New & Excellent

The evening had the makings of disaster. The opera was Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda, an obscure chronicle of intrigue and infidelity in medieval Italy, which flopped at its Venice premiere in 1833 and had not been done in the U.S. for a century. The American Opera Society's orchestra, awkwardly led by Conductor Nicola Rescigno, sounded coarse. The supporting cast in the concert performance was uninspired. Soprano Joan Sutherland's mother -- her first voice teacher --had died the day before in London. But in her New York debut, Joan Sutherland proved what past appearances (London, Venice, Dallas) had already shown: that even if one of the opera world's newest singers, she is already one of its best.

Auburn hair swirled into a massive cone above her head, her strapping (5 ft. 9 in., 180 Ibs.) figure dominating the stage, she swept through Beatrice's gothic intricacies with the ease of a nanny crooning a lullaby. Her voice was round, smooth and flexible, negotiating the score's chromatic difficulties with unfailing precision. Oddly enough, before any particularly difficult passage she seemed at her most relaxed and carefree; within seconds, she would take off on a high E, then ripple back eleven notes to a mellow A. Her complete, sunny ease caused one concertgoer to dub her "the rich man's Julie Andrews."

Popularity has come to her with a rush. Daughter of a Sydney tailor, Joan Sutherland took no formal voice lessons until she was 18. In 1950 she won $2,800 in an Australian singing contest, headed for Britain to study at London's Royal College of Music and landed a $28-a-week small-parts job at London's Covent Garden. She "jogged along" until 1958, when she became an overnight sensation in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

After last week's triumphant New York debut, Joan Sutherland concentrated on smoothing out all-but-invisible flaws in her performance. "The moment one stops finding things to criticize," she says of herself, "one might as well pack up." Soprano Sutherland has plenty of packing to do--for a tour of the U.S. and Europe that will reach a climax for U.S. operagoers next fall, when she sings Lucia at the Met.

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