Ermonela Jaho as Butterfly at Covent Garden (photo: Bill Cooper / ROH)

There is one operatic image from the last decade that still retains enough power to bring me close to tears whenever I conjure it up in my mind’s eye. It’s that of the Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho in a wimple, strikingly lit, centre stage at the Royal Opera House, London. Her eyes are wide open, imploring; her hands are clasped together to project a potent mix of prayer and helplessness. Jaho’s central performance in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, in Richard Jones’s unflinching, merciless production, is surely one of the most memorable in Covent Garden’s recent history. It’s happily preserved on film (indeed, the DVD deservedly won a Gramophone Award in 2013) and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to put their emotions through the mincer at the touch of a button.

Every bit as revealing, in a way, is Jaho’s curtain call on the film. She comes to the stage with a look somewhere between shattered and relieved. This is not an artist to keep a cool, calculated distance from what she’s performing, and she’s reliably emotionally poleaxing in a number of other signature roles – Violetta in La traviata and Madama Butterfly among them, both of which are captured on DVD.

It’s a relief, though, to find that none of these grand emotions are accompanied by diva-ish manners when I meet Jaho in a sunny Valencia in October. She’s there to record her first solo album with Opera Rara, a programme inspired by the first Butterfly, Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), and we meet in the evening in the miniscule apartment she’s staying in for the duration. She welcomes me in like an old friend, and offers me a herbal tea as we settle down to chat in a cramped sitting area.

The wide eyes, broad smile and grand gestures familiar from La Jaho on stage are there, here brought in to enliven our conversation. The soprano’s manner is engaging and engaged – ‘Exactly!’ she agrees, gratifyingly, at several moments – and she has a habit, when her excellent English runs out, to call upon a repertoire of emotive hand gestures or exaggerated intakes of breath. It’s very difficult not to like her, to be swept along by her curiosity and generosity. It’s easy to imagine that she’s a rewarding colleague on stage.

Jaho is now embarking on the third decade of a career whose initial inspiration came when she saw a production of La traviata in Tirana as a teenager, which turned her away from early ambitions to be a pop singer. She began her studies in the Albanian capital before catching the eye of Katia Ricciarelli and making the trip across the Adriatic to Italy, garnering prizes and becoming a student of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome in 1994. Her professional debut was as Mimì in Bologna in 2000. Her breakthrough for British audiences came in classic operatic style, when she replaced an ailing Anna Netrebko to sing Violetta at Covent Garden (opposite Jonas Kaufmann and Dmitri Hvorostovsky) in 2008. It’s a role, she tells me, she must have sung 300 times now.

Violetta in La traviata in 2019 at the Royal Opera House, London (photo: Catherine Ashmore / ROH)

Having begun with a repertoire that concentrated on a handful of key roles, she has recently also found herself as something of a figurehead for the dustier corners of verismo, not least in a collaboration with Opera Rara that has seen her add sound-only recordings to a discography of filmed theatrical performances. She lent her considerable star power to the label’s recording of Leoncavallo’s Zazà (7/16) – its first significant foray away from the bel canto that had traditionally been its focus – and, more recently, to its recording of Puccini’s Le willis (A/19; the original version of which would become Le villi).

When we talk, she’s looking forward to donning another wimple to reprise the role of Blanche de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites. It’ll be her third production of Poulenc’s masterpiece, she tells me. ‘Like with Traviata, or Butterfly, even if you sing something a hundred times, every time – if you are open, if you’re up for embracing that kind of experience – you discover something new.’ Her agenda was also to include her first staged Adriana Lecouvreur, as well as concert performances of Mascagni’s Iris – both of which fell foul of the Covid crisis.

Happily her most recent project with Opera Rara, a tribute to Storchio, is unaffected. Storchio was the first Zazà, the first Madama Butterfly and a renowned Violetta, who played an important role in the performance history of La traviata when, at La Scala, Milan, in 1906, she starred in the first production of the opera to set the action at the time of composition, as Verdi had wanted. One can see the appeal for Jaho, and when she performed a related recital at London’s Wigmore Hall earlier this year, Gramophone critic Tim Ashley gave it five stars in The Guardian, writing of Jaho’s ‘performances of unsparing veracity and tremendous emotional honesty’.

Jaho at the recording sessions for her new Opera Rara album – Valencia, November 2019 (photo: Simon Weir)

The new album offers a carefully selected mixture of the rare and the familiar, casting a fascinating spotlight on how singers built their repertoire in the first decades of the 20th century, at a time before the orthodoxy of today’s vocal categories. But, I suggest at the start of our interview, it must be something of a departure from the norm for a stage animal such as Jaho to find herself in front of a microphone in studio conditions, recording operatic excerpts. ‘I’d rather be on stage,’ she admits, ‘like an animal being able to touch every corner of my territory.’

But, especially after the experiences of recording Zazà, she seems to be pretty relaxed, and it didn’t take her long to adjust to the process. ‘It’s something I discovered for myself. I didn’t pay attention to the fact that I wasn’t on stage, or that I didn’t have a public, I just focused on what the music was telling me. It worked well – and now we have this new project!’ The recording process, she admits, can still be hard – especially, one senses, for an artist of Jaho’s natural intensity. ‘When recording, you have to repeat things for the sound, for the orchestra, for mistakes. You have to repeat and repeat, but even when doing that I want to give and give’ – she emphasises the word by stretching it into a long ‘geev’ before letting her sentence crescendo into a series of big dramatic breaths. ‘Of course, when you’re on the stage people can see the body, the movements.’

This new project presents further challenges in being a mixed recital. ‘You have to switch from Massenet to Verdi to Giordano: the language and the way to express things in each have their own flavour. It’s a big, big challenge, but I’m learning so much and I’m so grateful.’

And what about the step across into verismo? Here the Storchio model is instructive. As well as being the first Butterfly and Zazà, Storchio sang in the premieres of Leoncavallo’s version of La bohème, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Giordano’s Siberia. But accounts suggest she carried performances as much through her acting as through her voice, which was not big. Indeed, her repertoire stretched back to Mozart, while the few recordings of her that remain include the bel canto repertoire that was also an early focus in Jaho’s own career.

‘Puccini chose her to sing Butterfly’, the soprano explains, ‘to give the character that kind of vulnerability. But you need the skill to know how far you can go, vocally speaking. She jumped from coloratura to verismo, but the moment she started singing Tosca, she couldn’t take it.’ This is not a mistake that Jaho plans to make: ‘I’ve had lots of propositions to sing Tosca, and I said no. I know how far I can go!’ But she’s also had to work against certain preconceptions about what sorts of singers should sing which roles. ‘When I started singing Butterfly, people kept repeating the stereotype: that you have to have this big voice to sing verismo, otherwise you could lose your voice.’

She admits to growing up with a similar view. ‘I had this sort of mentality that if you want to sing verismo, you have to be a dramatic soprano. And I thought I was never going to sing that sort of repertoire, to be honest.’ Madama Butterfly, though, was always an exception: ‘It was the opera that my mother loved so much when I was a child and I wanted to make her happy! And when I opened the full score I saw that Puccini wrote this opera with so many details. Every time Butterfly enters, for example, he puts in a lot of colours, pianissimos, to give this kind of fragility.’

She goes on to explain that verismo, broadly characterised, is a lot more than just the ‘screaming’ that some people seem to see it as. ‘The drama comes more from the south of Italy, with “real” stories – if I can say that. You have to give emotion, but it can be dramatic without the screaming. I give that passion, but with my voice. I tried Butterfly and some verismo repertoire which I know I can do with my voice (I know my limits), and it worked out. That’s not because I gave something vocally exceptional (other singers have the exceptional vocal chords). I found that the key in singing certain operas, certain roles, is the passion, to give emotion through my voice, through its limits.’ Jaho cites Maria Callas as an inspiration, as well as Claudia Muzio (the first Giorgetta in Puccini’s Il tabarro), but has never tried to copy anyone: ‘I didn’t want to sound like someone else, or like one of my idols. But I gave to every role I sang the colours of the soul that I was singing and believing.’

Jaho at the recording sessions for her new Opera Rara album with Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana and Andrea Battistoni (photo: Simon Weir)

It’s easy to see what Jaho means by ‘singing and believing’ when I slip into the recording session in Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía the following afternoon. It’s in the complex’s auditorium, with its 1400-plus seating capacity, replete with striking rib-like supports and located along the spine of Santiago Calatrava’s remarkable fishlike edifice. Jaho seems laidback, using the breaks to chat or discuss a detail or two in the score with a coach. My attempt to slip in quietly is undermined when she waves and beckons me to the stage to return a pen I’d left in the apartment.

That all changes when Andrea Battistoni and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana strike up with La Wally. Then comes the familiar dramatic intensity as she transforms into the character in question. The stage animal’s territory may be restricted, but her energy and engagement certainly aren’t: there’s the wide-eyed intensity, the grandly plaintive or defiant gestures. But there’s an artistic objectivity at play too: in a couple of early takes she makes it clear when something hasn’t quite gone right, checking a point with coach or conductor. The intensity is even greater as we get on to the remarkable final scene from Lodoletta (1917), a kaleidoscopic 12 minutes that runs the gamut from Puccinian warmth to operetta-like lightness to Wagnerian Weltschmerz.

This scene was a focus of our discussion the previous evening. Jaho describes discovering it as ‘an epiphany – every time I’m in tears! Yes, it’s dramatic, but it’s more than that. You see this little young girl, this little soul. She’s suffering. When you’re young, everything is beautiful, and the drama is big. And the way Mascagni describes that in this opera is really unbelievable. And I thought, “Wow! After 25 years in the business, shame on me that I didn’t know something like this exists!”’

Another particular favourite of the repertoire uncovered on the album is Massenet’s Sapho – ‘It’s like another Traviata, except that it’s in French and no one dies at the end!’ Jaho says with a laugh. And it’s clear as she rifles through the various scores on the coffee table what joy she feels at discovering these works, and at the unexpected side road that her career has now taken. But she admits it’s also a big responsibility to make as powerful a case for these works as possible. ‘I hope to bring attention to them through the recording. Music, opera, singing: it’s the language of our souls,’ she goes on. ‘Now you can use the computer and everything to produce the most beautiful and perfect sounds, but I can’t pretend that’s me. And let’s be realistic: sometimes when you’re tired, a vulnerability comes through the voice, but actually makes you more real.’

Conveying this quality – call it truth, reality or authenticity – is for Jaho especially important in today’s world, when opera doesn’t necessarily have the automatic claim to an audience’s attention in the same way it did in Storchio’s time. ‘We are so much more naked than before,’ she says. ‘There are musicals, the movies, everything. There are certain movies that can make you feel so emotional, and that’s the competition opera has right now. So you can’t just be superficial. You have to be believable. You can’t fake it on stage. You can never cheat the public.’

Read the review of ‘Anima rara’, Ermonela Jaho’s Storchio-inspired album in collaboration with Opera Rara, in Gramophone's Reviews Database

Listen to the album on Apple Music