High Heat

It's Alexandrina Pendatchanska's normal temperature

Alexandrina Pendatchanska is making pasta. At first, it's hard to reconcile the small, blue-jeaned young woman in the kitchen, preparing dinner for a cheerful cohort of fellow Bulgarians, with the fiery soprano I have just seen tear up the New York City Opera stage in the title role of Rossini's Ermione. But the focus and seriousness in her approach to the task at hand are clearly in character.

Pendatchanska's Ermione has been cheered in the State Theater, and it has set off a small seismic reaction on internet bulletin boards and blogs. At the opera's climax, Ermione orders her lover murdered in a scena as long, demanding and emotionally complex as any Donizetti mad scene; Pendatchanska has riveted NYCO audiences as she progresses from anguish to vindictive fury to remorse. Still, the assumption isn't to everyone's taste. Her vocal performance, brilliant in coloratura, searing in legato, isn't conventionally pretty. She makes much of the contrasts in her vocal registers. Her chest notes are hooded, and her top, penetrating and vibrant, has a metallic edge. Anne Midgette in The New York Times, while admiring Pendatchanska's "intensity," called her tone "downright ugly."

The criticism doesn't surprise Pendatchanska. 'I'm not afraid to be disliked, or to be liked very much," she says to me at dinner. "The only thing I don't like is being mediocre."

Her manner is beguilingly direct and natural. There's no vanity in her demeanor, no prima donna flamboyance. There's no false modesty, either: she knows her worth, and she has worked hard to maintain it. She explains that the sound she produced as Ermione had much to do with the mercurial nature of the vengeful queen. "There are roles where I wouldn't dare to cross the line of beautiful singing," she says. "But there are operas where you need more. You can't be afraid to show things different from the normal, from the polite. When you say 'I hate you' in an opera, it needs to be Ι HATE YOU!!'"

For Pendatchanska, opera is a birthright. She's the daughter of the late Valerie Popova, who was a leading lyric soprano with Sofia National Opera, as well as a La Scala Butterfly and Li�. As a girl, Pendatchanska studied piano, but at age twelve, she surprised her mother with a homemade recording of "Ritorna vincitor!" Popova was both horrified and delighted, making her precocious daughter promise to delay singing for another couple of years. When Pendatchanska was fourteen, she began vocal studies in earnest, with her mother as her teacher.

She learned quickly. At the tender age of seventeen, she sane Violetta's Act I double aria from Travittta, in a nationally telecast concert hosted by Ghena Dimitrova. Typically, the self-assured teenager didn't worry about the scene's difficulty; her anxieties focused on a more prosaic matter. "I was afraid my dress would fall," she says. "I didn't think about the notes, and everything went perfect. The next day, I was famous. But when I watch the video, I can see that I'm always touching my dress!"

Her solid technique and dramatic presence have made Pendatchanska a natural for bel canto, and her career has centered on Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi. Recently, under the guidance of Ren� Jacobs, she has made her first ventures into the Baroque repertory. This past summer, she sang the title role in the Innsbruck Festival's Giulio Cesare in Egitto - not the Handel opera but an earlier piece to the same text by Giacomo Francesco Bussani. "Baroque singing is a completely new world for me," she says. "There is no room for any excesses. The discipline is concentrating on the most beautiful part of the sound."

Pendatchanska's career often takes her away from her home base of Sofia. Whenever possible, she travels with her husband, newscaster Nayo Titzin (the two were childhood sweethearts), and dieir four-year-old daughter, Valerie Violetta. In Bulgaria, Pendatchanska is a notable political figure, throwing her considerable prestige behind progressive candidates. She was nineteen when the Communist regime fell, and it's important to her to preserve her country's newfound liberties. "I consider myself a free spirit," says Pendatchanska. "People who are involved with art need free states."

Mozart figures prominently in the soprano's future. In collaboration with Jacobs, she's recording both Vitellia in La Clemenza di Tito and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni The conductor-diva duo promises to make for vividly unconventional recordings.

Pendatchanska wouldn't have it any other way. "In opera today, being polite is well received and appreciated," she says. "But the audience - the people who love opera - craves what is missing." The missing element is passion, and Pendatchanska has made it her mission to deliver it.

[Author Affiliation]

FRED COHN is a freelance writer and editor based in New York.