Voigt’s Ariadne rules Royal Opera spring season
DEBORAH VOIGT REIGNS OVER LONDON AS ARIADNE AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE AND MAKES INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES
“Voigt soars ... blazing performance ... huge thrilling waves of sound ... she's a sensation ... really rather wonderful ... refinement, glamour and passion ... an emotional charge that hits you in the solar plexus ... an ecstatic lover, she is magnificent ... can rattle the rafters with her money notes”
Superstar soprano Deborah Voigt – no stranger to vociferous praise for her operatic performances – is receiving an enthusiastic welcome at London’s esteemed Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where she last appeared in 2001. This time she’s singing one of her most famous parts: the title role of Richard Strauss’s sublime Ariadne auf Naxos.
London’s Evening Standard gave her five stars out of five, reporting:
“Voigt has a gleaming tone with a touch of steel, ideal for Straussian roles such as Ariadne. Her diction is crystal-clear and her animated line projects the words with genuine feeling for their significance. There’s a nice irony in that the work is in part about the pressures to which great art is subjected.”
Warwick Thompson’s review for Bloomberg is headlined “Voigt Soars”. He calls it a “blazing performance ... Her acting is both passionate and dignified. More importantly, her voice is gorgeously glossy, and it opens out in huge thrilling waves of sound the higher she sings. In short, she's a sensation.”
The Guardian’s Tim Ashley reported, “As the backstage drama queen transformed first into a grieving woman and then into an ecstatic goddess, [Voigt] “is really rather wonderful...Whether hurling imprecations at Kristine Jepson’s Composer or abandoning herself to the blandishments of Robert Dean Smith’s Bacchus, she acts with refinement, glamour and passion. ... She seems to have found greater expressive freedom, etching words with tremendous vividness and generating an emotional charge that hits you in the solar plexus.”
The first time Deborah Voigt portrayed Ariadne, her breakthrough performance in 1991 caught the attention of a New York Times critic who called it the “Opera Debut of the Year – Deborah Voigt’s sumptuous statement of the title role in the Boston Lyric Opera’s production”. Now that same paper has written of her London triumph: “Ms. Voigt looked elegant and sounded in fine form ... She sounded lustrous as she pleaded for death, her huge, gleaming voice as commanding as ever in her signature role. ... There was plenty of chemistry between [Robert Dean Smith as Bacchus] and Ms. Voigt.”
The Times of London’s Richard Morrison wrote, “bewitched, bothered and bewildered, in the sumptuous 15-minute duet where Bacchus ... turns the whining, pining Ariadne into an ecstatic lover, she is magnificent. And the new compact curves look good too.”
Amidst the media excitement, including a report by ABC TV’s Good Morning America from London, Ms. Voigt has also been praised for her sense of humor, which she displayed in a spoof video for YouTube that has been watched by 40,000 viewers in the last couple of weeks. This video can be viewed here or on the Latest News page.
Voigt has three additional performances (June 25, 28 and July 1) in Covent Garden’s Ariadne before she returns to the U.S. She will open her 2008-09 season back home in New York with her Metropolitan Opera role debut as Ponchielli’s La Gioconda.
For more on Deborah Voigt’s engagements, go to the Engagements page.
June 23rd, 2008
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