This spring, ads with Alagua’s handsome face will go up on New York City bus shelters; this summer, he plays the Hollywood Bowl and the Atlanta Olympics. This month, he makes his Metropolitan Opera debut in Puccini’s “La Boheme,” singing Rodolfo to the Mimi of Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu. During the rim, the costars plan to get married, and their album of duets and arias will join Alagua’s popular 1995 solo-recital disc in stores.
The opera world craves a young lyric tenor with star quality; Carreras is 49, Domingo 55 and Pavarotti 60. Alagua had never seen an opera before he won his first role, with a British touring company in 1988, but stage-craft turns out to be one of his strong suits: he takes pratfalls, rides rickety bikes and sings from ladders like an operatic Garth Brooks. “I want to show that opera is young and funny and exciting,” he says. Yet there’s nothing hammy about his musicianship. He’s a purist who believes in sticking to the score, nailing notes spot-on and avoiding chokes, sobs and other tricks of the tenorial trade. The rap against Alagna is that he’s too tasteful, a heartthrob but not a heart-wringer. Yet he owes his stardom to his emotionally charged 1994 performance of Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” at London’s Covent Garden, shortly after his wife died of a brain tumor.
Alagna watchers worry that he’s over-scheduled. And the British press scorns to relish placing Alagna and Gheorghiu in the grand tradition of temperamental tenors and dragon-lady divas. (One producer calls them “opera’s Bonnie and Clyde.”) Alagna’s insistence on Gheorghiu’s being east with him has gotten her the Yoko Ono treatment. But Gheorghiu more than pulls her weight: she made her debut (in 1992) not with a road troupe but at Covent Garden. Their duet album proves they make musical sense together, whatever else the sultry cover shot of her reclining on him suggests. So far Alagua seems able to manage both his voice and his career: any singer with a Pavarotti mask has clearly been thinking about the pitfalls of stardom. “I wanted to arrive at the right moment,” he says of his Met debut. “I hope this is the moment.” He hasn’t made a false step yet.
