James Valenti has just gotten off a plane to West Palm Beach, so he’s dressed casually in shirt, shorts and flip-flops as he tucks into some salad and crudités before talking about his career on the operatic stage.
No one passing by at CityPlace on a beautiful December afternoon realizes that the tall, friendly, dark-haired man at the table will soon be breaking the heart of a fictional young Japanese bride when he takes the stage at the Metropolitan Opera in April for four performances as Lt. B.F. Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Even less do they know that he’s begun retooling his career, adding vocally weightier roles and branching out into new repertory, including his first contemporary opera.
“You get to the point where you’re not the new kid anymore, and your fees are a little higher than someone 10 years younger,” Valenti said. “I just felt like I needed a change, like I’d plateaued a little bit and needed to change things up … Now I’m moving into heavier repertoire, and it’s all going very well. It’s good to sing new stuff.”
This Saturday afternoon, he’s the star of the Palm Beach Opera’s first event of its new season, a free outdoor concert of opera favorites on the West Palm Beach waterfront at the Meyer Amphitheatre. This first-ever concert will also be a showcase for the company’s current troupe of Young Artists, who will be featured in solo works as well as in ensembles with Valenti.
Chorus master Greg Ritchey will conduct the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra and Chorus for the 2 p.m. concert, which will be offer favorite arias and ensembles by Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, Rossini, Bizet, Delibes, Offenbach and Dvořák, in addition to two songs (Some Enchanted Evening and The Impossible Dream) and an overture (Candide) from Broadway.
Although it’s the first such concert by the opera company, it already been awarded a Knight Foundation grant to help pay for next year’s concert. The outdoor performance is part of general manager Daniel Biaggi’s rethinking of the Palm Beach Opera season as a 12-week festival rather than a series of discrete mainstage productions.
“We’re thrilled to be able to give the community a free opportunity to experience live opera with an orchestra in a very casual setting,” Biaggi said in a prepared statement.
Valenti has appeared with the company in past years, and that experience led him to relocate from New York to West Palm, which he now considers his home base. Born into a large Italian-American family in Summit, N.J., and reared in nearby Clinton, he studied at West Virginia University and the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, making his debut at 25 at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera as Rodolfo in Puccini’s iconic La Bohème.
That appearance led swiftly to appearances at major venues all over the world, including La Scala, London’s Royal Opera House, the Paris Opera, the Sydney Opera House and the Salzburg Festival, as well as the Met, the San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He’s won leading vocal prizes as well, including the prestigious Richard Tucker Award in 2010, and recorded with the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorgiu for her 2011 tribute disc to Maria Callas.
Now 36, Valenti has begun moving away from the Traviatas and Rigolettos of his immediate past and into roles such as Verdi’s Don Carlos. This summer, he sang the role in the 1884 French version of Don Carlos at the Caramoor Festival in New York, conducted by Will Crutchfield, who has led two recent productions (La Cenerentola and Roméo et Juliette) for Palm Beach Opera. His “dark-centered, expressive tenor” won praise from critics, and when there was a cancellation at Austin Lyric Opera last month, he sang the role in the Texas capital, this time in the Italian version.
“It’s an opera that’s being done a lot more because of Verdi’s 200th birthday this year. It’s a difficult opera to do because it has six huge principal roles, which makes it hard to cast,” Valenti said. “I did it in French and Italian within six months of each other, and that was a challenge, after learning it in French, to have to redo the whole thing in Italian.”
In March, he’ll be appearing with Minnesota Opera in American composer Dominick Argento’s The Dream of Valentino, a story of the silent film star Rudolph Valentino that premiered in 1994, and which has been newly revised by the 86-year-old composer.
“It’s going to be something totally outside my normal realm,” he said, adding that he’s taking tango lessons to do the role (Valentino began acting in films after working as a taxi dancer). “Learning it has been very difficult. Modern music doesn’t sit on your ear the same way as Puccini. And it just takes a longer time to put it into your body … it’s a muscle memory thing.
“You have the same challenges in any role you do, but modern music is more difficult. It takes more concentration, and a lot more preparation,” he said.
Over the coming two years, he’ll also be doing his first Don Jose (in Bizet’s Carmen) and Mario Cavaradossi (in Puccini’s Tosca), as well as debuting in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. He’s happy about the response he’s been getting to his new direction, which includes some vocal adjustments, but he’s also well aware of the risks.
“Your whole body is your instrument, not just from here up,” he said, gesturing to his throat. “You have to learn how to tap into all of this. And I feel like I’m on a very good path, but it’s difficult: I got started early singing in big theaters. And so to sort of make a change — I’m not singing in small venues; I’m singing at places like Lyric Opera of Chicago — I’m trying to do some of these new things, but I don’t want to fall flat on my face.
“But there comes a time when you just have to say, ‘Well, I’m going to try this,’” he said. “It’s a difficult balance, because you don’t want to do it the way you did it before, you want to keep growing and getting better. But I’m doing it under the spotlight.”
Valenti said he’s looking forward to doing the concert Saturday, for which family members from New York and Wellington will be in attendance. He’ll perform La fleur que tu m’avais jetée, from Carmen; E lucevan le stelle, from Tosca; and Quando le sere al placido, from Verdi’s Luisa Miller. With five of the Young Artists, he’ll sing the sextet (Chi mi frena in tal momento?) from Act II of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and with one of the Young Artists, soprano Bridgette Gan, he’ll sing the drinking song (Libiamo ne’ lieti calici) from Act I of Verdi’s La Traviata.
He said Biaggi came to the Caramoor Don Carlos and asked him then to star in the waterfront concert.
“And I told him I would love to be there, I would love to come and do it,” Valenti said, adding that his early experience with Palm Beach Opera led him to relocate to West Palm in the first place. “I’d love to give back in some way, to help the company. It’s a great company.”
After Saturday’s concert, he’ll be making an appearance on Christmas Eve at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, where he’ll be part of a live midnight Mass broadcast on PBS, singing Adolphe Adam’s operatic carol O Holy Night.
“Being from the Northeast, and Roman Catholic, St. Patrick’s is the epicenter of Christmas Eve. It’s a good opportunity, and I’m excited about it,” Valenti said.
Aside from his work in music, which includes an increasing number of master classes, Valenti is committed to several charitable causes, such as his work as a celebrity ambassador for Kansas City’s Children International. He also recently sang at a benefit concert in Philadelphia for victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
“We give ourselves on stage, we bare our souls, but it’s nice to give in other ways, too, to give a little more of my heart in ways besides my music,” he said.
All of that is of course central to the redefinition of his brand, and Valenti strikes one as a happy man who’s excited to be embarking on another phase of his career.
“There’s a strategy that goes into career. I knew many years ago that eventually I would move into some of this other repertoire, but you have to just wait,” he said. “The voice is a delicate instrument, and you have to give it time to develop.”
OPERA @ THE WATERFRONT begins at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Meyer Amphitheatre on the Intracoastal Waterway in downtown West Palm Beach. Appearing along with tenor James Valenti are Young Artists Rachel Arky, Bridgette Gan, Tobias Greenhalgh, Claire Kuttler, Michael Nestorak, JoAna Rusche and Peter Tomaszewski. No tickets are required for this free concert. For more information, call 561-833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.