Review: Soprano Maria Valdes and tenor Christopher Bozeka spin a lovely duet

The First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta’s Concerts@First series continued its 2023-24 season — its first with new Music and Arts Director Tom Bara — in grand fashion on Sunday with an afternoon of opera standards.

Soprano Maria Valdes, who grew up in Marietta, and tenor Christopher Bozeka held court over an entranced audience as pianist Valerie Pool provided accompaniment. For such a minimalist presentation, it proved to be a tour de force of passion and projection.

The set was divided into three parts, each catering to audience-pleasing facets of the opera canon. First — and most prodigious in length — was a tribute to star-crossed lovers, namely the legendary Romeo and Juliette in the form of Charles Gounod’s opera of the same name and their contemporary counterparts Tony and Maria from West Side Story. 

The shifting back and forth between Gounod and Leonard Bernstein was hardly as jarring as it might sound and gave Valdes and Bozeka an opportunity to re-interpret the chapel as a makeshift stage with the choir deck becoming a balcony for Valdes’ Juliette and arched doorways serving as hiding places for Bozeka’s Romeo. The ability to fully embody characters can often make or break an engaging operatic performance, and the pair was clearly having tremendous fun hamming it up.

Valdes emerged first with Gounod’s “Je veux vivre” and was quickly confronted by a notable spatial limitation: Church worship chambers are generally constructed to sculpt the collective voices of the choir together into a unified whole and carry the spoken sermon out to the congregation as a whole. That unique sculpting is often at odds with operatic vocal delivery and blunted Valdes’ delivery by adding endless reverberations to her powerhouse vibrato. Listeners had to separate the glassy overtones created by the room from Valdes’ own voice.

None of this, however, is meant to detract from Valdes’ performance. Her voice is marked by the absence of the sort of humanizing undercurrents that are normally apparent in a performer. The usual sharp intakes of breath and waverings on the tail end of sustained pitches and other inflections that typify even the most capable opera singers are nowhere to be found in Valdes’ delivery. In their place is a disarmingly robust tone that seems to come from some outer dimension where breath support is not required. And her soaring tones remain just as vibrant on the back end as the front. Most vocalists are content to be soulful, but Valdes reaches for the superhuman.

Bozeka fared better with the acoustic limitations with his stirring opening performance of “Maria” from West Side Story. The piece lends itself to a soft and gradual buildup in dynamics and as such allows the performer to skirt just under the degree of projection necessary to clash with the architecture. 

Though Bozeka was more than capable of dramatic technical delivery, it was his softer side that shined most brightly. “Maria” and later his half of the duets “Tonight” and “O nuit divine . . .” showed that he is a markedly gentle singer — one for whom each note is its own handcrafted sculpture. 

The afternoon continued with “Opera Composers in Song,” a selection of stand-alone works by Giacomo Puccini and Vincenzo Bellini composed as preliminary sketches in the development of larger works. It was an interesting assortment of ideas but offered nothing as substantial as the more cohesive segments that bookended it.

The final segment, “Giants of Italian Opera,” returned to crowd pleasing favorites. Valdes delivered another showstopper with Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi. The piece is instantly recognizable to even the passing opera fan, and Valdes filled it with warmth and youthful energy. Bozeka had his own moment with “Una furtiva lagrima” from L’elisir d’amore, and it was here that we really got to hear him belt out at full volume. 

The segment closed with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Fra gli amplessi” from Cosi fan tutte. It was another bombastic affair complete with pantomimed staging and the charming vocal interplay that made their duets such a pleasure throughout the afternoon.

They soared to a finale that brought the audience to its feet. Valdes and Bozeka are captivating talents in their own right, but together they have a palpable chemistry that never ceases to shine forth. It is always a joy to watch performers who are clearly having tremendous fun with their craft and for that alone this is a pair that belongs together. 

The Concerts@First series has always been its own small oasis in the Atlanta classical music world — a place where performers from larger ensembles can let their hair down in a more intimate environment. But for Valdes and Bozeka, the space became something else, a transcendent realm of the imagination. They are both in-demand vocalists, but, hopefully, the time will come when they pair together once again.

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.