Detroit Free Press (Michigan)
October 6, 2005, Thursday
The soprano superwoman
By Mark Stryker
For an opera regarded as one of the peaks of the repertoire,
Vencenzo Bellini’s “Norma,” which opens Michigan Opera Theatre’s
season this weekend, doesn’t often make it to the stage. The reason
is simple: Norma — the Druid priestess who breaks her vow of
chastity in an affair with the Roman pro-consul, the mortal enemy of
her people — is possibly the most difficult role to cast in opera.
The vocal demands are immense, requiring a soprano who marries
Herculean strength and stamina with the usually contradictory agility
and control. Those qualities are all needed to sing Bellini’s florid
coloratura lines, unusually expansive lyric melodies and floating
high notes . Dramatically, the singer must express the mercurial
depths of a woman who is part warrior, part politician, part lover,
part mother, part feminist and part Medea.
“If you can sing this role, you are truly blessed,” says Armenian
soprano Hasmik Papian, who will alternate with American Brenda Harris
as Norma in MOT’s production.
A failure at its 1831 premiere, “Norma” rallied quickly, earning a
reputation as the greatest dramatic masterpiece of the age of bel
canto — literally “beautiful singing” — defined by the
hyper-lyrical and fluidly melodic works of Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti
and Gioacchino Rossini. In Bellini, even more than his
contemporaries, melody becomes the key means to express drama and
character.
Like Hamlet, Lear or Stanley Kowalski, Norma has always been
associated with specific stars dating back to Guiditta Pasta, who
sang the premiere. Legends like Rosa Ponselle and Rosa Raisa were
associated with the role in the 1920s and ’30s. Maria Callas reigned
supreme in the 1950s and early ’60s, and for many her intensity still
defines the role. Joan Sutherland took another path, relying on
blissful vocal splendor in her 1960s and ’70s performances.
In 1989, Sutherland sang the last Normas of her career for MOT in a
production that general director David DiChiera commissioned
expressly for her. The same production, designed by John Pascoe, is
being redeployed this time around.
After Sutherland and the slightly younger Montserrat Caballe, others
have stepped into the role, some successfully, some disastrously. But
in recent decades it seems like God stopped making Normas.
“Actually, it’s not that God hasn’t made Normas,” says DiChiera.
“It’s that God hasn’t made superstars who are Normas. In America it’s
not an opera that’s reached the broad public like those by Puccini
and Verdi. ‘Norma’s’ success from the box office perspective has
depended on superstars. People weren’t necessarily going to see
‘Norma’ in the past. They were going to see Maria Callas or Joan
Sutherland.”
For years, DiChiera has wanted to revive the opera, but every time he
traveled to Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles or elsewhere to hear a
soprano hyped as the next great Norma, he’d return home dejected.
Then he discovered Papian, who has made the role a specialty, earning
rapturous reviews in Washington, Montreal, Vienna and elsewhere —
and the endorsement of some aficionados as the Norma the opera world
has been waiting for.
Papian first sang the role for Polish National Opera in Warsaw in
1992. She was drafted as a last-minute substitute, five days before
opening night. Though she had previously studied the role, she did
not have it nearly up to performance standards when she impulsively
agreed to the offer.
“I said yes and then I realized, ‘My God, what have I done?’ ” she
recalls.
The director of the production, fortuitously, was mezzo-soprano
Fedora Barbieri, who had sung the supporting role of Adalgisa to
Callas’ Norma and was able to pass along a number of insider tips,
among them that she should sing the famous aria “Casta Diva” — a
prayer to the moon for peace between Gaul and Rome — with no
extraneous body movement. “It’s a prayer. Everything is in the
voice,” Papian says.
As difficult as Norma is, Papian says that singers cannot let the
challenge intimidate them. A steely confidence is required. The role
demands respect, but not fear.
Still, it can be daunting knowing that every time you step on stage
as Norma, the cognoscenti will be comparing your every move to
Callas, Sutherland the rest of the pantheon. All of which feeds into
mythology of the role.
Harris, who is singing just her third production of “Norma” for MOT
but has generated promising buzz, recalls a recent MOT rehearsal when
stage director Mario Corradi referred to a couple of Callas
recordings of “Norma” made a decade apart that differ greatly in
terms of detail. His point was that even the greatest artists keep
searching for new depths .
“I said, ‘Look, if you’re going to start throwing the C-word around
here, I’m going to leave the room,’ ” says Harris with a laugh.
Harris tries not to think about the inevitable Callas comparisons,
but she is aware of the lineage and responsibility.
“I think about it with regards to how awesome this music is and am I
doing it the best justice I can — whether that’s in the greatness
range or just my own greatness range,” she says. “I’m someone else
with my own strengths and approach. But if I thought about it too
much, I couldn’t do it.”

The Age , Australia
Oct 10 2005
Diamanda Galas
By John Slavin
October 10, 2005
Hamer Hall, October 7
PHILOSOPHER Theodor Adorno once wrote: “After Auschwitz, poetry is no
longer possible.” It is a contentious statement for a number of
reasons. Poetry is the paramedic of culture: without poetry, what
will cleanse language through which history, politics and media is
polluted?
The other contention is that there were other genocides before the
Holocaust. Greek-American artist Diamanda Galas confronts these
issues head-on. Hers is a poetic chronicle and angry protest of man’s
inhumanity to man pushed up hard against the glass of memory.
The horrors that her extraordinary, over-the-top performance
commemorates are the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Anatolian
catastrophe of 1923 in which an estimated half a million Greeks lost
their lives and another 1½ million were displaced. “The Defixiones”
of her title are the lead beads left on graves in the Middle East to
warn against the desecration of graves. Her hour-and-a-half sustained
chant for the dead based on poems by the Greeks Ritsos and Seferis
and eyewitnesses to the murders in Armenia and the writings of the
novelist Dido Soteriou, among others, are the chain of a rosary told
for the victims upon which she hangs her performance.
It is one of the weirdest and most intense theatre events I have
seen. Dressed in the dark robes of an Orthodox nun, Galas wails,
rails and rants her anguish. The voice range is four octaves. It
could crack glass at 20 metres, but the strain she imposes on it is
enormous.
As with the KARAS Dance Company’s Green, there is a reliance on
hypnotic repetition and the presentation of oblique, introspective
art. This disjunction between text and performance is the central
problem.
Although a minute printout of the poems is provided, the audience
seated in the dark can’t possibly understand the details of a recital
delivered in a smattering of Greek, Armenian and Turkish.
The effect is that of the Delphic Oracle at the mouth of her cave,
who warned of disasters yet to come in a psychobabble that none could
untangle.
This is the contradiction of protest art. Galas, like the Beat poets
of the ’50s and ’60s, with whom she has much in common, takes the
anger and internalises it so that the body and the voice become an
instrument of emotional reaction. The moral anguish is undoubtedly
genuine, but the difficulty is one of communicating a position that
can be shared and acted upon. Portraying the horrors of World War I
proved less effective at the time than the ironic cartoons of Grosz
or Dada artists mocking all assumptions about rationality in
civilisation.
Diving into Galas’ performance is like entering someone else’s
nightmare. It is intense, incomprehensible and finally tedious. It
did, however, arouse an enthusiastic response from an audience of
ululating Goths who might have identified with Galas’ romantic
despair.
Diamanda Galas performs today at 8pm at Hamer Hall
photo: Over the top: Diamanda Galas, on Friday night, dressed in the
robes of an Orthodox nun, during her hour-and-a-half sustained chant
for the dead. Diving into Galas’ performance is like entering someone
else’s nightmare.
Photo: Wayne Taylor

ARKA News Agency
Oct 7 2005
MOSCOW, YEREVAN MAYORS DISCUSS COOPERATION PROGRAM
YEREVAN, October 7. /ARKA/. Moscow and Yerevan Mayors, Yuri Luzhkov
and YUewrvand Zakharyan have discussed the implementation of the
cooperation program between the two capitals, as well as the
decisions of the 1st meeting of the working commission for
cooperation between the Moscow and Armenian Governments. The Yerevan
Mayor reported that the Moscow Mayor is visiting Armenia as part of
the Year of Russia in Armenia, Days of Moscow in Yerevan and Days of
Yerevan. Zakharyan said that the implementation of the cooperation
programs between the Moscow and Yerevan executive powers for
2005-2007 has been sped up, which is evidence of intensified
relations between the Russian and Armenian capitals. “The holding of
Days of Moscow in Yerevan testifies that it is a common festival of
multipronged Russian-Armenian cooperation, which is a striking
example of warm relations between the two fraternal nations,”
Zakharyan said.
The Moscow Mayor is to hold meetings with RA President Robert
Kocharyan, Prime Minister Anranik Margaryan and discuss the
development of relations between Moscow and Yerevan. P.T. -0–

ARKA News Agency
Oct 7 2005
YSMU HONORARY DOCTOR CONFERRED ON INDIAN VICE-PRESIDENT
YEREVAN, October 7. /ARKA/. The title of Honorary Doctor of Yerevan
State Medical University (YSMU) has been conferred on Vice-President
of India Bhairon Singkh Shekhavat. A YSMU “Gold Medal” was awarded to
him as well. The Indian Vice-President congratulated YSMU Rector
Vilen Hakobyan and the students on the 75th anniversary of the
University. He expressed his appreciation of the YSMU’s achievements.
“Indian citizens have a good opportunity to gain necessary knowledge
here and they must not miss it,” said Bhairon Singkh Shekhavat. He
also expressed readiness to render all possible assistance to the
cooperation between Armenian and Indian educational institutions.
Over 700 Indian students study at YSMU now. P.T. –0–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARKA News Agency
Oct 7 2005
ARMENIA’S DEFENSE CONCEPT TO BE APPROVED IN 2007
YEREVAN, October 7. /ARKA/. Armenia’s defense concept is to be
approved in 2007, RA Minister of Defense Serge Sargsyan stated at the
Rose-Roth seminar, NATO Parliamentary Assembly. According to him, the
concept will be in harmony with the strategy of national security and
will be made public. “It will also be submitted to the RA National
Assembly, which will ensure the basis for short- and long-term
defense-military planning,” the Minister said. Sargsyan said that the
defense concept illustrates the role and mission of the armed troops
and will serve as a fundamental document for efforts towards reforms.
“It will ensure a single strategic direction for armed forces and
other government officials responsible for national defense,”
Sargsyan said. He added that the dissemination of defense doctrine
will give an impetus to public discussions of defense problems and
ensure assistance in satisfying military needs stipulated by the
document. “The defense strategy will also have a paramount importance
for reforms and modernization or the RA armed forces,” Sargsyan said.
P.T. -0–

ARKA News Agency
Oct 7 2005
CBA CHIARMAN: 95% OF MONETARY TRANSFERS TO ARMENIA ACCOUNT FOR
TRANSFERS IN USD
YEREVAN, October 7. /ARKA/. 95% of monetary transfers to Armenia
account for transfers in USD, as the CBA Chiarman Tigran Sargsyan
stated in the framework of the Second open international interbank
conference “Monetary Transfers”. According to him, the problem is
that citizens have no possibility to choose the currency of payment,
but they might like to transfer rubbles from the RF and receive AMD
in the RA. According to Sargsyan, AMD appreciation to USD has been
recorded in the RA recently. It caused discontent of people who
receive transfers in USD, since the buying capacity of USD reduced by
17%.
According to Sargsyan, the problem of monetary transfers is actual in
Armenia. “The actuality of the issue has been observed all over the
world. The issue is discussed at all international conferences. The
phenomenon is preconditioned by the inflow of migrants from many
countries and by the fact that migrants make monetary transfers to
their relatives”, he said. According to him, the second factor
contributing to the growth of monetary transfers is the active
monetary policy program of the USA and growth of dollar liquidity.
A.H. -0–

Reuters, UK
Oct 9 2005
Turkey’s Gul: writer will win genocide claim case
Sun Oct 9, 2005 7:58 PM IST

PARIS (Reuters) – Turkey’s foreign minister said on Sunday he was
confident a court would dismiss charges against a best-selling
Turkish writer who faces prison for his views on the massacres of
Armenians 90 years ago.
Orhan Pamuk has been charged with insulting Turkish identity for
supporting Armenian claims they suffered a genocide under Ottoman
Turks in 1915. He faces 3 years in jail if convicted.
Pamuk further upset the establishment and nationalists by saying
Turkish forces shared responsibility for the death of more than
30,000 Kurds in southeast Turkey during separatist fighting there in
the 1980s and 1990s.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul sought to play down the controversy,
telling Canal television he expected the case to be dismissed as a
court had already thrown out similar charges against a different
person.
“The same trial has been held before, over the same phrases, the same
words,” Gul said through an interpreter.
“The judge ruled that everyone has the right to express their
opinion. The same decision will be handed down (in Pamuk’s case), I
have no doubt about this.”
Pamuk’s prosecution has highlighted concerns over whether Turkey’s
human rights record is compatible with EU membership. Some 60 percent
of French voters say they don’t want mainly Muslim Turkey joining the
EU.
In a show of support, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn met Pamuk
at the writer’s Istanbul home on Saturday and urged Ankara to respect
freedom of expression.
Pamuk, best known for historical novels such as “My Name is Red” and
“The White Castle”, goes on trial on Dec. 16.
Gul said that despite the case, human rights had come on in leaps and
bounds in the past three years.
“We have a limited democracy in Turkey … but thanks to the reforms
of the past few years, its scope has widened enormously.”
Turkey had offered to open its archives to international historians
so as to resolve the Armenian massacre issue, which has complicated
Ankara’s bid to join the European Union.
The European Parliament last month passed a non-binding resolution
saying Ankara must recognise the Armenian massacres as a genocide
before joining the EU, and gave only grudging support to the start of
entry talks with Turkey on Oct. 3.

The Age, Australia
Oct 10 2005
Year of great boxing promise now rings hollow
By Stathi Paxinos
October 10, 2005

AUSTRALIAN flyweight Hussein Hussein’s fate against Jorge Arce for
the World Boxing Council interim world title yesterday reflected the
way of Australian boxing this year.
There had been great anticipation surrounding the fight because their
first encounter in March was regarded as one of the fights of the
year. But, by near the end of the second round and after two
knock-downs, Hussein’s corner man, Jeff Fenech, had seen enough and
threw in the towel.
It was another blow to the promise that Australian boxing had shown
at the start of the year when the fight fraternity proclaimed that
half a dozen Australian fighters could hold world titles this year.
Such predictions now appear a touch optimistic as 2005 has, instead,
produced a succession of shattered dreams with Danny Green, Anthony
Mundine, Paul Briggs and Tommy Browne all losing shots at major world
titles.
Junior-lightweight Robbie Peden won the International Boxing
Federation belt in spectacular fashion only to lose it last month
against one of the best pound-for-pound boxers in the world – Marco
Antonio Barrera.
The unthinkable also occurred when junior-welterweight
king Kostya Tszyu quit on his stool after being hammered for 11
rounds by English challenger Ricky Hatton. That leaves Australia with
one champion of a recognised belt – Armenian-born Vic Darchinyan, who
has twice defended the IBF flyweight title he won last December.
Australian light-heavyweight Paul Murdoch will be fighting for the
World Boxing Association title in December but is the outsider
against multiple world champion Fabrice Tiozzo.
So, a year that started with such promise for local boxing is heading
towards a sobering finale, although the prospect of the long-awaited
match-up between Green and Mundine early next year has provided a
much-needed attraction.
And it is also fitting that Sam Soliman will take a step towards
finally earning that elusive middleweight world title shot.
The Soliman camp confirmed at the weekend that the 31-year-old IBF
No. 1 contender had signed a deal to take on his WBC and WBA
equivalent Ronald “Winky” Wright with the winner earning the
mandatory challenger position against the victor of the rematch
between world champion Jermain Taylor and Bernard Hopkins.
Soliman is regarded as an awkward fighter who has posed too big a
risk for comparatively small financial rewards to big-name fighters.
Soliman earned a mandatory challenge for Hopkins’ IBF belt earlier
this year but Hopkins, who ruled the middleweight division for a
decade, was granted an exception by the sanctioning body and was
allowed to accept a big-dollar challenge from Sydney Olympian Taylor.
Hopkins subsequently lost his WBA, WBC, IBF and World Boxing
Organisation belts to Taylor and the pair are set for a rematch in
early December.
Soliman’s fight against Wright, a former junior-middleweight world
champion, will be held on December 11 in Connecticut in the US –
which will make it a huge weekend for Australian boxing.
It has also been set down for the joint Green and Mundine card in
Perth, which will act as a warm-up for the pair’s fight next year.
Victories by all three Australians would set up another exciting year
for local boxing.

Rabble, Canada
Oct 9 2005
X-Sender: Asbed Bedrossian
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 — ListProcessor(tm) by CREN
Bridging the Christian-Muslim divide
While no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks joining what happens
to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52 per cent in favour
and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of Austrians favour
Turkish membership.

>by Heather Mallick
October 9, 2005
It may have taken 40 years, but it finally happened this week: The
European Union opened membership talks with Turkey.
I have watched the especially intense year-long run-up to this moment
with fascination and disgust. It was like being a spectator at a
cockfight, with ugly squawks, blood-soaked feathers and the stabbing
of beaks into the meat beneath the skin, the two cocks all the while
denying that this was, in fact, a cockfight, oh no, and the EU
spectators secretly hoping Turkey would expire in the straw of a
heart attack. It wouldn’t look good if an Islamic nation were pecked
to death.
Supposedly, the fight was over Turkey being too big, or too poor, or
too full of possible migrants. It wasn’t about Muslims joining what
former EC head Jacques Delors once called a `Christian club.’
Neither was it about whether Turkey was a European-type nation or
more of an Asian-ish, wrong-side-of-the-Mediterranean kind of
country. Not that they’re not lovely people, of course. Fine
peasants, we’re sure, but we won’t have them in our home. You do
understand.
That’s how racism works. One German-American writer in The Guardian,
disregarding the fact that the European nations fight their best wars
with each other, said white people should be allowed to mourn the
eventual loss of their culture to immigrant hordes. What is white
culture? Egg-salad sandwiches? Fridge magnets? She did not say.
The key is that while no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks
joining what happens to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52
per cent in favour and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of
Austrians favour Turkish membership. The pollsters were surprised.
Austrians were the only respondents who saw `almost no positive side’
to letting the Turks in, the BBC reported, not even envisioning
`improved understanding between Europe and the Muslim world.’
Every EU nation agreed to negotiate with Turkey except Austria, which
said talks should take place only about a `privileged partnership,’
not actual membership.
Austria got dirty looks. The conference hall fell silent, I assume. A
polite cough was heard from Germany. It’s unlikely there were Jews in
the room, Europe having a distinct shortage of Jews on its mainland,
but they were on European minds. Far-right Austrian politician Joerg
Haider, whose election had once brought EU sanctions against his
nation, had campaigned hard against the Turkish membership effort.
So Austria caved, doubtless reassuring itself that the negotiations
will take a decade, Turkey has to swallow 80,000 pages of EU law and
even then, it will take only one vote to blackball the country.
The EU wants Turkey badly for economic reasons. With a population of
72 million, it has plenty of young, educated people. Europe is
getting panicky about its low birth rate, caused by the refusal of
working women to have large families and resultant miserable lives.
At some point, Europe will need that younger work force.
In addition, Turkey, while mostly Sunni Muslim, is a secular
republic. Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, see the
EU as a guard for their human rights, which it would be. Turkey,
notorious for arrests without trial and severe torture of prisoners,
claims to be trying to improve its human-rights record and treatment
of women. The charges recently filed against Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk for deploring Turkey’s killing of 30,000 Kurds since 1984 and
the 1915 Armenian genocide were inspired by reactionaries aiming to
stop the talks. They failed.
After watching the cockfight for a year without taking sides, I am
convinced that Turkey’s entrance into the EU, whose human-rights laws
are a model for the world, is our last best hope for a peaceful
understanding between the so-called Christian and Muslim solitudes.
Those in doubt might wish to read Indian novelist Vikram Seth’s new
book, Two Lives, a stunning biography of his great-uncle Shanti (from
India) and great-aunt Henny (a Jew who escaped Second World War
Germany at the last minute). It brings home the horror of the slow
humiliation and demonization of the German Jews, who considered
themselves utterly German. It shows how insiders are made into
outsiders, how Henny’s sister, Miss Lola Caro, an elegant German
(Jewish) girl, went from eating Stollen with her German (Christian)
friends in 1931 to Birkenau in 1943, stripped, thrown into a room
with perforated pillars filled with Zyklon-B, gassed, grapple-hooked
and burned to ash. That’s 12 years of humiliation.
Imagine what the Palestinians feel. Imagine how a Turk, wanting to
modernize Turkey, feels at being rejected for his race and religion
for 40 years. Hitler would be giggling now. Think how much time
Muslims have had to be humiliated by the Western world. Perhaps
globalization speeded up the process.
When we seek an explanation for the existence of young, educated,
middle-class suicide bombers, humiliation fits the bill. An
Associated Press interview with a suicide bomber – he changed his
mind when he saw a mother and two children in a café – suggests that
bombers are driven `not by poverty or ignorance, but by a lethal mix
of nationalism, zealotry and humiliation.’
Turkey had already declared that it would give up on Europe if it
were rebuffed this time. The fact is, it would have been utterly
humiliated. In Western eyes at least, the squalid objections of
Austria, a country that unlike Germany has never truly faced its Nazi
past, would have been plain evidence of racism. Austria wanted a wall
around Europe, but the world doesn’t work that way, we hope.
Former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing was angry at the
welcome extended to Turkey. The EU was risking replacing a `grand
French project of political union’ with `a large free-trade zone,’ he
said.
In fact, it is the opposite. It is a hand extended in hope.
Heather Mallick’s column is in The Globe and Mail each
Saturday. It appears on Sunday in rabble.ca.

The Hellenic Radio, Greece
Oct 8 2005
Olli Rehn’s Visit to Turkey “Proceed Quickly with Reforms”
08 Oct 2005 15:41:00
By Annita Paschalinou
The EU Enlargement Commissioner urged the Turkish National Assembly
to immediately proceed with signing the EU-Turkey protocol, while he
called on Ankara to implement the reforms at a faster pace, so that
the accession talks can commence on time. After meeting with the
Turkish PM, Olli Rehn noted that the speed of negotiations would
depend on the rate of reforms implemented by Turkey. He also
predicted that Turkeys accession to the EU would be tough and the
negotiations could last 10 years. Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke of a
tough process, while he voiced his optimism that the negotiations
will prove successful in the end.
Meeting with Novelist Orhan Pamuk
In the context of his contacts in Turkey, Olli Rehn met with Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk, a great defender of the rights of Kurds and
Armenians.
Turkeys most famous author faces up to three years in jail on the
charge of “insulting Turkish identity” for allegedly backing charges
that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Empire
forces 90 years ago.
The incident has prompted intense reactions from the EU.
Pamuk will be called to appear before an Istanbul court in December.
Translated by Vicky Ghionis