Is Veronica Bell Serious About Her Work?

courtesy of Crossover Media

A couple of week’s ago the mail brought me a CD scheduled for release on April 26. The title of the album was Midnight Affairs, and it featured Russian-American soprano Veronica Bell. Much to my surprise, searching Amazon.com failed to turn up any information about this recording but CD Baby has created a Web page that supports both download of the tracks and purchase of the physical compact disc.

The Album Notes provided on that Web page describe Bell as “Operatically trained” but then goes on to assert that she “proudly wears the title Antichrist of Opera.” Apparently, that title was earned by her recording Giuseppe Verdi’s “Va, pensiero” (the opening chorus of Hebrew slaves from the opera Nabucco) as a solo accompanied by a heavy metal band. After reading this I was reminded by an old joke that still strikes me as funny:

You can lead a horse to water; but, if you can get him to swim on his back, you’ve got an act worth promoting!

Just what Bell’s “act” is has me more than a little perplexed. It is hard to tell whether there is any sense of humor behind any of the tracks on Midnight Affairs. I get the impression that Bell is dead serious about everything she does, perhaps even when it comes to attributing her selections from Lakmé and Les pêcheurs de perles (the pearl fishers) to “G. Biset” on the tracks listed on the back cover of her album. Nevertheless, this is the sort of thing one would expect Mel Brooks to create, perhaps with an affectionate nod to Darlene Edwards, the notorious alter ego of Jo Stafford, who never met a pitch she could hit correctly. (I have always felt that the intervallic leaps in “Autumn in New York” that Edwards fumbles constitute the ne plus ultra of musical humor, guaranteed to make any well-trained singer in any genre double over in uncontrollable laughter.)

Where Midnight Affairs is concerned, however, I found that I could laugh neither at nor with any of the tracks. Whether the issue is one of hitting pitch confidently or taking a compelling rhetorical stance, Bell never seems to find the mark in any way that seizes or holds attention. This is one of those rare listening experiences that left me wondering when it would all stop.