BBC Singer of the World 2019

[kwanfan1818]

The BBC Singer of the World 2019 competition in Cardiff has started:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qn4b

The first two groups in the Song Prize portion have finished and are posted to the website at the link above. The third Song Prize group competed this afternoon, and the first Main Prize group is probably wrapping up about now. That group competes as the 4th and last group for the Song Prize on Monday afternoon. The 2nd Main Prize group competes Monday evening and the final two Main Prize groups compete on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, and each group is a mix of the first three Song Prize groups.

Friday Thursday is the Song Prize Final and Saturday the Main Prize Final, in which, according to the website, there are five competitors. They also have the Audience Prize, which has been renamed after Joan Sutherland.

There are so many recitals, master classes, and talks, many by the jury members:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/r2hzp6/by/date/2019

I've listened through the first Song Prize groups twice. I want at least seven to win, and I haven't even heard the other half.

 

[kwanfan1818]

There's also this interview with Kiri Te Kanawa and Frederica von Stade:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07d8zqj

I disagree with one thing in it: while it may have been revived for her after a period in which opera singers were buttonholed, Te Kanawa didn't start the trend to allow opera singers to sing and record other genres. Ezio Pinza and Lawrence Tibbett were just two opera singers who made films and performed on Broadway and made recordings, and many, many opera singers sang popular songs, ballads, and musical theater on The Ed Sullivan Show, Firestone Theater, and The Bell Telephone Hour, to name a few, and before TV, they performed on radio. I remember stealing my father's Jan Peerce's "Bluebird of Happiness" record.

 

[kwanfan1818]

Group 3 is up now:

BBC - BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, 2019, Song Prize Recital 3 - Coverage from Song Prize Recital 3 from BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2019 16/6/2019 at 14.30pm

1) Andrei Kymach 2) Lena Belkina 3) Sooyeon Lee 4) Adriana Gonzalez 5) Roman Arndt

www.bbc.co.uk

I now have 10 of 15 singers I want to make the final (of five), and there's still one more group to go. Actually, I have four strong favorites among them, and two others I would find it hard to choose between. With five to go.

If I'm reading the "Episodes" page correctly, so far, they only list Song Prize-related shows except for the Main Prize finals. If true, and they just haven't updated the pages, .

I still can't believe I heard Owen Metsileng two years ago in the Third World Bunfight production of Macbeth set in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, in it, he sang Macbeth as a baritone. His bio says he switched to tenor between then and this competition!

 

[kwanfan1818]

Round 4 of the Song Prize and the first two Main Prize groups are up on the website.

If you scroll past the Welsh version of each competitor's bio, there's a list of rep for each segment.

This is a full year for competitions:

1. The 16th Tchaikovsky Competition has started, with the first vocalists starting this morning. There are also piano, violin, cello, woodwinds and brass segments.

2. Operalia is coming from Prague at the end of July.

3. Auditions for Neue Stimmen are ongoing through the beginning of September, with the competition in October.

 

[kwanfan1818]

I've just caught up with all of the Song Prize videos and the Main Prize rounds. The Final is live now (I think still), and I'll wait for it to be posted to the website.

I'm very cranky. I just finished listening to the Main Prize Round 4. Doing the intro before the Round winner, Main Prize Jury Chair Sir David Pountney said that it wasn't the Voice of the World but Singer of the World, and then, IMO, the winner they announced was the exact opposite, someone I would think "meh" about if I saw them on the cast list. If I hadn't stumbled upon the results looking at singer bios, where the rep for the Main Prize Final had been added, I would have been that it wasn't someone else from the round. Now I'm just . But they have an important person doing commentary after each singer, and the round winner was guest Gerald Finley's choice, so...

Pountney also said that while Round 3's winner was a coronation, this group was a lot tougher to judge.

I shouldn't be surprised that while many singers were equally excellent-to-amazing in both Song and Main Prize (almost all opera) categories, there were some singers that I didn't feel at all in the Song rounds, but who I thought killed it in the Main Prize rounds, and others whom I loved in the Song rounds, but didn't think were as strong in the Main Prize rounds, which made me

I realized, though, that my desert island opera company from among these singers would be doing a lot of performances of The House of the Dead and Billy Budd. I'd select tenors Lei and Metsileng, baritones Kymach, Lee, and Espino, bass-baritone Ollarsaba (despite the man bun), and bass Guetti. My soprano choice would be Gonzalez, and among the mezzos, Bray and Mennibaeva. I get Barrientos' appeal -- she was the only one who acted as if she was in a production, not singing in front of an orchestra, and she reminds me of Rachvelishvili in Adriana Lecouvreur -- but I thought she was swoopy in "Mon couer s'ouvre...", and I liked Mennibaeva's Ulrika more. I really loved Barrientos' Fricka, though. I like tenor Arndt's voice and control; I think he could use some time in Europe to differentiate between styles. van Mellaerts isn't quite cooked, but I loved his Billy Budd selection especially, and Gomes is clearly wonderfully talented: he's just the ardent tenor type, and I'm on the Sobinov side of Sobinov/Smirnoff divide and have never been a Corelli fan, so it's just taste.

 

[kwanfan1818]

I don't want to give it away, but I did read who won, and I am beyond thrilled for that singer.