Diva with A Difference

By Martha Duffy

June Anderson has a wish list. First, she would like to star in a marvelous, imaginative production of Lucia di Lammermoor. That means, the soprano quickly adds, one utterly unlike the pedestrian ones she has already graced. Anderson would also like to sing the role of Violetta in La Traviata, but declines to do so until a satisfactory stage director can be found. She admits that she cannot think of one. "I can wait," she says philosophically. "But who knows? I may be too old when it finally happens." A third wish is that a fine young tenor would appear on the opera horizon. "My three tenors," as she refers to Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Alfredo Kraus, will do nicely for now, but at 37, Anderson is at least twelve years younger than any of them. What to do, she wonders, when they retire?

Who is June Anderson, and where does she get off being so -- well, so demanding? For starters, she is the newest diva on the international music scene. Her coronation came last fall with her Metropolitan Opera debut as Gilda in Rigoletto, the season's major event. "Ah, she is beautiful!" croons Pavarotti, her co-star. "So tall! And she has beautiful musicality, beautiful voice, beautiful phrasing." Leonard Bernstein, who chose Anderson for the new recording of his operetta Candide, likens her to Jennie Tourel, among others, in "the sense of vocal color, of the dramatic use of technique and the endless drive to work hard."

She will not lack work opportunities anytime soon. Covent Garden is on the telephone, pleading that she not cancel a new La Sonnambula because the agreed-upon director has just withdrawn. Italian maestro Riccardo Chailly, who is on her very short list of preferred conductors, wants her for Rossini's The Turk in Italy, not exactly on opera's hit parade, but that does not matter to Anderson. Major new productions have been lined up in Chicago (finally, perhaps, a satisfying Lucia) and San Francisco (La Sonnambula), as well as a new Semiramide next season at the Met.

The voice is a lyric soprano with an unusual coloratura, capable of unearthly runs, trills and ornaments, but with a bigger, lusher sound than most. Anderson commands the bel canto repertory, whose heroines tend to be, as she puts it, "girls who are sad, mad or dead." She herself is a larger-than- life heroine with a bravura temperament to match her voice. If critics see her as a young Joan Sutherland, opera fans compare her with Maria Callas. Like la Callas, Anderson stirs things up.

In Europe she has gained a formidable backstage reputation for demanding the optimum in production and rehearsal time and, if not satisfied, canceling. "She's hardly ever in agreement with any director," says Niccolo Parente, artistic director of the San Carlo opera house in Naples, who, nevertheless, is an admirer. "She is fanatical," he adds, "but is often right." Says Anderson: "They say that singers have resonance where other mortals have brains. But I do have a brain, and I can make a decision based on something more than notes." Many of her decisions to walk out of productions were based on directors' plunking her down in the middle of a set, then giving her no more guidance than go right, go left, go upstage. "I cannot carry an opera by myself," she complains. "If the set is wrong, I'm the one who anguishes over it."

Better include wigs and costumes too. Anderson has a long, thick mane of strawberry blond hair, and directors always want her to forgo wearing hairpieces. But she feels she cannot play a character without an element of disguise. Last July, when she appeared in the inaugural performance at the new Bastille opera house in Paris, Anderson was unhappy with her specially designed gown from the French couturier Ungaro. She promptly began pulling it apart. To the rescue of French couture -- and that evening's gala -- rode "a nice man who got down on his knees and began pinning." His name? Pierre Berge, Yves Saint Laurent's multimillionaire business partner and France's culture czar.

As is usual in the artistic world, today's new phenom is yesterday's hardworking apprentice. Anderson grew up in Wallingford, Conn., taking voice and dance lessons. She grew too tall to dance (today she stands 5 ft. 10 in.), but at 17 she was a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera auditions. She hated the process. "I'm determined, but I can't step on someone else to get ahead. I hated the competitiveness." Instead she went to Yale and majored in French literature, graduating in 1974. She gave herself two years to become famous and has been working at it ever since.

At one point, discouraged by what she saw as the shortcomings of her colleagues, she seriously considered chucking her opera career to concentrate on recitals. "After all, my technique is strong enough now. I'm not out there worrying about where the next high note is coming from," she says. "I'm full of ideas, but I needed someone to collaborate with." After a rolling wave of cancellations, she took most of 1989 off before the Met debut, in order "to get things straight. Sometimes I wished the voice were like a violin, an instrument in a box -- and you could put the box in a closet." But the period of questioning is over. Time now to celebrate all those sad, mad girls in productions that just might suit. As the prima donna promises, "I'm just starting my prime."