Volume 21 Issue 3 - November 2015

METROPOLITAN OPERA
Sondra Radvanovsky in Roberto Devereux
recital is definitely art song .. so I want to give them both, a little bit
of both, but definitely more art song than aria, to kind of end it with
a bit of a ‘Wow!’ ... Everything on this recital is music that I love.
Because Renata Scotto told me, ‘If you don’t love it, they’ll know it, so
don’t do it.’ So everything on this, I love. And it relates to me in one
way or another and when they come to the recital, they’ll see how it
all relates to me.”
Toronto Masterclass: Along with the December 4 Koerner concert,
Radvanovsky will also give a masterclass December 1 at 2pm in Walter
Hall at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. It’s a side of her
that we have not seen much of before, but from what she says, this
is something that is sure to change. “Everywhere I go in the world,
I teach masterclasses, usually for free. And I think that will be my
passion once I decide to retire from this crazy world, just to keep
passing it along. It’s my real passion. It’s passing on that knowledge
that I’ve acquired over 20-some years of doing this trade ... passing
it on to the new generation, because I felt that I was given so much
information along the road, being in the Lindemann Young Artist
[Development] Program, and working with the greats, with Renata
Scotto, with Régine Crespin, having a close relationship with all these
people, picking their brains–this is my 20th year of singing at the
Metropolitan Opera. Hearing these people and passing that on: I think
it’s my duty and my job to help young kids because if I don’t, what’s
going to happen to opera?
Next year, and the year after ... It’s a comfortable hour and a
half drive from the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts at
University and Queen to that country house in the Caledon Hills, with
its basement home gym for the opera singer who fully understands
that she is an athlete, and its upright piano covered with thumbedthrough
scores, marked up with Crayolas. The journey to and from
the FSCPA is not one that she has made often enough for some of us, I
tell her. “I know I can’t ask what it is,” I say. But will there be news, at
the Canadian Opera Company 2015/16 launch this coming January to
change that situation?
thewholenote.com Nov 1 - Dec 7, 2015 | 9