Opera News & Press

Carmen visits LSU

A passionate opera figure helps teach a lesson about the dangers of smoking.

WAITING TO INHALE

John Pope
Times Picayune
March 18, 2009

Thick black curls framing her face, the mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham strode forward Tuesday afternoon, turned to face her rapt audience and launched into an aria from "Carmen" in which the title character explains the passions and desires that rule her turbulent life.

As she sang of Carmen's forthright, freewheeling ways, Shaham commanded attention even though she was in a lecture hall at LSU Health Sciences Center instead of an opera house.

Shaham, who will sing the part this weekend, went into character immediately as Georges Bizet's mercurial heroine, casting flirtatious glances at her attentive audience of faculty and students, some of whom up to then had been concentrating on lunch. Shaham coyly gazed at them with downcast eyes, stroked the red stone pendant at the base of her throat and swished the pleated skirt of her low-cut black dress. Her powerful voice soared to a high B; at moments of great emotion, she pounded the purple carpet with her black stilettos as if she were about to start a flamenco.

"What else could I do?" Shaham said later in discussing her performance. "You can't sing this role without being in character."

When she finished the second and final aria of the program, the applause was loud and prolonged. Also cheered were Professors Renny Mize and his wife, Emel Songu-Mize, the academic couple who invited the Israeli-born singer to the medical school for the latest installment in their series linking medicine and the arts.

The connection here? Carmen worked in a cigarette factory; Dr. Carol Mason's PowerPoint lecture preceding Shaham's performance spelled out the perils of smoking.

And there is plenty of smoking in "Carmen," although it wasn't part of either aria Shaham performed Tuesday.

In fact, the sight of Carmen's fellow factory workers, all women, lighting up onstage was regarded as scandalous when the opera was first performed in 1875, said Robert Lyall, the New Orleans Opera Association's general and artistic director.

Previous LSU Health Sciences Center sessions linking music and medicine have drawn on operas in which characters suffered from medical maladies: "La Bohème" and "La Traviata," for a session on tuberculosis, and "Rigoletto," for a forum on back problems.

"I think it's very interesting," Shaham said of the concept. "Anything that would bring young people into the opera is a good thing."

"Carmen" will be performed Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Mahalia Jackson Theater of the Performing Arts.

Lyall said that making the association between music and medicine was nothing less than inspired.

Doctors "deal with the human condition in physical terms," he said. "We deal with the human condition in emotional terms."

Clad in a black Nehru suit, Lyall discussed the opera before Shaham sang. In brief, Carmen seduces a corporal, dumps him for a hunky bullfighter and meets a bad end.

Shaham leapt in Tuesday to defend Carmen from suggestions that she was a loose woman.

Declaring Carmen a feminist, Shaham said: "She decided that she was going to do what she felt like doing. When she saw somebody she liked, she was going to go after him. If she got bored, she was going to move on."

All this drama unfolds, Lyall said, as Bizet "wraps the characters in some of the most sensual music you'll ever hear."