Latest news with #AsmikGrigorian
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Soprano Who's Ready for Tragedy and Comedy at the Salzburg Festival
When the soprano Asmik Grigorian took on the title role of Strauss's 'Salome' at the Salzburg Festival, in 2018, the summer event found a new reigning diva. With a voice of lush power and a raw authenticity that shines through in every character, the Lithuanian artist has become one of today's most sought operatic performers, in Vienna, currently her home city; London; Milan; and beyond. But she has flouted conventions of stardom and challenged audiences' expectations. Onstage, she pushes well-known characters to dramatic extremes; offstage, she often stares into the camera with a defiantly non-glamorous expression. In August, she will return to Salzburg as Lady Macbeth in Krzysztof Warlikowski's staging of Verdi's 'Macbeth,' first seen there in 2023. And on Aug. 24, with the pianist Hyung-ki Joo, she will present the comic recital 'A Diva Is Born.' The 'Diva' show debuted in May of last year at the Vienna State Opera — where it will return this December — and was recently performed in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Grigorian was born and raised. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Salome review – a frankly astonishing concert performance
Antonio Pappano never conducted Salome while he was music director at Covent Garden, but he has now turned to Strauss's opera for the final concerts of his opening season with the London Symphony Orchestra, assembling, in the process, one of the finest casts you could ever hope to hear in the work, and presenting us with an interpretation at once decadent, beautiful, engulfing, and frankly little short of astonishing. Gabriel Fauré once dubbed the score a 'symphonic poem with voices added', which is not an entirely accurate description, given the power and psychological insight of Strauss's vocal writing, but does emphasise the centrality of the orchestra's role in carrying the dramatic and emotional intensity. With the LSO on tremendous form, Pappano lets the music unfurl in a single unbroken arc of gathering tension from the slithery, lubricious clarinet solo with which it opens to the savagery of the ending, and every flicker of detail and colour in Strauss's orchestration hits home. Strings sound palpably sensual, woodwind by turns exquisite and edgy, the brass associated with Jochanaan infinitely noble as it intrudes on the prevailing mood of feverish eroticism. The overall effect is of great beauty slowly turning monstrous, obscene, and rotten with decay. It's sung with remarkable and consistent lyricism, avoiding the expressionistic-sprechstimme approach we sometimes find, and all the more powerful for it. The concerts finally allow us to hear Asmik Grigorian in the title role, a career-making assumption when she first sang it in Salzburg in 2018, but which she has not performed in the UK until now. The mixture of metal and silk in her tone allows her to soar comfortably and rapturously above Strauss's orchestra both in her declarations of love to Michael Volle's Jochanaan and in voicing the torrential emotions of the final scene. Elsewhere, the darkness in her lower registers conveys nerve-ridden ennui, steely determination and imperious selfishness. She is utterly compelling throughout. Volle, meanwhile, superbly captures the fanaticism that lurks behind Jochanaan's principled dignity, is magnificent in his evocation of Christ preaching to his disciples on Lake Galilee, and ferocious as he heaps curses on Salome. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke makes a suitably neurotic Herod: vapid, weak-willed, lethally dangerous, barely maintaining the veneer of elegance he tries to preserve before his dinner guests. His Herodias is Violeta Urmana, fierce in her scorn and well nigh brutal in her irony. John Findon sounds ardent, even heroic as Narraboth, his voice bigger than many we usually hear in the role, while Niamh O'Sullivan is eloquent and deeply touching as the Page. An outstanding, overpowering achievement, every second of it, and one of the greatest performances of Salome I've ever heard. At the Barbican, London, on 13 July
