Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Sondra Radvanovsky Profiled by the New York Times

La Diva Radvanovsky in New York
(Photo: Vivien Schweitzer/NYTimes)
The soprano, who makes her return to the David McVicar production of Il Trovatore this evening at the Metropolitan Opera, gives an interview to the New York Times about the long road it has been to success in the world's greatest opera houses. She describes the difficulty of administrators not really "getting" her unique voice and how hard she has worked to prove she is one of the leading Verdi sopranos of this generation. She discusses her relationship with the Peter Gelb and how her early involvement with MET - winning the National Council Auditions and being a member of the Lindemann Young Artist Program - never secured her hiring by the house for large roles. Through determination and hard work, she showed fellow colleagues like Plácido Domingo and Dmitri Hvorostovsky that she had not only the vocal goods but the stage craft to rank among the best. In discussing her own unique voice the article states, "Ms. Radvanovsky admires Maria Callas, because 'she paid attention to the text and the music and was willing to make an ugly sound, if the text and music called for it,' she said. 'She was one of the best storytellers ever.' She compares her voice to Callas’s in the sense that audiences 'love it or hate it.'" [Source]