Hot properties.

THE opera world has a scorching-hot star on its hands: Anna Netrebko, the 35-year-old soprano from Russia. Her face is plastered on every street corner of every opera capital. She is adored and panted after. Two summers ago, she created a sensation in Verdi's Traviata at the Salzburg Festival. The next summer, they auctioned off the red couch on which she had reclined. That, my friends, is stardom.

In her years before the footlights, Netrebko has sung a variety of roles, many in Mozart, and in the bel canto repertoire. At the moment, she is Elvira in Bellini's Puritani at the Metropolitan Opera. The voice is not a classic Mozart or bel canto voice: It is a little dark, a little steely, a little unbending. But it is a fine and exciting voice, and Netrebko knows what to do with it. Hers is not a perfect technique, and she has a number of problems to solve--for instance, a tendency to sharp. But no one denies that she makes the most of what she has.

What she has, in abundance, is charisma, or magnetism. She is a real stage animal, a real singing actress. Comparisons have been made to Callas, and Netrebko chafes at this. But those comparisons are not unjust. The Russian should simply accept them, blushingly, and smile.

She is not a recital artist, or at least not yet. (Then again, Callas never was.) She was scheduled to sing a recital in Carnegie Hall last season, but canceled it, saying she did not feel "artistically ready." She had sung very few recitals, and wanted to be at her "very best" for Carnegie and "the New York public." This shows self-knowledge and wisdom, no doubt--and yet, Netrebko is no kid, and should happily face the recital music, pretty soon.

Where she is well-nigh unquestionable is in her native repertoire--the Russian repertoire. Many of us Americans first noticed her in 2002, when she made her Met debut in Prokofiev's War and Peace. It was a stunning debut. Too much can be made of nationality in music, and good musicians can perform anything. And yet, nationality is not nothing, particularly in singing: Netrebko's timbre tends to suit Russian music, and her use of the language is enchanting. Of course, timbre and language are not unrelated.

Her latest CD is called Russian Album, and it comes from Deutsche Grammophon. Netrebko sings an assortment of arias, scenes, and songs, in the company of the conductor Valery Gergiev and his St. Petersburg band: the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater. Gergiev has been something of an evangelist for Russian opera, introducing the West to works it never knew.

And since the collapse of Soviet Communism, Russian singers have become ever more prominent in opera. So has the Russian repertoire.

Netrebko begins her CD with a long-famous and -beloved piece: the Arioso from Tchaikovsky's Iolanta (not to be confused with the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Iolanthe). She continues with two songs by Rachmaninoff, whose piano accompaniments are arranged for orchestra. The songs seem a little too big, a little too grand, but Netrebko makes them work. She exhibits her special and unusual combination of coolness and vulnerability.

The disc goes on with Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, and Prokofiev--and more Tchaikovsky and more Rachmaninoff. Netrebko includes a "tableau" from Rachmaninoff's one-act opera Francesca da Rimini (not to be confused with Zandonai's four-act opera, or Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasy, of the same name). This tableau is ravishing and magnificent, and so is Netrebko. She is not all lushness, however, contributing some vocal bite--which, again, may put you in mind of Callas.

Opera does not exactly need sizzling stars, but, when they come along, who can object? Netrebko has entered that small class of singers who are known by first name alone: She is "Anna," on top of the heap, like "Renee," "Bryn," and "Placido" (Fleming, Terfel, and Domingo). And it does Anna no harm that she is a beauty, indeed, an international sex symbol. This is a bonus--but only a bonus, as opera is primarily a musical experience, and only secondarily a theatrical or visual one.

Which brings us to the latest hot topic at the Met. Reliable rumor has it that the new administration there is cracking down on the overweight, and not just the obese--the pleasantly plump, too. The word is, "Get slim, or find another house." Many singers are running scared, and some of them are running to the hospital, for weight-loss surgery.

If the hefty had been ruled out in the past, think what we would have missed! We would never have seen Birgit Nilsson as Salome. Some joked that she was "Beer Gut Nilsson"--but she was the most celebrated Salome of her time (the Dance of the Seven Veils aside). We would never have seen Joan Sutherland, the healthy gal from Down Under, as the delicate, fragile Lucia. We would never have seen Montserrat Caballe ... as anything. And would we even know the name of Luciano Pavarotti?

In any case, Anna Netrebko has no worries, on any front.

* The big news in the piano world is Lang Lang, the 24-year-old phenom from China. Wherever he goes, he causes a stir, exuding a rock-star presence. As a pianist, he is frightfully uneven: He can play absurdly--willfully, sloppily, superficially. Liberace would grimace in disgust. He can also play superbly--musically, sensitively, inarguably. He can be absurd and superb in the course of the same evening, or hour. You never know, with this exasperating kid.

His latest album is Dragon Songs, and it brings us Chinese music. (As with the Netrebko CD, the label is Deutsche Grammophon.) Lang Lang is following a long tradition, and I am not referring to a Chinese one: Musicians have always offered music from their native lands, spreading it far and wide. They especially do this when serving up encores. Last November, Lang Lang played Beethoven's C-major concerto in Carnegie Hall (dreadfully). The audience went wild, of course, and he favored them with a Chinese piece (exquisite).

The young man begins his new CD with the "Yellow River" Concerto, which has an interesting origin. It is based on a choral work, The Great Song of the Yellow River, written by Xian Xinghai in 1939. Three decades later, Jiang Qing--a.k.a. Madame Mao--ordered an arrangement of this piece for piano and orchestra. As Deutsche Grammophon's liner notes say,

   the composer himself [Xian Xinghai] did
   not live to see the victory of the Party and
   was unable, therefore, to depict it in his
   work, and so the team of composers,
   pianists and arrangers that worked on
   the new piece introduced into it the
   Internationale and the Maoist hymn
   Dongfanghong ("The East Is Red").

Know any other concertos written by committee? Anyway, it is a ghastly thing, worse, even, than the "Warsaw" Concerto, Richard Addinsell's 1940s take on blowsy Romanticism. The "Yellow River" Concerto sounds like bad, Chinese Liszt. But we are informed that it is meaningful to Lang Lang and millions of his countrymen, and they are not to be denied it.

The rest of the pieces on this CD are far more palatable, and Lang Lang plays them winningly. There is much smooth, limpid, natural pianism here. When Lang Lang is thinking straight, he is virtually unbeatable.

And consider a broader point: Chinese music will occupy an ever wider space in music at large. For about 20 years, Western conservatories have been packed with Chinese students, along with others from East Asia. (Lang Lang attended the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.) In December, Tan Dun's opera The First Emperor premiered at the Met. The composer is a Chinese American who likes to blend the Eastern and the Western. So do many of his colleagues, including Bright Sheng and Chen Yi. Thus does music expand, change, and, one hopes, grow.

* Finally, a third CD--this one from the Decca label--and a third young star: Janine Jansen, the 28-year-old Dutch violinist. She plays two warhorses, the Mendelssohn Concerto in E minor, and the Bruch Concerto in G minor. She makes them gallop with freshness and delight. It says something about a musician when he can make the very familiar, even the hackneyed, seem new, or at least inspired. This is what Jansen does, especially in the Mendelssohn.

She plays this concerto with maturity and flair. While she is imaginative, she is never self-indulgent, always respecting the composer's intentions. The slow movement is utterly melting--but not soupy. And the concluding movement is spry and sly--without being cutesy. In all, Jansen demonstrates extraordinary taste. And she has an able partner in Riccardo Chailly, leading the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. (This is the group once led by Mendelssohn himself, as they are quick to tell you.)

The real prize on this disc may be the shortest piece--a filler--and it is not even for violin: It is Bruch's Romance in F for Viola and Orchestra, Op. 85. Like Pinchas Zukerman and, from her own generation, Julian Rachlin, Jansen is a switcher--a player who can handle either the violin or the viola. And in this Romance, she is noble, restrained, and moving. Despite its title, the piece has the character of a hymn, or, better, a prayer.

Above, we spoke about looks and the opera. And we will now have to speak about looks and strings. The young Dutchwoman could easily be a movie star--and her label clearly knows it. Decca devotes over half the pages in its CD booklet to photos of Jansen: 8 of 14. You can hardly blame business people for doing the necessary. Look what they have done with another violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter--they have been selling her bare shoulders for years. Evidently, Jansen's remain covered, suggesting that, when it comes to violinistic shoulders, there is room for only two.