thu 28/03/2024

BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, St David's Hall | reviews, news & interviews

BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, St David's Hall

BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, St David's Hall

Voice competition won by Moldovan and Ukrainian also reveals best of British

The Cardiff Singer of the World may or may not be (as several of this year’s competitors seemed to think) the most important voice competition in the universe, but it must surely be the nicest. The Welsh really do believe, perhaps rightly, that they invented singing; and to hear the whole St David’s Hall uplifted in “Land of My Fathers” at the end of Sunday’s final was a heartwarming experience – almost as much as to see the four losing finalists applauding the winner, the Moldovan soprano Valentina Naforniţă, as if they were honestly pleased she’d won, though at least two of them must have been bitterly disappointed.

This is a competition in which the audience does genuinely play a part. The singers who did best were the ones who communed, not just with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Marilyn Horne and their fellow judges, but with the entire hall; the hall responded and the singers did better still. There were three prizes altogether: a song prize (with piano), the main concert prize (with orchestra) and an audience prize; and it was surely no accident that the audience prize also went to Naforniţă, even though voting is by phone and must involve a big majority who follow the contest only on television or radio. She was one of the two singers (out of 20 in the competition) who performed most vividly and engagingly, using her eyes and face and whole body as a vital adjunct of a God-given voice. The other was the winner of the song prize, the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko (pictured below); and he must have come within a whisker of lifting the main concert prize as well.

By any standards these are already great singers – and they are both only 24. In the song prize final, Bondarenko gave exquisite performances of four of Schumann’s Eichendorff lieder, alongside some interesting Sviridov; and with orchestra he showed not just a memorable voice and assured technique, but extraordinary emotional and intellectual range, at an age when the male voice (never mind the male brain) is seldom fully mature or under control. He sang Almaviva’s “Hai già vinto la causa” (from Mozart’s Figaro) with as much intensity as the richly sentimental Tanzlied from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. And in the final he zipped from Così fan tutte, through Rodrigo’s death aria in Don Carlos and Don Giovanni’s champagne aria, to Yeletsky’s aria in The Queen of Spades, with scarcely a musical blip, transfixing us with his variety of vocal colour, his grasp of character and situation, and his mobility of facial expression.

c3_ukraine_01_446How did he lose? The simple answer would be that Naforniţă was even better. But competitions are rarely so straightforward. To my mind, Naforniţă was not quite at her best in the final; but in her heat, which she perhaps unexpectedly lost to Bondarenko, she had been sublime. This is a voice in a million, with rich, warm colouring across the whole range, great agility in coloratura, and, like Bondarenko’s, unfailing musical adaptability. If one compares her singing of Donizetti, Dvořák and Gounod with the coloratura Handel and Thomas of her Korean rival Hye Jung Lee, the difference in emotional reach is very striking. Listening to the Korean was like looking at a bas relief beside a Michelangelo sculpture. Yet Hye Jung Lee is a superb singer with a delicious lightness to the voice, which showed up better in Zerbinetta’s aria from Ariadne auf Naxos in her heat than in her final pieces, Handel’s “Tornami a vagheggiar” (from Alcina) and Ophelia’s mad scene from Thomas’s Hamlet, which had everything except madness.

Judgments of this kind have to be made at an extremely high level. The general standard here has been astonishing, and any of the losing finalists might have won in another year. In fact, the Russian mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova may well have come close this year. She is another wonderful singer, a true mezzo with an authentic richness in the chest voice (in fact, she has two chest voices, one hard, one soft), but with great beauty of tone also in middle and high registers. She, too, relates very directly with her audience, so that one hardly takes one’s eyes off her, though her handsomeness is more discreet than Naforniţă’s candid physical beauty. She sang Rimsky-Korsakov, Verdi (Ulrica’s “Re dell’abisso”) and Santuzza’s “Voi lo sapete” from Cavalleria rusticana, all rivettingly, but let herself down slightly with Bizet’s Habañera, which suited neither her voice, her temperament, nor her command of French.

The remaining finalist was the English soprano Meeta Raval, who started the evening off with a nerveless account of Leonora’s “D’amor sull’ali rosee” from Il Trovatore, continued with a deeply touching death scene from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, then faded somewhat in Strauss’s “Beim Schlafengehen”, disconcerted, I think, by ensemble problems with the orchestra (BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Lawrence Foster). These arose, presumably, because, while the rules ensured that the finalists had the same conductor as in the heats, they didn’t guarantee the same orchestra, since the heats were shared between the BBC NOW under the excellent Jac van Steen and the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera under Foster.

I have loathed competitions since Postnikova lost at Leeds but I am now prepared to love them again

Rehearsals for the finals must be a pretty tense affair anyway, since the finalists aren’t known till late Thursday, and this year two of them were also involved in the song final on Friday. All things considered, it’s amazing how smoothly most of the performances went, how efficiently indeed the whole week ran from an organisational point of view. Thank you, BBC – despite the cameras swinging around one’s head like monster tentacles; despite us poor audience having to sit down early and stay sitting for two hours while Petroc Trelawney interviewed every singer he could lay hands on and Josie D’Arby asked each contestant in turn what it felt like; despite the crossed legs and the inaudible speeches; despite Valentina Naforniţă kissing each of the seven judges twice, once for each prize (why didn’t she kiss the audience for the audience prize?). Despite all this, thank you. It was an extraordinary, unforgettable week which would not have happened without you. I have loathed competitions since Postnikova lost at Leeds. I am now prepared to love them again.

As for Meeta Raval, at 28 she has emerged – regardless of the result here – as perhaps the outstanding British soprano of her generation, just as the Welshman John Pierce, who didn’t make the final but sang beautifully in his heat (against both the eventual winners), may well be the best tenor. Like most of these singers, they already have careers and plenty of dates. They will now get plenty more. There is more than one way to win a singing competition.

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Comments

Hear, hear! Agree with everything you say. And if the perceived sheer niceness of the competition, as well as the animation of its very warm audience, comes over even better live than it does on telly, it must be a very special experience. Do wish I'd heard/seen more of the earlier rounds, though; fortunately many of these singers' earlier performances can be recaptured on YouTube

What a wonderful week. Why doesn't the BBC take more advantage of having these great singers to hand? - Perhaps get each to record a recital and broadcast over the next 12-24 months? - better than most of the rubbish they put on the telly!

I enjoyed the warmth in the speech gven by the small Welsh-speaking woman with glasses... Why all the comments about, in particular, Naforniţă's looks? Is the physical beauty of the contestants, and the perceived implications for box office receipts, a factor in judgement at singing competitions? It's not the singer's beauty, nor, even the beauty of the voice (think Callas!) that engages audiences in the long term, but their communication skills. I wish the BBC would televise the song prize heats, as well as those for the main prize; art song is, I think, more popular than they know.

"despite Valentina Naforniţă kissing each of the seven judges twice, once for each prize (why didn’t she kiss the audience for the audience prize?)" Kissing on both cheeks is cultural stereotype in Romania. :)

And in fact on her first win - the audience prize - she rather formally shook hands with all except the Italian - so, goddamit, she deserved to kiss them all twic when she took the Big 'Un.

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