by Antonio Mejías Rentas
Rolando Villazón
SIDELINED BY SURGERY: Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón, a rising international opera star at age 37, has cancelled all performances for the rest of 2009 to have a cyst removed from a vocal cord. His management says he will return to performing in 2010.
Opera companies around the world have scrambled to find replacements for his multiple engagements this year. Ramón Vargas, another popular Mexican tenor, will fill in for Villazón in a production of Werther at the Vienna Opera House the end of May. Los Angeles Opera has replaced him with Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti in L’Elisir d’Amore, next season’s opening production in September.
“I am a close personal friend of Rolando, who is one of the great tenors of our day,” said Los Angeles Opera director Plácido Domingo.
“My deepest wish is for him to have a quick and complete recovery.”
Beginning in March, Villazón cancelled all performances in a production of L’Elisir at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, complaining of laryngitis. The imminent surgery is a new blow for Villazón, who retired for several months in 2007 to deal with vocal problems.
Villazón became an international star soon after winning several awards at the1999 Operalia, a singing contest sponsored by Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo, who has become his mentor.
Buoyed by critical acclaim, he began performing in opera houses around the world, wowing audiences with a brilliant voice and dramatic intensity. Some called him the next Plácido Domingo.
When Villazón’s voice began to fail in 2007, doctors recommended rest. The Mexico City-born tenor took six months, claiming he had attempted to take on too much. He returned in 2008 and recorded a collection of Handel Arias, warmly received by critics in March.
ON SALE: Self-portraits of artist couples are the lead attractions at the spring Latin American art auctions in New York this month.
A rare self-portrait by Diego Rivera, painted in the United States at the height of his popularity, highlights Christie’s May 28-29 sale.
The 1941 painting was commissioned by New York collector Sigmund Firestone, who befriended Rivera and his sometime wife Frida Kahlo, who is also portrayed in the piece.
The painting is being sold with 14 letters exchanged between Firestone, Rivera and Kahlo, also a painter, and may fetch between $1.2 and $1.8 million.
Sotheby’s May 27-28 sale offers a large canvas by English artist Leonora Carrington, who settled in Mexico. She is one of the few living members of the surrealist group founded in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Her self-portrait, titled Chiki, is dedicated to her husband, Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, also seen in the painting. The 1944 painting is expected to sell in the range of $1.2-$1.8 million. Hispanic Link.
