I used to be a Leonardo DiCaprio stuntman, now I’m a world well-known opera star | Theatre | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Yup, that tall bloke with the thrill minimize and striped shirt standing behind Stephen Graham in Leonardo DiCaprio’s posse from Gangs of New York is Italian tenor celebrity Riccardo Massi. He’s additionally fairly useful with a double sword, spear and dagger. Just who you’d need in your facet in a bar battle (actual or Hollywood).

No surprise that when he turned up in Milan in 2007 to audition for La Scala’s Young Artist opera programme with a shaved head, swollen eye and coated in cuts and bruises, it didn’t, initially, go properly.

“They wouldn’t let me in,” Riccardo laughs. Not fairly the hooligan he appeared, he’d been funding his music research for years as a nightclub bouncer and as a stuntman at Rome’s legendary Cinecittà studios, the place he’d additionally been in a position to observe Hollywood legends at work.

Although, he tells me that the one who impressed him essentially the most was not Leonardo DiCaprio…

We’re assembly to advertise his starring function in Il Trovatore on the Royal Opera House. It’s a really good distance from his stuntman days and his upbringing removed from the inventive worlds of Rome and London.

“I do not come from a family of artists,” he says. “My father was an entrepreneur who loved opera but can not sing. My mother owns a shoe shop and never sang, but she has perfect pitch. So, I am a strange mix of them.”

Growing up in tiny Sarnano, a distant central Italian city of some thousand, with not a lot to do, he studied karate on the native fitness center. After highschool, he moved to Rome and skilled in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai. “I joined a dojo that was teaching medieval fighting with the sword and shield, spear, knife, double sword,” he says. “It was very well-connected with the stuntman community.”

For nearly a decade, he labored on native and worldwide initiatives, studying from all the celebs: “We were not allowed to speak to the actors,” he says, “but I was doing what Italians call ‘steal with your eyes.’ Especially Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. That guy is amazing, always in character, even off camera.”

Few might think about that his greatest dream was to sing: “It was there in me,” he says. “I said, ‘okay, let’s try,’ and I found a teacher.”

And then sooner or later, after filming a brutal, bruising battle scene for the HBO collection Rome, he remembers that the telephone rang: “I’m wasted, I just want to go home and take a shower,” he laughs, “and La Scala wants to see me in two days! I tried covering it all very badly with make-up, but it didn’t work!”

Riccardo finally satisfied the doubtful doorman to let him cross and aced the audition, making his main debut simply two years later in 2009 as Radamès in Aida on the Teatro Verdi of Salerno. The Egyptian common torn between combating the Ethiopian armies and loving their princess was tailored for him.

“It definitely goes with my personality,” he grins. “If you ask me if I like more to sing Radamès or Rodolfo in La Bohème, they’re both beautiful, the music is made in heaven, but I feel much more like the young guy that that leads an army and makes unbelievable sacrifices than the young poet with no more struggles than love, which is beautiful, but when it’s just only that, I feel that something is missing, at least for me.”

He still uses his old skills in fight scenes but some of the muscles had to go. Looser, supple bodies suit the mechanics of opera, he explains: “You don’t have to be a couch potato, but you cannot be a gym rat. You also need endurance to sing kneeling or lying on the ground or on steps.

“Sometimes people forget this, but I am my instrument. If I sleep or eat badly, it affects my voice. The discipline is the same as martial arts. Eat well, do not yell, drink or smoke. I swim to stay fit with lots of stretching.”

He also busts a major myth that larger bodies create a richer, fuller voice: “The sound an opera singer produces goes out of your body through the vibrations of your bones and your skull. 30 or 40 extra kilos doesn’t affect the way you sing. But it can affect your health!”

Not all voices or operas are the same, though. I tell him I love the pretty Italian and French pieces, but give me something German and I’m in trouble. Anything Russian, I’m out the door.

“Yeah, me too” he laughs. “I’m a dramatic tenor. That covers Bel Canto, the interval of Donizetti, Verdi till we arrive to Puccini.”

Does that mean he is a drama queen? “Some of them are,” he raises his eyebrows, “but not me! It means that you have a voice that is capable of that repertoire. Not just the volume, but also the colour and the timbre. Your voice chooses your repertoire, not you. I am very happy because I love the romance and structure of the music. Wagner requires a type of singing that’s a little bit more violent. If you don’t know your limits as a singer, you can hurt your vocal cords.”

You also have to come out and tackle numbers like Nessun Dorma under the shadow of the all-time greats like Pavarotti or Franco Corelli.

“Everybody’s ready for you,” he laughs, “and it is like (he places on a squeaky voice), ‘I’ll do my finest. I’m sorry.’ Nobody can beat them, however they’re gone.”

Opera audiences, of course, are notorious for heckling and booing. “They do!” he grins. “It occurred to me. It’s a part of the sport. It’s not essentially, ‘you suck.’ It’s, ‘we needed one other singer’ or they do not just like the manufacturing. They get very indignant. You can provide your soul, the whole lot you might have, however you’ll by no means ever be capable of please everyone.”

Often lazily labelled as elitist and old-fashioned, opera struggles with modernising its appeal while pleasing those dedicated traditional supporters.

“Opera is everlasting,” he says. “Thank God. Why? Like Shakespeare, it speaks to human feelings, which have been the identical for millennia. Aida is mainly about two youngsters loving one another and one other woman making an attempt to get between them. In Il Trovatore, it is two males vying for a similar lady. And when the alchemy is magical, pure emotion fills you and it’s so, so stunning. But it might want to evolve, adapt to the brand new instances.

“Damn, this is a very delicate subject,” Riccardo pauses, conscious of the looming minefield…

“Traditional staging will always work because the composer thought about it in that way,” he says. “And I actually know many young people are coming and they love traditional stagings. With modern productions, you risk doing something that people will not believe. If you set Aida in a gypsy camp or a degraded suburb, you gotta have a very, very good idea to make me forget that we’re not in Egypt with pyramids and deserts. If you do not involve me in your vision, I will get bored.

“If you betray the unique spirit of the piece, the whole lot will fall down And that is horrible since you failed. The main goal is to convey me into one other world for 3 hours. Unfortunately, for those who ask me, one out of 30 fashionable productions work. It’s painful for an opera singer if you have a look at the primary rows and individuals are their watches.”

It’s a joy to talk to an artist who sees beyond his art to the other side of the equation, to the audience. But I’m still blown away when I ask what he enjoys away from his work, cheekily imagining afternoons reclining on a chaise in a silk kimono, and he proudly declares he’s a fellow “sci-fi and fantasy nerd.”

We share our pain about people, even friends, not understanding that, like opera, it’s a way of looking at human interactions, what is happening in the world today, through a lens. We geek out about the upcoming third season of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation on Apple TV and get way too sidetracked debating Disney’s patchy run of Star Wars shows.

“I grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars, it gave me life,” he beams, “Andor was a masterpiece however I did not very like Kenobi with Ewan McGregor. It was a wasted likelihood.”

And then he finishes me off by flashing his engagement ring (to fellow singer Elisa) and I see a gleaming band wrapped with Elvish script from Lord of the Rings.

May opera, ahem, “stay lengthy and prosper” with folks like Riccardo at its beating coronary heart.

Riccardo Massi Stars in Il Trovatore on the Royal Opera House From July 8 (RBO.org.uk)