas, but just as enjoyable. I also had enormous fun with all the patter-singing, which isn’t something we tenors get to do very often!

One of the great contributions from the Donizetti Festival was making new editions of the scores and parts for these rarities; they prepared Giovedì Grasso especially for this recording, using the original score that Donizetti wrote for the great tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini. (Rubini’s involvement is another reason why this is an important work - he also created roles in Il Paria, Anna Bolena and Marin Faliero, and this is one more piece of the puzzle!).

You have a sequel to this album in the works, celebrating ‘Monsieur’ rather than ‘Signor’ Donizetti - what can you tell us about the repertoire at this stage?

I haven’t finalised it yet, but this was always a project that I conceived in two parts because as well as his success in Italy Donizetti had a very significant career in France. Many of his operas were premiered in Paris and were originally written in French – including La favorite, which I’m singing right now in Bergamo. For a long time everybody knew it in Italian as La favorita, so I’m playing my part in restoring the balance a bit!

You might be wondering why there’s no Lucia di Lammermoor on Signor Gaetano, so let me justify that - unlike La favorite, Lucia was originally conceived in Italian, but Donizetti went on to write Lucie de Lammermoor specifically for Paris, and that version still isn’t well known today. Lucie was a very important turning-point in Donizetti’s career: like so many other composers of that generation he really wanted to go in the direction of composing grand opera, and writing new works especially for the Paris audience and adapting existing Italian operas was all part of that. So I’m fairly certain Lucie will feature on the French album – and of course it would be a crime to leave out my beloved Fille du régiment. That must be there!