Like any other opera singer, James Valenti has his heroes: “Franco Corelli, Luciano Pavarotti, Freddie Mercury . . . ”
Whoa! Freddie Mercury, as in Queen?
“Have you ever tried to sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?” asks Valenti, who’s done just that in karaoke. “What a workout!”
Valenti’s just had quite a workout of his own. The 32-year-old’s debut at the Met last month in “La Traviata” was remarkable for several reasons:
Not only did his ardent Alfredo wow the critics — The Post’s James Jorden hailed both his “sweet, even lyric tenor” and “smoldering good looks” — but Valenti bowed the same night Leonard Slatkin buckled, conducting so clumsily that he threw off superstar leads Angela Gheorghiu and Thomas Hampson. (Slatkin stepped down a few
days later.)
“It was obvious to me from the very first day of rehearsal that he wasn’t familiar with the piece,” Valenti says. “He’s an intelligent musician, but there were train wrecks all over the place.”
Meanwhile, the singer said, he had his own problem — he’d gotten food poisoning the night before.
“I was up half the night throwing up,” he recalled the other day, sounding almost cheerful over his fruit parfait.
“I woke up and thought, ‘I worked too hard to get to this day, I’m not going to let anything ruin it!’ So I drank some Gatorade, ate a little bit of pasta and walked onstage not thinking about anything else but
the singing.”
That focus has served him well. Six-foot-5 and movie-star handsome — he models on the side — Valenti is truly a tenor for our time. He sings, he acts, he tweets. He also has a Facebook fan page and a Web site (jamesvalenti.com).
Pretty impressive for a guy who says he was “a dork” growing up in Clinton, NJ, wanting to be Billy Joel.
That changed, Valenti says, when he was 16 and saw the Three Tenors on TV. Bowled over, particularly by Pavarotti, he studied voice at the University of West Virginia, took a residency with the Minnesota Opera and studied with superstar voice coach Bill Schuman.
At 24, he won the Met’s National Council Auditions. That led to bigger roles on bigger stages, culminating in what Valenti calls his “holy s – – t moment”: performing alongside Gheorghiu and Hampson, singers he’s idolized since college.
“They’ve both been so gracious and encouraging,” he says. “Everyone has been.”
After “La Traviata” ends its run on April 24, Valenti’s off for some rest at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., where he can see Donald Trump’s place from his condo.
Then it’s on to operas in Vancouver and London. Somewhere along the way, he’ll visit his girlfriend, a singing teacher in upstate New York.
“I think you’re going to be seeing him for the next 25 years,” predicts Augusto “Gus” Paglialunga, Valenti’s college singing teacher. “He’s a wonderful guy and a wonderful tenor!”
And if that doesn’t pan out — well, there’s always modeling.