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Tenor Salvatore Licitra at Spivey Hall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
RECITAL REVIEW
Tenor Salvatore Licitra, with pianist Eugene Kohn. Sunday at Spivey Hall. www.spiveyhall.org.
Opera has always tried to balance its extremes. At one end are the courtly pleasures: the sophisticated and sublime. At the other, the folksy and unschooled: earthy passions and slapstick gags. Singers who navigate easily between the two poles — Caruso, Bjorling and Domingo come to mind — earn single-name status and lasting super-stardom.
There’s no mistaking where tenor Salvatore Licitra stands. His Atlanta debut recital, Sunday at Spivey Hall, was a model of feel-good surface pleasures.
His agents and record label are billing him as the next Pavarotti, especially after Licitra made headlines as the aging tenor’s last-minute replacement at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. But even less than Pavarotti, Licitra is not what you’d call a thinking man’s tenor.
As heard Sunday, the young Italian is unbridled, intuitive, unreflective. Blessed with an instrument of jet-engine power and once-in-a-generation beauty, he is also good humored on stage, with generous charisma. There’s an Italianate “ping” in his tone as well as an unmissable cheer, and a tear, in his sound. Athough he speaks in halting English, he had the sold-out audience rapt, even for his patter between songs. We laughed as he tried to explain that he was cold, or perhaps had a cold. When a cellphone rang, he pointed at the offender and asked, “Is that for me?” We couldn’t help but adore him as a showman — and couldn’t help wishing he offered more as a musician.
Veteran pianist Eugene Kohn, best known as Maria Callas’ 1970s master class accompanist, played to Licitra’s coarsest tendencies.
The opening sets, including refined arias and songs by Handel and Beethoven, showed Licitra couldn’t scale his delivery down for a 400-seat recital hall. He was more comfortable in a set of bel canto tunes of single emotions, one perky, another melancoly. He was a knockout in Rossini’s “La danza” — a rowdy Pavarotti specialty — shaping the words “Mamma mia” and “La la ra la ra” with total joy and delirious abandon. You’re a curmudgeon if you cared about his sloppy rhythm or shady vocal control.
Licitra then turned to what the people wanted to hear: famous opera arias. He delivered overheated hits from “Tosca,” “Pagliacci,” “Andrea Chenier.” He never shaped a character, never told a story nor even dipped down into soft headtones. But he triumphed at the other extreme: loud, fast and let it rip. Licitra might not be one for the ages, but his charms are extraordinary.
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