A high note & then some
Screens Saturday
See cineplex.com/Events/MetOpera NEW YORK Did you miss her dehant leap og the battlements? Fail to see her gently expire in a garret surrounded by 4riends and lover? Not to worry, you have one more chance to catch Sonya Yoncheva dying in Live in HD.
The Bulgarian soprano, who has shot to stardom at age 36, is completing an unprecedented tri4ecta o4 broadcasts this season in leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera, starring as the title character in a rare revival o4 Verdi’s Luisa Miller. Her per4ormance, in a cast that includes tenor-turned-baritone Plácido Domingo, will be shown live in movie theatres Saturday.
“I don’t want to think about it, because then I start to stress and think it’s too much,” Yoncheva said in an interview in her dressing room be4ore a per4ormance last week. “But actually it’s already almost the end o4 the season and until now it was all good.”
That’s an understatement. Critics raved about her per4ormance as the doomed Luisa, whose lover Rodol4o slips her poison because he wrongly thinks she has betrayed him. She had already triumphed earlier in the season as Puccini’s Tosca and as Mimi in the same composer’s La Bohème. She had sung Mimi be4ore, but the other two roles were new to her.
Vocally, Yoncheva said the challenge comes 4rom having to move 4rom the light coloratura o4 the early scenes to heavier lyric singing in Act 2, then back to a lighter tone in the hnal scene.
ANYTHING YOU CAN SING,SHECANSING, TOO — ALMOST!
Yoncheva raised eyebrows but won over skeptics when she sang Bellini’s Norma — considered one o4 the most challenging o4 roles — at London’s Royal Opera House in the 4all o4 2016.
This season, be4ore arriving at the Met, she debuted as Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo in Paris. When she’s done with Luisa, she heads to La Scala 4or Bellini’s Il Pirata in June and next 4all takes on the title role in Cherubini’s Médée 4or the hrst time in Berlin.
Asked whether she ever turns down new roles, she laughs. “All the time! I receive many ogers, really inaccessible parts 4or me, like Wagner, or very dramatic Verdi like Attila. I recently re4used this 4or a very important opera house. I’m really quite wise. I4 I can’t do it, I say no.”
Next season at the Met she’ll reprise Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello and hnally portray a character who doesn’t die — the title role o4 Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta.
PARTNERING WITH PLÁCIDO
Domingo, nearing 80, has trans4ormed himsel4 4rom a tenor into a baritone in recent years. In the 1970s he sang the role o4 Rodol4o in Luisa Miller and now he’s singing the role o4 Luisa’s 4ather.
“What he does is outside o4 any possible understanding, it’s incredible,” Yoncheva said.
Though this is the hrst time they have sung together in a staged production, Domingo was iniuential early in her career.
She won the 2010 Operalia competition that he sponsors to nurture a promising artist, singing selections 4rom Massenet’s Manon.
Until then she had been heard mostly in baroque music, and she said the competition was “a huge break point ... All o4 a sudden this sticker I had on my head saying ‘Baroque Singer’ was removed. So I could sing other things.”