After melting the hearts of the Shanghai audience last week, one
of the world's highest paid classical music stars hopes to wow
Beijing with her warm and shining voice at the Beizhan Theatre
(Beijing Exhibition Hall Theatre) tomorrow night.
"I wish my songs could bring joy and happiness to the audience
in Beijing and I believe my voice would touch their hearts," Norman
said before she gave a master-class at the Central Conservatory of
Music this week. After the master-class, she was made an Honored
Professor by China's best conservatory.
The American soprano will start with arias selected from Verdi's
opera "Aida," followed by a few pieces from Mozart. Then she will
move to a French program including Bizet's "Carmen" and
Saint-Saens' "Samson and Delilah."
The concert will end with melodies from her home country
including songs by Gershwin and Bernstein. The program gives full
play to Norman's wide range of repertoires and showcases her?
ability to absorb the flavor and accents of different
languages.
She is equally at home with American spirituals, French chansons
or German Lieder. In opera, she has made Wagner's Sieglinde and
Elisabeth her own but also Gluck's Alceste, Mozart's Countess
Almaviva, Strauss' Ariadne and Stravinsky's Jocasta. From Haydn to
Mahler to Schoenberg and Berg, from Satie and Poulenc to Gershwin
and Bernstein, the range of Norman's musical reach is
breathtaking.
No matter what the language, she makes every word count, and
every note tell.
"The greatness of music speaks for itself when Jessye Norman
sings," wrote Octavio Roca in The Washington Post after one of
Norman's early Kennedy Centre recitals. Reflecting years later in
The Washington Times, he wrote "listening to Jessye Norman finding
her way into a song is like watching in wonder as a beautiful
morning reaches the climax of noon. Warmth and blinding light are
everywhere in her voice."
That same formidable voice was described by Edward Rothstein in
The New York Times as "a grand mansion of sound. It defines an
extraordinary space. It has enormous dimensions, reaching backward
and upward. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit
rooms, narrow passageways, cavernous falls."
Norman was born into a musical family in 1945 in Augusta,
Georgia. Norman's mother, Janie Norman, was an amateur pianist and
ensured all of her children took piano lessons and sang. Her
father, Silas Norman was an insurance broker, singing frequently at
the family's Baptist church. In this environment, it's no surprise
Norman became a singer. But even more to the point, she enjoyed
performing and did so often as a child and teenager whether at
school, church, or at Girl Scout meetings even once appearing at a
supermarket opening.
She recalls falling in love with opera when she was 9 years old
after hearing a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera.
Norman pursued her formal musical studies at Howard University,
then later at the Peabody Conservatory and the University of
Michigan School of Music. "She had all of the tools she was very
intelligent, a keen musician, and a voice with qualities you
encounter a few times in a generation. I've never heard another
like her in all my years at the UM," said Willis Patterson,
associate dean and professor of music at the University Michigan,
who, recalling being impressed by her voice, joined the faculty
about the same time as Norman studied there in late 1960s.
She made her operatic debut in a 1969 production of
"Tannhaeuser" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
(China Daily October 26, 2006)