Exclusive Interview with Kathleen Cassello By Karen Lotter from Durban, South Africa ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Among devotees of the super-diva there is always the speculation - who is the greatest prima donna of her time? These arguments balancing technique against performance have been going on for decades, after all - who was greater, Callas or Tebaldi? Then, on September 5, 1996 this all changed. International impresario Tibor Rudas who brought the world The Three Tenors, staged the now legendary concert at The Century Plaza Towers in Los Angeles and The Three Sopranos forever put to rest the stories of feuding divas and vindictive upstaging which were often more dramatic than the operas they sang. Kathleen Cassello, Kallen Esperian and Cynthia Lawrence joyously burst into the world of TV opera in diamonds, designer gowns, voluptuous bodies and magnificent voices. Not only three divas on one stage together, but also singing in harmony. "Three sopranos harmonising is certainly odd and very, very difficult", explained Kathleen Cassello during a recent visit to Durban. "You have to consider that each of us is accustomed to only singing the top line. You know it is very hard to get it into your head that you will not always be singing the top line. I had to keep on reminding myself - Cassello don't be a Diva!" Miss Cassello who first appeared in South Africa a few years ago with Luciano Pavarotti - and nearly stole the show - has appeared in Durban twice as part of the World Symphony Series of the KwaZulu Natal Philharmonic Orchestra. To see Kathleen in performance and to experience the exquisite purity of her tone and the laser like sharpness of her high notes, does not at all prepare you for meeting her in person. Far from conforming to the diva stereotype, the gently pretty, 40 year old Kathleen is a very down to earth woman... When 18 year old Kathleen graduated from High School in New Castle, Delaware, USA in 1976 she certainly had no aspirations of becoming an opera singer, although she enjoyed acting and singing in local productions. She only wanted to become a nurse and enrolled in the University of Delaware where she completed a Bachelors' degree in Nursing, serving four years in the intensive care unit. Along the way she picked up a beauty queen title, sang in some musicals, started studying opera and soon the singing competition prizes began to roll in, much to her surprise. "My voice is a gift. It really is a gift to be able to stand up in front of strangers and open your soul. I enjoy doing it. It is very risky as well. Sometimes I get hurt. It just takes one person to boo and it ruins the whole performance for me. You want so much to give to all of them. It seems so stupid but if it wasn't enough for that one person it just wasn't right. But that's the way it is. "I've been given these talents, so in a way it was inevitable that I would sing. I take care of my voice and I take care of my body but I don't feel that it's necessary to close myself down as a human being and isolate myself from my public. That is the reason I can touch an audience, because I'm an open person. If I were a more closed person, I don't think I would have the responses that I get. Encouraged by her early success, the beauty queen from Delaware then joined the Salzburg Somerakadamie in 1984, won the prestigious Mozart competition in Salzburg in 1985 and made her European debut as Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflote at the Hamburg Staatsoper. During the next three years she sang more than 200 performances in Austria, Germany, Russia and Switzerland. "It wasn't an easy one-step-two-step-over, leaving my nursing career and deciding to become a singer. It involved a lot of chance and a lot of luck and a lot of just daring to take the steps. I asked the hospital, can I have six weeks off because I've just won a competition and they want to send me to Salzburg. When they said I couldn't, I quit! "My father was incensed, he thought I was insane giving up a real career for this - 'I mean, they really pay you to scream at people?' he asked me." Kathleen Cassello rapidly built up an extensive repertoire including the title role in Lucia de Lammermoor and other bel canto roles I Puritani, La Sonnambula and I Capuletti e I Montecchi. Her Verdi repertoire includes Leonora in Il Trovatore, Violetta in La Traviata and Gilda in Rigoletto, in which she made her debut at the operatic holy of holies, La Scala in Milan in 1994 under the baton of Riccardo Muti. Over the past ten years as her career has grown, she has travelled to all corners of the globe and stolen the hearts of her audiences not only for her technical purity, but also for the exuberant emotionalism which shines through in every song she sings. For Kathleen, who is of mixed Irish, Italian and American Indian descent, singing is an almost religious experience. " I do a bit of praying before I sing, many times it is just that kind of concentration that gets you inside of yourself. It's almost like meditating." "It is true, singing is an outlet for your emotions. I use it, it's therapeutic for me - it is cathartic to get on the stage and work through your feelings, and let the audience feel something as well as just hear the music. After all, the composer wrote not just for voice, not just for us to sing the musical line. There are words. There are feelings. There has to be a reason why the music suddenly changes. And I think it is our job not just to sing the notes but to bring out everything that lies dormant on that page." Modern recording techniques produce sound of such clarity that often some of the atmosphere is lost. Voices are "cleaned up" and synthesisers and samplers have become the order of the day. But they will never take the place of the real thing, she believes. "The human voice is such a viable instrument because there is a soul behind it. There are thought processes behind it. Every tiny nuance changes the colour of the voice at any particular moment. Just the shading of a word, of a vowel that you are singing changes the colour of the voice and this makes the human voice such a special instrument." But life not all work and no play for Kathleen who ensures that she spends a good deal of quality time with her husband of almost ten years, baritone, Renato Girolami who also maintains a busy opera schedule in Europe. Every possible opportunity to relax finds them together on a golf course, although at present they live in Monte Carlo. Her dream holiday destination was always Portugal's Algarve - that is until she set foot in Durban. "I thought it must be beautiful here, on the Indian Ocean. And it is - Durban is fantastic. I am thinking of getting a summer house here. You know, I have felt coming to South Africa almost like coming home. It's a very strange feeling. I feel so comfortable with everybody I meet. I feel like I'm home. "I would love to perform more with the KZNPO. They played phenomenally well for me - they have been really fantastic. And I would also like to teach some Master Classes." Audiences around the world differ in their response, but nothing quite prepared Kathleen for the reception she received from a jam packed Durban City Hall last year. The enthralled hall thundered with applause every time she appeared on the stage, dressed in a stunning gown by local designer Imran Vagar. "I have been thoroughly spoiled by many of my audiences in Europe. There are theatres where I sing, where people scream C-A-S-S-E-L-L-O , but when I heard them stamping their feet last night, I was totally amazed. I would expect it from Marseilles, but certainly not from Durban." And although Kathleen Cassello is one of the most sought after sopranos in the world she has never recorded, that is apart from the widely acclaimed Three Sopranos' CD. "In the beginning I tore myself up about not recording , she explains "I mean how can you make a career if they cannot hear you on CD, if they cannot see you on video? But then after a while, I guess when I was round 35, I thought, all right, that's it. I'm going to sing in theatres where I sing for the audiences who have come to hear me. And I'm going to give them everything I have. I decided that would be enough." The complex politics in the opera recording industry is more volatile than in a Central African state and certain conductors and singers have a vice-like grip on who gets the opportunity to be recorded. "If you don't have the support of a particular conductor who is influential in a specific recording agency, you just never get recorded. There is simply no way to break in unless you have support from someone, be it another singer who says 'I will only sing with her' or a conductor who says 'I will only record this piece with her'. And I've just never had that kind of success with conductors. I've always had the success with my audiences. Maybe that is precisely the problem. But sing she will. "You must see my Lucia", she says smiling gleefully "I go crazy and die very well." But where does such a clearly well balanced person draw inspiration from for the heavy drama and melodrama of the Grand Opera? "I think part of it is the nursing training. I've seen a lot of death. And my mother died a slow death from Cancer when I was 20. But you start to see that death is not the end, it is the beginning of a new level in spiritual life. I draw from that knowledge when I sing, and when I die on stage, I don't consider death as an end, it is merely a new beginning. There is that wonderful reaching to God when you die, that final looking up rather than going down. It's really dying up. And when I need to portray extremes like insanity - well, I think there is a little bit of insanity in all of us and I think we just choose how to control it. Kathleen Cassello unquestionably has what the Germans call "Ausstrahlung" - star quality. There is no doubt that this lady's star is on the rise. In the same way that people brag of having seen Maria Callas in her prime, a Durban audience will one day be able to boast "Oh I saw Cassello in Durban in 1997."