Music: Triple Treat

On opera opening nights, say San Franciscans, no woman looks another in the eye—glances glide from the neck down, comparing finery. As for the performers on the stage, they do not necessarily rate full attention either. But this season the excellent San Francisco Opera Company has three attractions that compel all eyes and ears. They are three striking European sopranos whose high Cs are sure to echo across other U.S. opera and concert stages.

Mado Robin, 35, a petite ambassadress from the Paris Opera, opened the season as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto, determined not to go unnoticed. During her first scene, before Rigoletto’s house, she was just a demure little coloratura. But opportunity beckoned in her florid aria, Caro Nome, and Soprano Robin seized it: she unexpectedly gave out with what critics call a B “in altissimo”—up in the whistling range. The audience gasped at the piercing sound (which Conductor Fausto Cleva had specifically outlawed during rehearsals), and the critics scolded. Wrote the Examiner’s Alexander Fried: “Startling is the word for the tone . . . It was so loud and impetuous that it sounded more like a cry of alarm than a musical tone.” Nevertheless, Mado Robin scored a popular success when she sang Lucia last week, and mollified critics agreed that her performance was both appealing and commanding.

Rosanna Carteri, 23, guest star at Milan’s La Scala, the Salzburg Festival, etc., had the crowd swooning from the moment she walked on stage as Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème. She reminded one critic of Italy’s “gorgeous-looking, immensely skillful actresses,” surprised everyone when her warm singing and touching performance equaled her looks. In her second opera, a sunny revival of Cherubim’s The Portuguese Inn, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Alfred Frankenstein called her “the very incarnation of youthful feminine grace and vivacity.” Even before she had appeared in her other roles (in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Massenet’s Manon), the San Francisco Opera decided to invite her back next season.

Inge Borkh, 33, who sings at the Hamburg and Munich operas, may never be compared to a movie beauty, but her big, dramatic voice and commanding presence fascinated audiences. In the gruesome role of Salome, she slunk, crouched and snarled until it almost seemed as if she were going to bite off the head of John the Baptist before it was cut off for her, but at the end, she tamed her style, let the music have its say. Her singing was as compelling as her acting, her voice easily soaring out over Strauss’s heavy orchestration.

At week’s end Artistic Director Kurt Herbert Adler (successor to the San Francisco Opera’s founder, the late Gaetano Merola) had reason to be satisfied with the way his first season was going. With his divas backed by a solid company (including Metropolitan Opera Singers Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren and Lorenzo Alvary), he could be sure of top musical quality for the next six weeks. Adler has another novelty in store for next month: the first U.S. performance in operatic form of Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, with Cinemactress Dorothy McGuire speaking the name part.