Anthony Roth Costanzo gives a truly inside look at one of Mozart's most loved operas.
Singing seven different roles in a madcap presentation of "Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)" at New York's Little Island, the countertenor labors through the Countess' "Dove sono" aria with a steel laryngoscope down his throat while a video recording of his throbbing vocal chords is displayed on screens.
"After the first part of the opera in which I've torn my voice to shreds essentially going through all of these hijinks and she has been carried offstage in a stretcher, she comes back in a hospital gown and she has this nightmare of her husband, the Count, giving her a laryngoscopy, which of course has all kinds of sexual innuendo," Costanzo said.
A 42-year-old Grammy Award winner who is among the world's top countertenors, Costanzo sang Cherubino for his Opera Santa Barbara debut in 2000. He adds Figaro, Susanna, the Count, Countess, Antonio and Barbarina, stretching his voice 3 1/2 octaves in an invigorating and entertaining 95-minute reinvention of a work that premiered in 1786.
"When was the last time you went to an opera that wasn't 'Tristan' thinking: Is he going to make it?" said Zack Winokur, Little Island's producing artistic director.
