Last update - 00:00 10/05/2007
Almost famous
One performance from the last Felicja Blumental International Music Festival echoes in my memory: A young, unknown soprano comes on stage and appears to be making a basic mistake. She sings, to piano accompaniment, two Mozart arias, divorced from their context, just like that, on an empty stage, in a concert that includes chamber and choral music. But not a minute elapsed before the lack of context was forgotten and the music conquered my heart, thanks to the singer who made it come alive and to the charming, magical narrative within the singing.
A year has passed. The festival has returned (13 concerts at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, from next Monday through Saturday), and so has Alma Moshonov, for two concerts with the music of Edvard Grieg, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Giancarlo Menotti.
"Opera and classical music had never been part of my life," Moshonov, 25, said as she explained the turning point that led her to become a singer. "I hadn't studied music and didn't know how to read music. My grandmother was an opera singer and when she heard me sing she thought it was worth sending me to a private teacher. I took a few lessons from soprano Bibiana Goldenthal but stopped very quickly," Moshonov related.
She studied theater at Tel Aviv's Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, and after graduation she applied for a job at the Israel Opera. "Not in theater, because I wanted to move away from my parents," Moshonov said in reference to her parents, actors Moni Moshonov and Sandra Sadeh, "and opera seemed professional, with people from all over the world, in a beautiful hall. It was a dream."
Moshonov's uncle, the international tenor Gabriel (Gaby) Sade, helped her get an interview at the opera company. "I didn't exactly tell the truth when they asked if I could read music," she admitted, "and I was hired to be props director and then became a stage manager. I learned 'The Magic Flute,' my first opera, from a recording, and that's how I knew what was happening onstage."
After 30 performances, it happened: "They were doing Verdi's 'Rigoletto,' and I couldn't believe my ears," Moshonov said. "I was sitting backstage and I could barely absorb this beauty. I fell in love. And after that Rossini, and Strauss' 'Elektra' with all its wild animality and the blood. I was simply in shock and I decided to return to Bibiana. Only then did I begin to understand what she had tried to teach me when I was a little girl."
My ear saved me
Her current visit to Israel finds Moshonov on the verge of a professional career, after earning a bachelor's degree in voice from Mannes College of Music in New York. "I didn't go to Julliard because I knew they would eat me alive," she says. "Now I could do it, but then I was too shy, inexperienced and with a lot of gaps compared to the other students, who studied music from a young age. The first time I sang on stage I nearly fainted." Mannes is known for its focus on music theory and analysis, and its high standards in those areas.
How did all this fit with your dream?
"It didn't even resemble it. Mostly it was getting acquainted with my voice, what it can do, whether Bach or Poulenc, and how much Mozart or Puccini. And a lot of dirty work, theory, sitting with a dictionary in classes, work on reading and writing in English, which I didn't know. Luckily my ear saved me in learning the language, as in many other things, and as for standing on stage, it's only very rarely that the lights are blinding."
So why did you continue?
"Because if you start something you have to pursue it to the end, at least to prove to yourself that you tried your best. Besides, it's work, like any other work: I have to learn a profession to support myself and if I am a singer then I have to be professional. It's good that in the course of my studies there were small compensations, a few minutes when I was singing, and so I succeeded in touching this dream. Three or four of those a year were enough."
Not like a lullaby
This year the Felicja Blumental Festival is presenting much fine vocal music: from the great Renaissance Requiem by Tomas Luis de Victoria to "The Elixir of Love," a program of folksongs and folk tales performed by Etty Ben-Zaken; from ensembles like L'Arpeggiata and the Armonico Consort in Baroque music to songs from Mexico, Spain and Portugal accompanied by authentic instruments.
Moshonov will be singing music that she loves: in Portuguese, "Bachianas Brasilieras" by Villa-Lobos for soprano and eight cello - "I will be singing with eight female cellists, and my aunt, the designer Dorit Sadeh, will make the dresses for us" - Moshonov relates; in Norwegian, Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite"; and in English, arias from Menotti's "The Medium" and "The Old Maid and the Thief" - "[Menotti] died this year, and I really loved him," Moshonov says - as well as songs by George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.
One word keeps coming up in the conversation about how to master all of these styles of singing: "technique."
"Technique comes before everything," Moshonov explains. "Like a tennis-player, for example, who has to learn all kinds of strokes and be able to control them at all angles and with the right force, it's the same with singing. The body is the instrument, and the voice lives inside it, and it is operated by the breath and the vocal chords and it needs the support of the diaphragm and the back and the legs. All of this, and the nuances that can be created with it, you must be able to control.
"Operatic singing isn't natural singing," Moshonov continues. "It's not like singing to a child or to someone you love, it's an entirely different voice. And you have to be able to control this voice so that it seems natural at first, and afterward it becomes second nature. The dream is to forget technique at some point and devote yourself only to the voice; to throw yourself into the singing and the role without thinking, and for this to come out sounding natural. There are moments like that, isolated moments, when everything falls into place and all of a sudden it happens. You can detect it in a singer when it happens."
After the festival Moshonov will return to New York, to the apartment she shares with her partner, jazz pianist Omer Klein. The two recorded a CD together: "He composed the whole thing and plays all the instruments - piano, bass, drums, accordion, melodica - and I sing," she says. In New York she will begin a round of auditioning for opera companies.
The dream of being a professional opera singer is still waiting to be fulfilled.
"Yes, the roles in operas, the traveling, the international career, the success - of course I want them, but it is a very hard life. The truth is that I don't like spending time in airplanes and hotels, far from home, and I don't like being away from my partner. I definitely want to grow as a singer, but at the same time I regret not having just a regular job. At least I'm used to the lack of job security that performers have. It's what I grew up with, at home."