CANTOR OF THE OPERA

posted by James Reel

    For a change, I’m writing about music in the current Tucson Weekly:

    The first thing you notice about David Montefiore is that he's an operatic tenor. Not that he bursts into Mozart arias while sipping coffee at Starbucks (although he will illustrate a point by singing some stray passage in a voice scaled down to avoid disturbing strangers). But he has that tenor personality--outgoing, self-assured, voluble, full of stories about himself and much else besides.
    The second thing you notice is that he's cosmopolitan. His hard-to-place accent carries the vaguest suggestion of England (where he was born) and a stronger whiff of the more cultured parts of New York City (where he was raised), and, completely without affectation, he manages to pepper his conversation with bits of Italian, French and Argentine Spanish.
    The third thing you notice, something that is apparent from the beginning and soon becomes the dominant aspect of his character, is that Montefiore's greatest passion is neither Mozart nor his own golden throat, but the traditions and performance of Jewish liturgical music. Indeed, he worked in Buenos Aires not as an opera singer but as a cantor in a synagogue.

    Find out more here. And while you’re poking at the nether parts of the Weekly, you may discover that I pop up, unexpectedly, in the music section, which is usually reserved for popular music, not the unpopular kind that you and I listen to. There’s a feature called “Nine Questions,” in which some local music figure is asked a standard set of, um, nine questions. These week’s subject fell through, so the editor called me on Tuesday, a few hours before deadline, and during the one hour I was home that afternoon, and begged me to fill the space. So I did. You can find my Nine Evasions here, slightly nipped and tucked to fit the limited available space. Where else will you see an old Alka-Seltzer jingle and a Mahler symphony mentioned in the same sentence, along with cremation and toilets?