“Opera News” Editor-in-Chief discusses this year’s Award honorees
The countdown to the eighth annual Opera News Awards gala has begun, with the magazine paying tribute to its five new honorees in its April 2013 issue. Profiled there are sopranos Mirella Freni and Dawn Upshaw, bass–baritone Eric Owens, countertenor David Daniels, and baritone Simon Keenlyside, all of whom – along with a host of the city’s cultural, civic and social luminaries – will be on hand for a gala celebration in the Grand Ballroom of The Plaza in New York City on Sunday April 21, 2013. First introduced in 2005, the Opera News Awards gala dinner, which features the hosts and presenters speaking about the awardees and introducing video performance clips, has become one of the most anticipated opera events of the season – an evening of celebration, appreciation, reuniting and celebrity-spotting that is without parallel in the industry. This year’s event will be hosted by soprano Patricia Racette, herself a past Opera News Award honoree, and will feature an all-star line up of presenters: composer John Adams, conductor and organist Harry Bicket, former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, fast-rising mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard, and acclaimed director Julie Taymor
In the Q & A that follows, Opera News’s Editor-in-Chief, F. Paul Driscoll, discusses this season’s distinguished honorees, from Mirella Freni and the roles he heard her sing at the Met, to the singer he calls “an actor to his fingertips” and a “total performer.”
Q: The Opera News Awards were first introduced in 2005 with the goal of recognizing artists who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of opera. Are you happy with how the Awards have progressed since then?
FPD: This is the eighth annual Opera News Awards and what we are all very proud of is the fact that the evolution of the awards has followed the evolution of the industry. For example, this particular season, one of our awardees is Eric Owens, who richly deserves it, but when the Awards were first started most people outside the opera world hadn’t heard of him. Since then he has become recognized for his performances in contemporary repertory and, of course, for Alberich in “The Ring” at the Met, which I think is one of the outstanding opera performances of the last decade. So we’re not only looking at opera’s past, with wonderful honorees like Mirella Freni, but also at people who have come up in the last few years, like Eric Owens, and people who are doing exciting work right now, like David Daniels, who is starring this season in a new opera about Oscar Wilde in Santa Fe this summer.
Q: One of this year’s honorees is a truly legendary and much-beloved singer, soprano Mirella Freni. Do you have any particular memories of her performances that you could share with us?
FPD: Like a lot of people my age, I didn’t hear Mirella Freni until she made her Met comeback. She had been away from the Met for a while. She made her debut during the last season of the old house – I was in grammar school, and the opera was way past my bedtime. But I did see her when she came back to the Met in roles like Elisabetta in Don Carlo, and later in Manon Lescaut, Micaela in Carmen, and in Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, and a lot of the other verismo pieces that she took on later in her Met career. She is an extraordinary example of someone who knows her instrument, and who has always delivered the very best to her audiences, in a career that lasted 50 years. She was still singing beautifully when she made her final Met appearance at a gala in her honor, 40 years after her Met debut and 50 years after her professional debut. She’s a great prima donna without ever being a diva. She’s a normal, happy, well-adjusted woman who is a great and generous teacher and a great and generous artist, and we’re thrilled to honor her this year.
Q: You will be honoring another soprano at this year’s gala, the wonderful Dawn Upshaw. This important American singer has had such a fascinating and wide-ranging career, with recitals, concerts, new works, and interesting recording projects. How do you place her operatic work in the broader context of what she’s achieved as an artist?
FPD: The magazine has always tried to cover artists who center their careers in opera. Dawn Upshaw has created a career that is a template for someone who is an adventurous musician who happens to be a singer. She does everything – Mozart, new works, concerts, recitals, teaching, master classes; she’s recorded everything from Purcell to Vernon Duke and done it all beautifully. I think that this is an extraordinary musical intelligence. She’s a woman and a singer of great, great courage. Opera News covered her pretty much from the beginning of her career when she was a Naumburg Foundation winner, when she was at the Met as a very young artist and came up in small parts like Barbarina in the Marriage of Figaro, and then of course when she was doing the leading roles in productions of the Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni and creating Daisy in John Harbison’s Great Gatsby. I think she’s an amazing artist and we’re very proud that she is able to be among the honorees this year.
Q: One critic has noted that when it comes to countertenors there are two periods: before David Daniels and after David Daniels. Watching him over the years, and the development of the re-emergence of the countertenor, it seems like he’s made a lasting contribution to his voice type.
FPD: David Daniels re-invented the countertenor for contemporary audiences with his work in Handel specifically but also Benjamin Britten and in recitals. He has a beautiful voice and is an immaculate musician. His Met debut, as Sesto in Giulio Cesare, was thrilling. He’s back at the Met this year in a new production of Giulio Cesare, this time in the title role. But, I think that when David first came to people’s attention with his work at Glimmerglass, for example, and then at City Opera, there were not too many people studying to be countertenors. He’s opened up so many possibilities not only for himself, but for a new generation of singers who can hope when they grow up to be a David Daniels. He’s someone who has reinvented a vocal category, much the same as Maria Callas did for sopranos and Marilyn Horne did for mezzos, and the way that Chaliapin did in an earlier era for basses.
Q: Another of this year’s honorees, Simon Keenlyside, is an artist who has had a very varied and wide-ranging career, with a great reputation, in particular, as a recitalist. He hasn’t been at the Met all too often – but opera is a key element to his career.
FPD: Simon Keenlyside has been a singer for almost all his life. He was a chorister when he was a child, and made an impression in recital and with recital recordings when he was a young man in London and in Europe. He first came to the Met in slightly smaller parts. I remember him very well as Belcore in Elixir of Love a while ago; he was also in Capriccio as one of the two suitors of the Countess. I think what has happened is that as the Met and other companies have put more emphasis on theatrical values, and on the dramatic intelligence of singers, Keenlyside, who is an actor to his fingertips, a total performer who incorporates the intellectual, musical and physical lives of his characters in the works of the composers he’s singing, has been increasingly in demand; he’s very much at home at the Met and is receiving increasingly prominent assignments there. This season, for example, he was Prospero in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, which is a role that he created at the world premiere in London, but he was also very memorable Hamlet, a role in an opera that hadn’t been done for quite some time, and was brilliant in both.
Q: Is it gratifying to you that the annual Opera News Awards gala has become such a highly anticipated moment for the community of opera performers, industry people and fans?
FPD: Bringing together so many members of the opera world into this extremely joyous event is one of the most wonderful aspects of the Opera News Awards. The sense of camaraderie and celebration that pervades the gala is energizing and uplifting. And there are always unexpected surprises that make each event so memorable: a touching memory shared in an acceptance speech, a joke that really touches a nerve, a performance we’re watching on video that is especially moving. All of these remind us of how blessed we all are to work in this extraordinarily rich art form.
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Eighth Annual Opera News Awards
Sunday, April 21 in the Grand Ballroom at The Plaza in New York City
A tribute to five superb artists who have made an invaluable contribution to the art form: sopranos Mirella Freni and Dawn Upshaw, countertenor David Daniels, baritone Simon Keenlyside, and bass-baritone Eric Owens.
Hosted by Patricia Racette
6:00 PM – Cocktail Reception with the Honorees, Hosts and Presenters
7:00 PM – Dinner, followed by Spoken and Video Tributes and Award Presentations
To reserve, call Metropolitan Opera Public Programs at 212-769-7009, or reserve online at www.metguild.org
Created in 2005, the Opera News Awards recognize five individuals each year for distinguished achievement in the field of opera. Proceeds from the gala evening on April 21 will benefit the education programs of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. The corporate sponsor for the event is BNY Mellon Wealth Management.
Opera News has been published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild since 1936; it has the largest circulation of any classical music magazine in the United States. The magazine, published monthly, is a winner of three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music journalism.
Previous Opera News Awards honorees:
Seventh (2011-12 season): Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Peter Mattei, Karita Mattila, Anja Silja, Peter Sellars
Sixth (2010-11): Jonas Kaufmann, Riccardo Muti, Patricia Racette, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Bryn Terfel
Fifth (2009-10): Martina Arroyo, Joyce DiDonato, Gerald Finley, Philip Glass, Shirley Verrett
Fourth (2008-9): John Adams, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Marilyn Horne, Sherrill Milnes
Third (2007-8): Olga Borodina, Stephanie Blythe, Thomas Hampson, Leontyne Price, Julius Rudel
Second (2006-7): Ben Heppner, James Levine, René Pape, Renata Scotto, Deborah Voigt
First (2005-6): James Conlon, Régine Crespin, Plácido Domingo, Susan Graham, Dolora Zajick
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© 21C Media Group, March 2013