DEBORAH VOIGT OPENS 2008-09 SEASON AT NEW YORK'S METROPOLITAN OPERA, SINGING TITLE ROLE IN PONCHIELLI’S VERISMO TRAGEDY LA GIOCONDA; OTHER MET APPEARANCES INCLUDE HOSTING INTERNATIONAL HIGH-DEF SIMULCAST OF STRAUSS’S SALOME, AND GALA CELEBRATING COMPANY’S 125TH ANNIVERSARY AND DOMINGO’S 40TH MET SEASON
In December, Voigt gives Orange County duo-concert with great American songstress Barbara Cook and headlines her own holiday concert at Carnegie Hall
Chicago audiences to experience Voigt’s first hometown Isoldes at Lyric Opera beginning January 27
Also performs in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, Japan And China
Superstar soprano Deborah Voigt begins the new season at the Metropolitan Opera as La Gioconda on September 24, in her first American performance of Ponchielli’s Venetian tragedy. Gioconda is Voigt’s 15th role at the Met, her home company, and one of seven major roles Voigt will give on three continents this season; 2008-09 will also feature two solo and one duo recital as well as a star turn at Carnegie Hall just in time for the holiday season.
Voigt’s role debut as the lovelorn ballad singer La Gioconda, in Barcelona in 2005, was called “an unqualified success” by the influential Spanish monthly Ópera Actual. A DVD of Voigt’s Barcelona Gioconda has earned international raves, including Opera magazine’s concise summing-up of all that makes Ms. Voigt a popular performer:
“Deborah Voigt brings such a generous blend of grandeur and detail … Handsome and graceful of presence, she convinces as a woman of extremes, adoring both her saintly mother and the undeserving Enzo, detesting the evil of Barnaba and finally reaching the end of her tangled tether in Act 4.”
Ms. Voigt’s most recent Met triumphs have been as Wagner’s Isolde and Strauss’s Egyptian Helen. At the Met this season her other appearances include joining the celebration of Plácido Domingo’s 40th anniversary with the company during the Met’s own 125th anniversary gala on March 15, and hosting one of the company’s enormously popular international high-definition simulcasts on October 11: Strauss’s Salome with her colleague Karita Mattila in the title role.
Salome and Tristan und Isolde figure prominently in Voigt’s 2008-09 season. She returns to the Vienna State Opera in November as Salome after touring Japan with the company in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Her Vienna triumph in her role debut as Wagner’s Isolde in 2003 has become the stuff of legend – not unlike that of her first staged performances as Salome two seasons ago at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
This season Lyric Opera of Chicago presents Voigt in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde opposite Clifton Forbis, beginning January 27. Her run of Isoldes at the Met last season gave her no fewer than four leading men as Tristan, and concluded with the first and so far only performance of the opera she has given with the great Ben Heppner. In the performance simulcast in high definition from the Met to movie theaters all over the globe, Voigt played opposite the unrehearsed Robert Dean Smith as Tristan, in an unequivocal world-conquest.
Two separate concerts on the lighter side and on opposite coasts will round out 2008 for Deborah Voigt. First, on December 6, comes a duo appearance with America’s greatest songstress, Voigt’s friend Barbara Cook, at California’s Orange County Performing Arts Center. The two performed at the Hollywood Bowl one summer and promised to get together again soon, and southern California won first prize once more. On December 16, Ms. Voigt joins the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and conductor Patrick Summers for Carnegie Hall’s official holiday celebration, in which she’ll sing traditional and popular favorites ranging from Handel’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, from Messiah, to Mel Tormé’s “Christmas Song” – better known from its first line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”. (Voigt’s holiday concert with the New York Philharmonic in 2003 went on despite a massive snowstorm the night before the event, and Voigt delighted and surprised the audience with ad libs, jokes, and several solo turns at the piano.) Soon after her Carnegie Hall show, and a half a world away, Voigt will celebrate the New Year with concerts on December 31 and January 1 in Beijing, China, joining Sir Andrew Davis and Joshua Bell for performances with the National Chinese Philharmonic.
Early in the New Year, Voigt gives one of only two solo recitals of the season, for the esteemed Schubert Club in Minneapolis (January 5). After her Chicago Isoldes and several Salomes in Orange County, Voigt departs for Europe, where she spends most of the remainder of the season. She returns to the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille, for the opera that was her calling card with many major companies: Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, beginning April 24. London’s Barbican Hall welcomes her back for a June 12 concert of arias and scenes by Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss, and she treats Berlinand Paris audiences to three concerts of Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Isolde’s “Liebestod” conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. A single concert performance in New York with the Collegiate Chorale at the Rose Theater on May 26 will feature Voigt in the title role of Gluck’s Alceste.
Deborah Voigt closes out her 2008-09 season in London with her first appearances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the title role of Tosca, beginning July 9. Voigt returned to Covent Garden for the first time in seven years this past June, performing the title role in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. London’s Evening Standard gave her five stars out of five for the performance, 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.” The Guardian credited her with “etching words with tremendous vividness and generating an emotional charge that hits you in the solar plexus.”
For more on Deborah Voigt’s engagements, go to the Engagements page.
September 9th, 2008
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