A Few of Smorg's Favorite Sopranos (part 2 of 3)

Being rather blessed by the current abundance of wonderful operatic soprani, I'm only listing a few currently active ones that I find most fetching. Though... 'few' might be a relative term since my list is still long enough to warrant breaking into 3 separate posts (since most readers don't like to wade through articles that run longer than 3 pages). In the first installment I covered Nina Stemme, Angela Denoke, Anja Harteros, and Krassimira Stoyanova, some of today's leading spinto and dramatic sopranos. Included in this article are some of my favorites singers of more lyrical and agile-voiced soprani: Malin Hartelius, Catherine Naglestad, Anna Caterina Antonacci, and Edita Gruberova. Click on their name for a sample clip from Youtube:

5. Malin Hartelius : Sweden must really be a musical place. The little country has produced more than its fair share of wonderful opera singers. While Nina Stemme is making big headline in the Wagner and Strauss repertoire (along with some Verdi and Puccini), Malin Hartelius has been the steady lyric soprano to turn to for the Zurich Opera for the last two decades or so. She is an amazingly consistent performer with a charming lyric voice that gleams with a tint of steel up top, and easy technique that makes her at home in the floridly elegant music of the Classical Period. I first encountered her as Sophie in the Zurich Opera's DVD of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, and became an instant fan. I don't know how she does it, but the gal is quite adept at being quietly unforgettable on the stage. She may not always dominate your attention with her stage presence, but it isn't easy to ever forget that she is there either, even when in a support role.

There are many good opera DVDs with Hartelius available (look for productions from Zurich Opera), and she has recently had a successful outing with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra as the Countess in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at Severance Hall.

6. Catherine Naglestad : California born of Scandinavian parentage, Catherine Naglestad is one of the most beloved American singers on the European continent. She is a fascinating actress whose total immersion into her role can sell even the most ludicrous of staging choreography... And it does help to have such a supple voice that is capable of excelling in the florid music from the baroque period (the sample clip is of her as Handel's Alcina), and is also powerful enough to make her a formidable tragic heroines in verismo and Puccini operas.

For some weird reasons, though, I keep running into her stellar performances on some of my least favorite of opera DVDs. The Alcina DVD from Opera Stuttgart is just a hair shy of being a racy porn film, and I find most of the staging and choreography in the La clemenza di Tito from Paris Opera unfortunately off-puttingly comical. But no matter how badly I think of those recordings, I still find myself putting up with them every now and then just to catch Naglestad's part in the shows. Maybe that's one of the reasons the stage directors in Europe clamor for her... It takes an artist of her caliber to keep the opera fans coming to pay to endure some really depraved staging ideas the stage directors are indulging in these days! Website: www.catherinenaglestad.com

7. Anna Caterina Antonacci : Even in the riches of today's crop of theatrically adept singing actresses, Anna Caterina Antonacci stands out as a searing dramatic presence on the stage - a slender woman who can chill the air around you with her piercing voice and stare, and whose artistic intensity can, in turn, causes the stage to spontaneously combust while electrifying the auditorium air with enough charge to turn the normally laissez-faire opera snobs into a bunch of raving maniacs come curtain time.

Antonacci is also blessed with a splendidly colorful voice that just plain refuses to settle on a single voice range. If anything, she is probably the closest thing we have today of a soprano sfogato, a deep mezzo with wonderful top extension who can sing anything from the bosomy depth of Carmen to the height of Ermione and Rodelinda... being particularly unforgetable in dramatic roles like Medea and Cassandra (in Berlioz's Les Troyens). You can glimpse the extent of her intense artistry in her amazingly theatrically ambitious solo CD release, Era la notte, that plainly refuses to betray any modern marketing ploy to rein in casual fans. It is a mesmerizing collection of only 4 songs from the Renaissance Period.... each being 7 plus minutes long (with the final one, Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi ed Clorinda (The Battle between Tancredi and Clorinda), being 18 minutes long and voicing three different characters ). There aren't many singing actors around who can pull that sort of album off (though I'm quite sure that she does) Antonacci sings mostly in England and France nowadays, and I despair of her lack of engagement in the USA. :o( Can't someone please fix that ?

8. Edita Gruberova : Born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1946, Edita Gruberová is one of the greatest coloratura soprani of any era (let alone being quite peerless in her own generation). The voice is fuller than that of most who share her roles, and the technique almost superhumanly secure to the point that she can interpret the music that many others have all they can handle to just cope with. It took me a while before I started to appreciate her properly (her voice fach, coloratura soprano, isn't exactly my favorite to begin with). She has such command of her voice that she makes everything she sings sound so easy... so effortless that sometimes it distracts me from her expressiveness (she is a beast when it comes to subtle shading and shaping of her voice while maintaining a forward momentum, leading you along on her musical train of thought).

I first encountered her as Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda in the Nightingale CD of the opera, which I actually bought in order to hear Vesselina Kasarova's Agnese. So... I opened the CD looking to be mesmerized by one singer and ended up brava-ing two instead. That's what I'd call a happy listening experience!

Gruberova's rendition of Zerbinetta's beastly aria, Grossmachtige Prinzessin, is about the only version of the thing I can actually enjoy (just) listening to repeatedly. It's so obnoxiously long and pack filled with virtuoso tricks that it usually come off sounding like a pointless vocal exercise. With Gruberova, however, she somehow manages to integrate all the tricks so that the whole thing becomes a real interpretation.... a wistfully perky Zerbinetta who is having a heck of a time teasing at you with a wink in her eyes (and every spark being accentuated by the virtuoso ornamentations... they suddenly mean something rather than just show-off stuff).

Even though she is still keeping buzzingly busy schedule singing some of the toughest roles in operatic repertoire (Lucia di Lammermoor, Lucrezia Borgia, Zerbinetta, etc) at the youthful age of 62 (ahem, at least she doesn't really look it ), Gruberova apparently plans to retire in 2012 so those of you who haven't heard this walking legend sung live yet, you've better scramble and catch a performance by her at the earliest opportunity. L'Unica is truly in a class of her own. Website: www.gruberova.com (Unofficial fan page)