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As a teenager growing up in Peru, singing and playing piano or guitar in his mother’s bar in Lima, Juan Diego Florez had no concept of what the future might hold. Today he is unquestionably one of the top two or three opera tenors in the world, proclaimed by Luciano Pavarotti as his heir – and early next month he is singing in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.
“I began with rock and pop. This is the music I knew because opera was not in my household,” Florez says. “I went to the conservatoire, then I discovered opera and classical singing and fell in love with it. I was 17.”
Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez performs during a gala concert in Red Square, Moscow, at the start of the 2018 World Cup finals.Credit: AP
Singing rock can be fatal for an aspiring opera singer’s vocal cords, and Florez did sing a lot of “harsh” music, “but maybe that was a good school because I also sang in concerts, and I had to entertain an audience for two hours. I survived, you might say.”
Or rather more than survived. Today, at 50, he is one of the all-time great bel canto tenors, showered with honours and awards. As he has aged, his voice has changed, like all singers – becoming darker and more centred, he says – and he has been able to expand the huge number of roles he sings.
All these styles will be on display at his Melbourne recital on Thursday at Hamer Hall, accompanied by pianist Cécile Restier: Italian bel canto of the early 19th century; French romantic opera of the later 19th century; darker, bigger Verdi roles; and the early 20th-century Verismo school, including Puccini’s famous aria from La boheme, Che gelida manina.
“I do a lot of concerts and I like to spread a lot of styles, but it also represents my career because I began with bel canto but now I sing a lot of French repertoire and operas like traviata and boheme,” Florez says. “It represents what I became famous for so, the first time I come to Australia, to show the whole menu of what I sing is a good program.”
When Florez began his career he was regarded as a leggiero tenor, one with a light, flexible, pure-toned voice, but he called himself a lyrical leggiero, one who can sing bigger, more dramatic roles. As time went on, he added Verdi and Puccini and he is still adding new roles – next year he will perform Rossini’s neglected Ermione – but he will never tackle the ultra-heavy Wagner roles, which do not suit his voice.
Florez never felt pressure from being compared to Luciano Pavarotti, because it was the great Italian tenor himself who anointed the Peruvian.
“I was really surprised because this was maybe 2002 and it was early, and my voice was lighter than now. I was singing mainly bel canto, so I was surprised he was talking so much about me and in such good terms. Maybe he envisaged the future, because he mentioned some of the operas I am singing now but never thought I would sing. I was really honoured.”
Florez followed Pavarotti as the most famous exponent of the aria Ah mes amis from Donizetti’s La fille du regiment with its nine consecutive high Cs. He made history singing it at La Scala, Milan, in 2007 when he encored it, the first encore in the theatre since 1933.
Florez said he rang Pavarotti hours before singing the role at Covent Garden, in the first performance there since Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland, and Pavarotti assured him all would be well. It was. (Both Florez and Pavarotti versions are on YouTube.)
Another Florez story is how, as an impecunious student in New York, he busked in the subway to earn enough money to buy a ticket to Lucia di Lammermoor at the Met. He stood outside the opera house hoping for a last-minute ticket, and scored one just in time, beginning a life-long love affair with the opera that he has now sung many times.
He is familiar with struggle. “In fact it is two struggles. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a struggle to find the money to study, to travel. The other struggle is to persevere, your effort to study, to fall many times and stand up, because this is what an opera singer has to do. But the second is a nice struggle.”
Juan Diego Florez in recital at Hamer Hall, Melbourne on November 2, Sydney Opera House on November 5 and Llewellyn Hall, Canberra on November 7.
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