Sonia Yontcheva closes the Peralada Festival with a tribute to George Sand
The event emulated the musical and poetic evenings that brought together intellectuals in Paris at the end of the 19th century.
PeraladaSònia Iontxeva is one of the regular voices at the Peralada Festival and this Friday she returned to present her latest album, George, a tribute to the writer George Sand. In the recital closing the 39th edition of the festival, the Bulgarian soprano was accompanied by pianist Olga Zado, mezzo-soprano Ekaterine Buachidze, and Catalan violinist Sara Balasch, four women who emulated the musical and poetic evenings that brought together Parisian intellectuals and late poets Alfred de Musset and Pauline Viardot. The dramatized performance combined music, poetry, and the soprano's reading of letters and literary fragments by George Sand.
The recital began with Chopin's piano version of the aria Casta diva by Bellini, with good fingering by Zado, but a somewhat affected interpretation, followed by Yontcheva's reading of a letter from Musset and the song December Night, by Leoncavallo.
With pieces like The Daughters of Cadix (Delibes), Ballade to the Moon (Offenbach) and Madrid (Viardot), the soprano alternated mischief and lyricism and showed that she still has her fleshy voice, dark and velvety in color, intense high notes and overflowing passion, but precisely this delivery of a style more operatic than literary evening lacks restraint at times, and the vibrato aggravated by the acoustic reverberation of the Carme church, they subtracted sensitivity and emotion from what was intended to be an intimate and delicate session.
Chopin's mazurkas arranged by Viardot followed (Weak heart and Separation), The Bohémiennes (Viardot/Brahms) in duet with the young mezzo-soprano Ekaterine Buachidze and the reading of a fragment of The maîtres sonneurs, where Sand talks about music as the total language of the soul.
The Liebestraum No. 3 Liszt's work sounded moving, as delicate as the Hey Luli Sung by the Georgian mezzo, with a crystalline voice, mastery of phrasing and good stylistic control, a song that she repeated in the only encore of the recital, a duet with the soprano. The evening closed with Yontcheva performing the aria Casta diva in Bellini's original version, and it was there that he once again demonstrated that opera is his natural habitat.
Thus ends a competition that now moves on to the Savonlinna Opera Festival with the production of the opera The Fairy Queen (2022), with a stage proposal by Joan Anton Rechi, Dani Espasa leading the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and the heart of O Vos Omnes, and Xavier Sabata in the fun role of all the English queens.