Italian barihunk Alessio Arduini, who made his made his Royal Opera debut in 2013 as Schaunard in Puccini's La bohème, will return to the company from September 22-October 20 as Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte. His castmates includes Corinne Winters as Fiordiligi, Angela Brower as Dorabella, Daniele Behle as Ferrando, Johannes Martin Kränzle as Don Alfonso and Sabina Puértolas as Despina.
German director Jan Philipp Gloger will make his Royal Opera debut with the new production using librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s alternative title for the
opera: "The School for Lovers." Tickets are available online.
Alessio Arduini sings 'Hai già vinta la causa!' from Le nozze di Figaro:
The November 12th performance of Così fan tutte will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 at 6.30pm GMT.
After his run at the Royal Opera House, he heads to New York to perform Marcello in Puccini's La bohème.
Barihunk Benjamin Appl has won Gramophone Magazine's coveted "Young Artist of the Year" award. James Jolly of Gramophone wrote the following in his nomination for Appl's award:
For the past few years, British music-lovers have been aware of a major new singing talent in their midst, Benjamin Appl. Listeners to BBC Radio 3 have had a particularly privileged ring-side seat as this young German baritone was a New Generation Artist for the class of 2014-16; but he’s an increasingly visible figure on the concert scene, and once seen – tall, blond, handsome and with a commanding stage presence – he’s not easily forgotten. The last private pupil of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (there’s a YouTube clip of the two baritones, nearly a half century apart in age, working on Lieder together), Appl has been named an ECHO Rising Star and, earlier this year, he signed a contract with Sony Classical, the first fruits of which will appear early next year.
Benjamin Appl accepting his Grammophone award (Photo: Benjamin Ealovega)
Appl has appeared on a number of recordings, often alongside other singers – in the Mendelssohn song series with the pianist Malcolm Martineau for Champs Hill or in songs by Schumann alongside Ann Murray for Linn (‘With clear, incisive diction, he characterises vividly in the narrative “Ballade des Harfners” and catches both the Lear-like weariness of soul and the accusatory bitterness of “Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt”, wrote Richard Wigmore in March last year). But 2016 saw the appearance of his first two solo recordings.
Champs Hill’s May release, entitled ‘Stunden, Tage, Ewigkeiten’, linked Schumann’s song-cycle Dichterliebe with other songs to words by Heine. As Richard Fairman wrote, ‘Appl has a baritone voice with its own character and a natural appreciation of the essentials of singing Lieder’. Barely a month passed before his next disc, a Wigmore Hall Live recording – with Graham Johnson at the piano (Appl has worked with just about every major accompanist on the British scene) – of Lieder by Schubert. Hugo Shirley, who reviewed it, felt a marked advance even on that first disc: ‘His instinctive feel for these songs is immediately striking and manifests itself in the sort of artlessness that distinguishes the finest Lieder singers: a lack of tension, an easy relationship with the poetry, a confidence in the words and Schubert’s melodies to communicate with nothing but the gentlest helping interpretative hand.’
This young singer has huge potential and we look forward to following the exciting journey that lies ahead. As Richard Fairman concluded, in his May review: ‘Sample his debut solo disc and you will hear the current front-runner in the next generation of Lieder singers.’
There is no shortage of great low male voices in this year's Cardiff
Singer of the World Competition, as six baritones and basses are
competing. The include Jongmin Park, Blaise Malaba, Sebastian Pilgrim,
Amartuvshin Enkhbat, Ryan Speedo Green and Insu Hwang.
A number of operas most famous low voices were winners at Cardiff, most
famously Dmitri Hvorostovsky who won the main prize in 1989 and Bryn
Terfel who won the Song Prize that same year. Other winners have
included Tommi Hakala who won the main prize in 2003, Christopher
Maltman who won the Song Prize in 1997, Paul Whelan who won the Song
Prize in 1993 and Jacques Imbrailo who won the coveted Audience Prize in
2007.
This year, fans around the world will have two ways to enjoy the competition, either on BBC radio or for a fee on Sonostream.tv, which
will be the first international broadcast outside the U.K. The
broadcasts of the first rounds on Sonostream are on 24-delay and are
simultaneous
with the BBC transmissions. The main competition final on Sunday, June
21 is LIVE. Broadcasts of the initial rounds begin on June 16 at 8:30PM
CEST/3:30 PM EST/12:30 PM PST.
Over 300 young singers from around the world applied to participate in
the current competition, but only twenty artists were selected to
perform with the orchestra at St David’s Hall in Cardiff, Wales. Parallel
to the main competition, there is also the BBC Cardiff Singer of the
World Song Prize, in which singers perform art songs to piano
accompaniment at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and St.
David's Hall.
Purchased programs on Sonostream. tv will be available for 30 days on demand after the first broadcast date.
Jongmin Park
Jongmin Park studied at the Korea National University of Arts and at the
Accademia del Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he worked with Mirella
Freni and Renato Bruson. His roles at La Scala included Bartolo in
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and the Doctor in Verdi's Macbeth.
Jongmin Park sings Rossini's La calunnia:
From 2010-13, he was a member of Hamburg State Opera where he performed Masettoin Mozart's Don Giovanni, Sparafucile in Verdi's Rigoletto, the King of Egypt in Aida, and Truffaldino in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. He joined Vienna State Opera at the start of the 2013/14 season. He won the Birgit
Nilsson Prize at Operalia, first prize at the International Tchaikovsky
Competition and second and Audience Prizes at the Neue Stimmen
international singing competition.
Blaise Malaba
Blaise Malaba
was born in Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo and is
studying at the Faculty of International Relations and the
Faculty of Culture and Arts at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
Blaise Malaba sings "Let my people go"
He started singing in the church choir as a soloist, then the student
choir at my university and with the male choir of Lviv. Since
January 2014, he as been studying with Professor Bogdan
Bazylykut. He enjoys singing Verdi and sacred songs.
Sebastian Pilgrim
Sebastian Pilgrim was born in Herford in North Germany and studied in
Detmold and
Hannover with Sabine Ritterbusch and Alessandra Althoff-Pugliese. He won
the Wolfgang Wagner Award for
performances as Daland and Hagen at the 2012 International Competition
for Wagner Voices. While still a student, he became a member of the
Theater Erfurt, performing such repertoire as Tierbändiger and Athlet Lulu and Kaspar and Eremit Der Freischütz.
He subsequently joined the ensemble at Nationaltheater Mannheim in 2013, singing leading roles such as Sarastro Die Zauberflöte, Fiesco Simone Boccanegra, King and Cook Love for Three Oranges and King Philip Don Carlo. He also composes and conducts and has given several
premieres of new music.
You can listen to Sebastian Pilgrim's clarinet sonata HERE.
Amartuvshin Enkhbat
Amartuvshin Enkhbat was born in Sukhbaatar and studied at the State University of Arts
and Culture, Ulan Bator. He won second
prize and the audience prize at the 2011 International Tchaikovsky
Competition; shared first prize in Operalia 2012 and second prize and two
special prizes at the International Singing Contest Francisco Viñas in
2013. He is a principal Soloist of the State Academic Opera House of Mongolia where he has performed Escamillo and Morales in Carmen, Tonio in Pagliacci, Amonasro in Aida, Count di Luna in Il trovatore, Iago in Otello, Renato in Un ballo in maschera; and numerous other roles.
Ryan Speedo Green
Virginia native Ryan Speedo Green studied at Florida State University
and the Hartt School of Music. He made his Metropolitan Opera stage
debut in the 2012/13 season as the Mandarin in Puccini's Turandot, and the Second Knight in Wagner's Parsifal He was a National Grand Finals winner of the 2011 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.
Ryan Speedo Green sings This Nearly Was Mine from South Pacific:
In 2014, he received a George London Foundation Award, first prize in
the Opera Index Competition, an Annenberg grant, first prize in the
Gerda Lissner Foundation competition and both the Richard and Sara
Tucker Grants from the Richard Tucker Foundation. Operatic highlights
include the Commendatore in Mozart's Don Giovanni with The Juilliard School, Colline in Puccini's La bohème with Central City Opera and Don Magnifico in Rossini's La Cenerentola
with Opera Colorado. In 2014, he joined the Wiener Staatsoper
ensemble, where he has performed Sparafucile, Basilio, and the King in
Aida.
Insu Hwang
Insu
Hwang was born in Seoul, South Korea and studied at Yonsei University,
then in Germany at the Hochschule für Musik, Karlsruhe. He reached the
finals of the 2011 Queen Elizabeth competition and in 2013 won third
prize and the Mozart special prize at the Veronica Dunne International
singing competition, and 2nd prize at the Gut Immling international
singing competition. He is currently a member of the Young Artist
program at the Landestheater Detmold, where he has performed the roles
of Montano Otello, First Nazarene Salome and Sarastro Die Zauberflöte.
Other competitors in this year's BBC Cardiff Singer of the World
competition include soprano Nadine Koutcher, mezzo Marina Pinchuk,
soprano Aviva Fortunata, soprano Anaïs Constans, tenor Nico Darmanin,
mezzo Ingeborg Gillebo, soprano Kelebogile Besong, tenor Jaeyoon Jung,
soprano Regula Mühlemann, tenor Ilker Arcayurek, tenor Oleksiy
Palchykov, soprano Lauren Michelle and soprano Céline Forrest.
Duncan Rock in The Rape of Lucretia(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)
We've been following the amazing career of barihunk Duncan Rock and watched with great delight how quickly he's developed a devoted following amongst opera goers. We love his willingness to push his artistic boundaries, appearing in everything from Billy Budd at Glynebourne to an updated, gender bending Don Giovanni: The Opera at London's famous nightclub Heaven.
We received more mail about him after he appeared in last year's Barihunks calendar, than any other singer. He has quickly become the perfect example of what opera companies are often looking for today: Great voice, great appearance and great acting. In the pantheon of young baritone talent, he has more people talking than almost any other singer.
Duncan Rock in The Rape of Lucretia(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)
He's currently turning heads and receiving rave reviews for his portrayal as an often shirtless Tarquinius in Benjmain Britten's The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne. In this production, he is being directed by the great Irish actress and theatre and opera director Fiona Shaw, who is undoubtedly pushing him to even higher artistic standards. Tim Ashley, of the Guardian commented, "Rock undercuts Tarquinius's raffish allure with unnerving intimations of psychotic violence."
The Rape of Lucretia was first performed at Glyndebourne in 1946. It tells the story of Lucretia, who is raped by the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus, ruler of Rome. Unable to live with the shame, Lucretia commits suicide. The action of the opera is commented on throughout by a Male and Female Chorus who occupy another dimension, at times narrating the story and at times voicing the thoughts of the different characters.
Duncan Rock in The Rape of Lucretia(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)
There are three remaining performances at Glyndebourne on October 22, 25 and November 28, as well as a tour to Woking, Norwich, Canterbury and Plymouth. A recording of this production will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on December 28th.
