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Herb Caen, in a
major miss-emphasis,
didn't quite get it right in his 1995 column
"...The black-tie
crowd turned out en masse Tues. night for the [S.F.] opera's
current smash, "Ruslan and Lyudmila,'' but by the third act, Ruslan
(Jeffrey Wells) was gone, as were large parts of the audience. When a
gent appeared onstage to announce that Wells was suffering from an
allergy, a hale and hearty veteran of the box seats gruffed "That's OK,
I'm allergic to him.'' Best moment in the four-hour extravaganza:
concertmaster Kay Stern's gorgeous obbligatos to soprano Anna Netrebko's fourth-act aria . . ."
Herb Caen, S.F. Chronicle, September 1995
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Stephanie
Salter, reporting on a 1996 free outdoor Merola performance at Yerba
Buena Gardens in San Francisco, did better
"...Like the older and more
traditional-looking opera fans in the audience, the younger people were
knocked out by a 23-year-old soprano from Russia, Anna
Netrebko. Slender and dark-haired, she wore a long,
body-clinging red tank dress that had a hot, leg-revealing split up one
side.
"In two arias from Verdi's 'La
Traviata,' Netrebko proved that her voice is at least as good as her
looks. Given the whooping standing ovation that followed, I'd wager
that the next time several hundred folks hear 'Ah, fors'e lui' and
'Sempre libera,' the hair on the back of their necks will rise in
sensual memory of the divine Miss N...."
Stephanie Salter, S.F. Examiner, "Opera
addiction: The first hit is free," August 8, 1996
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S.F. Chronicle
1997 profile by music critic Joshua Kosman
Russian Soprano's Star Rose Quickly - Netrebko
young but seasoned
Marfa, Tsar's Bride
Anna sings for
her supper at the table of Croesus
Pat Steger, S.F. Chronicle society reporter,
12/2/98
...``Hey, everyone, the dinner's
ready,'' called out Gordon Getty over the cocktail dinner at his home
Monday. He, wife Ann and the Opera's Lotfi Mansouri got everyone... to
talk about ``Der Ring des Nibelungen'' next summer. There was lots of
talk, in general, about opera. Gordon said his mother, the late Ann
Light, took him to his first opera at the Hollywood Bowl when he was 7:
`` `Madama Butterfly,' and it was so beautiful I wept through it all.''
Dinner began with chef Alfonse's
signature sea bass.... Ah, the secret sauce. Only Alfonse knows.
Even better
than the secret sauce Monday was the icing on the cake, which came
after dessert -- Russian soprano Anna Netrebko of ``Betrothal in a
Monastery'' singing in the music room. ``Just imagine. She was once
Miss Kiev,'' said Lotfi. We know what she did during the talent
competition.
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Anna makes Liz
Smith's gossip column (8-5-04)
OK, SO SOPRANO Anna Netrebko was
born in St. Petersburg, but don't call her "The Russian Girl." She
sings in several languages and doesn't care to categorize herself
regionally. Of course, if we knew the name of the street where she
lived and what she called her childhood pet, we would be allowed to
refer to Anna by her stripper name. The sexy, raven-haired singer has a
secret aspiration: to be a pole-dancing, G-string- wearing,
"make-men-drool-and-sweat" stripper for one night only. Having seen her
photo, we think that act could surely sell out the Met. And she'd never
have to hit a high E. (Actually, she'll portray the saucy Musetta in
the Met's "La Bohčme" come November.)
Anna, whose "Sempre Libera" CD
hits stores Tuesday, will be seen and heard in "Princess Diaries 2:
Royal Engagement," and she plans to release a DVD performing arias "MTV
style." She is also a scorching salsa dancer. This is not your mother's
opera diva.
In 2003, the publicity
machine cranked up
In addition to brief featurettes
in the November Vanity Fair and something called Details,
there was a more extended profile and interview in the November issue
of Opera News titled "Wild Thing"
which included a coyly lubricious photo of Anna consorting with a
Viennese pastry. We've had Peach Melba; it may be time to start calling
this bit of strudel Stawberries Netrebko.
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2003 report of
Anna paddling about a Brentwood pool lip-synching for her MTV-style DVD
Article from The Los
Angeles Times, November 2, 2003
A soprano makes a dive into the DVD pool
By
Louise Roug
The other night, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko
floated on top of a pink and turquoise plastic swan in a Brentwood
swimming pool, her tiny manicured toes dipped in the water.
A video camera hovered above while an assistant
wearing a wet suit circled the singer. It was a little before 8 p.m.,
and the shoot for an MTV-meets-the-Met music video had just begun. At
the edge of the pool, Vincent Patterson, choreographer for Madonna,
Britney et al., watched on a monitor.
The production crew and the 32-year-old singer
(who's featured in the current Vanity Fair and will
sing the title role in Los Angeles Opera's upcoming Lucia
di Lammermoor) had come to Brentwood to film the last of five video
segments to accompany her latest CD - a Deutsche Grammophon recording
of operatic highlights by Mozart, Donizetti, Puccini and others,
packaged to make the most of her lovely features. Plans call for the
videos to be released in the U.S. as a DVD in the spring.
As she lip-synced to a playback of her singing
Antonin Dvorák's "Song to the Moon" ("O moon, stay awhile, tell me
where my beloved is!"), about a dozen crew members, many of them
Austrian, watched from the edge of the pool. Inside the house, a model
- the "male talent," who would join the filming later - was slumped in
a chair, reading a paperback.
"Your hands are his hands, OK?" Patterson called out
to Netrebko. Lovingly, she ran her fingers through her hair and
caressed her white outfit - a little more than a bathing suit but not
quite a dress. The camera zoomed in.
At one end
of the kidney-shaped pool, a fire marshal watched the floating
Netrebko, holding his thumbs in his belt and slightly swaying to the
music.
"This side, that's the movie star side," Patterson
told her.
Netrebko yawned a little ladylike yawn. Her stylist
jumped in the pool, treading water as she rearranged the soprano's
hair. "It's getting colder," the singer complained, but added,
pensively, "you must suffer for the art."
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Diva, unbridled
The Christian Science
Monitor profiles Anna (12/17/03):
...Netrebko has not become
one of the most coveted names in opera just because her voice flows
over audiences in a silken stream of pitch and melody, though it does.
Netrebko has not been hailed as the next Beverly Sills or Maria Callas
simply because her face and figure evoke Milan runway models rather
than Viking horns and helmets, though they do. Anna Netrebko has
reached this moment, on the edge of becoming the first great soprano of
the new century, because she is fearless....
It's hardly the icy air of
superiority. Nor is it the hauteur of a highbrow bad girl, as if Paris
Hilton had suddenly mastered the canon of Mozart librettos. It's more
the unadorned projection of the fact that Anna Netrebko simply likes to
have fun. And for the moment, at least, she's having fun singing opera.
"It's another life, and I
like to pretend - to lead different lives. Some of my friends told
me many years ago that I am more real on the stage than I am in real
life," she grins. "That's funny. I don't think so, but it's nice
because you know it's fake. You can play, you can suffer, you can die.
You're feeling this. All these feelings are real, but you know that it
will be over in one hour. And you can share this with the audience."
--Mark
Sappenfield
For full
text, click here.
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