Latest news with #SonyaYoncheva
Associated Press
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Domingo Hindoyan to become music director of LA Opera for 2026-27 season
NEW YORK (AP) — Domingo Hindoyan will succeed James Conlon as music director of the LA Opera and start a five-year contract on July 1, 2026. The appointment of the 45-year-old Venezuelan-Armenian, the husband of soprano Sonya Yoncheva, was announced Friday night. Conlon has been music director since 2006-07 and said in March 2024 that he will retire after after the 2025-26 season. 'LA is a city that is known by innovation, taking risks in productions and musically,' Hindoyan said in New York, where his wife is currently singing at the Metropolitan Opera. 'The idea is to do new pieces, commissions and modern pieces, something to really have a balance between what is classic and go further as much as we can.' Hindoyan will conduct two productions in 2026-27 and three in each of the following four seasons, LA Opera President Christopher Koelsch said. Koelsch hopes Hindoyan can lead works with Yoncheva, who has not sung a staged production at the LA Opera. Like other companies, the LA Opera has struggled with increased costs following the pandemic and scrapped a planned pair of world premieres over finances. Tenor and conductor Plácido Domingo was a key figure in fundraising for the company as general director from 2003-19. 'Part of my job as a music director and the job of any musician is to really take care of the art form as much as we can,' Hindoyan said, 'not only on stage, not only studying at home (but also) the connection with the community and the connection to the donors.' Hindoyan was born in Caracas, played violin and is a product of El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education system that was instrumental in the careers of Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare. He was an assistant to Daniel Barenboim at Berlin's Staatsoper unter den Linden. 'Given Barenboim's extremely exacting standards, I was impressed that he had that job and held onto that job,' Koelsch said. 'And then I saw a performance of 'Tosca' and was kind of immediately struck by the elegance of the baton technique and just the sort of the absolute clarity of what he was conveying.' Hindoyan has been chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic since the 2021-22 season. He first conducted the LA Opera last November in Gounod's 'Roméo et Juliette.' 'There's a kind of a natural warmth and charisma to him. In my experience, he almost always coaxes the best out of people,' Koelsch said. 'The 'Roméo' run for me was kind of a test run of how those qualities resonated inside our building, how it worked with the orchestra and the chorus and the administration and the audiences.'
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Queen of Spades' Review: A Fiery Soprano Breaks Through
Tchaikovsky's 'Queen of Spades' tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera's female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera's season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky's stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus. In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother. 'Young women often fall in love with' bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character. Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa's search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible. Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this month. Yet even on a visibly nervous night, Soghomonyan's tone commands attention with its velvety luminosity and plangent heat. His voice cracked a few times when he pushed for an emotional climax, as in the storm scene where Hermann makes a dark oath, or in the decisive last round of gambling that will lead to him losing his fortune and taking his own life. For Soghomonyan, who has recently electrified European audiences as Verdi's Otello, it was clearly not the Met debut he had hoped for: At curtain call, where he was greeted by warm applause, he held his prop pistol to his temple in a humorous pantomime of despair. But an opera performance is not the same all-or-nothing proposition as Tchaikovsky's game of cards. A strong cast, heavy on native Russian speakers, carried the patchwork plot. The coolly elegant mezzo Maria Barakova was outstanding in the minor role of Lisa's friend Pauline who also sings Daphnis in a pastoral court entertainment. And Violeta Urmana grew in stature as the aging Countess haunted by the prophecy that her knowledge of the card secret will lead to a violent end. Somewhat lugubriously sinister in her first scenes, she delivered a riveting performance as she reflected on her youth in Paris, singing a fragment of an aria by Grétry with quiet pathos that hinted at the personal trauma linked to the mystery of the cards. Among the men, Alexey Markov brought a fine-grained, warm baritone to the role of Count Tomsky. The baritone Igor Golovatenko was less convincing as Prince Yeletsky, the jilted fiancé, as he struggled to project some of the lower notes in the gorgeous love aria Tchaikovsky writes for him in Act II. In the pit, the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson delivered a cohesive reading of the score that drew bewitching playing from the orchestra. When Lisa, alone in her room, confesses her passion for Hermann, the strings and harp set the scene so vividly that you could almost hear the moment she throws open the windows and entrusts her feelings to the night. The opera ends with a pianissimo prayer for Hermann's soul. On Friday, the men of the Met chorus sang it with entrancing airy sound, a haunting conclusion to an evening that was otherwise memorable for the female voices.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Soprano With Many Roles On and Off the Stage
The soprano Sonya Yoncheva has established herself as one of today's most versatile opera stars. Just over a decade ago, in 2014, she caused a splash after jumping in on short notice as Mimi in her first staged performance of Puccini's 'La Bohème' at the Metropolitan Opera. When the Bulgarian native appears as Lisa in Tchaikovsky's tragic love story 'The Queen of Spades,' from Friday through June 7, it will be her sixth role debut at the house. Yoncheva, 43, maintains a busy schedule that includes a recent gala at the Opéra Garnier in Paris and her third production as the title character in 'Iolanta,' also by Tchaikovsky, at the Vienna State Opera. In Europe this summer, she will perform Handel, Bellini and more. Under the auspices of her production company, SY11 Events, she will also appear in August in Sofia, Bulgaria, for outdoor concerts alongside the tenors Vittorio Grigolo, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo. Started in 2020, the enterprise joined forces with the label Naïve for her most recent album, 'George,' inspired by the life and work of the French writer George Sand (born Aurore Dupin, she is known in the music world for her tumultuous relationship with Frédéric Chopin). An even less conventional project is the 2023 book 'Fifteen Mirrors,' combining personal confessions about select characters and portraits in which Yoncheva poses in different guises. 'I understand my work as a process,' she said by phone from outside Geneva, where she lives with her husband, the conductor Domingo Hindoyan, and their two children. 'The interpretation takes up maybe an even bigger part than the singing.' The following interview has been edited and condensed. Why was it the right time to take on Lisa in 'The Queen of Spades,' and what interests you about the character? I was touched by the fact that she is in love with a bad guy. Young women often fall in love with this type and want to make him good. And we never succeed. It is also a natural step forward after singing Tatyana [of 'Eugene Onegin,' by Tchaikovsky] in my early years, and Iolanta. 'Queen of Spades' is very similar to the two operas but slightly more dramatic. We hear that especially in the final pages. I like to create a kind of road map for myself. With Lisa, her first words are about fear. And she repeats this over the course of the opera. But in the moment that she is driven by love, she has this exceptional courage to stand up for it. The character is of course brand-new for me. I'm sure that after three or four productions, I will continue to find new shades in her. It's exciting. How has your relationship with the Met evolved? It's a huge love story. In 2013 I sang Gilda from Verdi's 'Rigoletto' without any rehearsal with the orchestra or the possibility to go onstage beforehand. I just saw this huge temple full of people. This is the magic of the Met. In the years after that, I just flew on those wings. I consider Peter Gelb and the Met, as well as all the other theaters where I sing, as my partners. This summer, in Gstaad, Switzerland, and Baden-Baden, Germany, you return to Bellini's 'Norma.' What do you continue to discover about the role? The story is very much about her children and her relationship to her father, to her duty. She was most of all educated to be a leader and guide her people. When I had my daughter, who is now 5, I started to see the world slightly differently. I think that Norma discovers colors of her youth that she never could resolve. Why was she not allowed to love, to be a normal woman? These questions grow in me. And every time I encounter Norma, I see her with more mature eyes. You started out your career performing early music with William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Is this still an important basis? Absolutely. When I was chosen to sing in his academy with him, I didn't have any experience in Baroque music, which was great because I was in the hands of a master. But he never tried to cancel my personality, and as a result I approach this music with my natural voice. Baroque music is like going back to the source. It's very healthy for the voice and mind. When I was around 18, I left Bulgaria to study in Geneva. [The soprano] Danielle Borst became my mentor, even a kind of mother, because I was far from my family. I arrived singing Liù [of Puccini's 'Turandot'] and very heavy repertoire for a young voice. She opened my eyes to the music of Mozart and Handel and Bach. She also presented me to Christie. Bulgaria has an extraordinary opera tradition. But at that time, the country was at a critical moment economically and in terms of education. It was quite natural to leave but also very difficult. I had to build my life from minus zero. I am grateful because I learned so much through this process. What was the impetus to create your production company? It was during the summer of Covid. I decided to return to my hometown, Plovdiv, to give a concert. But there were no open institutions. They gave me an outdoor Roman theater that seats 4,000 people, but I had to create my own structure for selling tickets. Luckily, a cousin of mine runs a theater for contemporary dance and helped me. And I loved how the whole machine works. Building an event and just participating in it are completely different things. Now I understand how painful it is to have a cancellation! We are living in a time when the arts are sometimes forgotten. We somehow want to concentrate on the superficial. Maybe it's difficult for people to enter their inner world. I believe that art and culture are the key to a better society.
Forbes
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The MET Opera's 'The Queen Of Spades' Star Sonya Yoncheva Talks Opera, New York and Travel
"Queen of Spades" star Sonya Yoncheva. Manfred Baumann Superstar Sonya Yoncheva stars in the Metropolitan Opera's upcoming production of Tchaikovsky's 'The Queen of Spades,' opening on Friday, May 23 at 7:30 PM. The Bulgarian native, who now calls Switzerland home, plays Lisa. Yoncheva has played iconic roles at the Met before such as the title role of 'Tosca,' Mimì in 'La Bohème,' the title role of Luisa Miller, and Violetta in 'La Traviata.' She made her Met debut as Gilda in 'Rigoletto' in 2013. Next season at the Met, Yoncheva returns to sing the role of Maddalena in 'Andrea Chénier' and Cio-Cio-San in 'Madama Butterfly. ' I interviewed the operatic star recently about how she prepares for a performance, her favorite restaurant in New York to sit at the bar, and more. My favorite opera that's not my own: My favorite opera not in my repertoire is Richard Strauss's Salome. My pre-performance ritual: Before I sing or perform, I have a ritual: I listen to the sound of flowing water. It doesn't matter where it comes from - my phone, the bathroom, anywhere - as long as I can hear it moving. The sound of water going somewhere soothes my nerves and helps me feel calm. After a performance, I: After every performance, I treat myself to one to three glasses of champagne. My favorite kind of operagoer (does what): I truly appreciate opera-goers who come with the intention of immersing themselves in the full experience, those who approach it like watching a beautiful film, ready to be drawn into the story. I am less fond of those who make comparisons, focusing on whether I sang the version of, if I was like… What I truly enjoy are audiences who come to be part of the journey, to engage with the story, and to share the fun with us. My role model in business is: I like to think of theatres and artists as partners. To me, this is the business model that truly defines our industry. It's not about being employed by someone or working for an institution, it's about institutions and artists building a career together. That perspective completely reshapes the opera industry and how my career can best piece of career advice I've gotten: The best career advice I ever received was to be myself. But in truth, that's also the most challenging advice to follow, because truly understanding who you are is already difficult. And then, being able to present that authentically to an audience, especially on stage, in the most genuine and natural way, that's even harder. Get the most out of an opera by: I do a lot of research. But I also place a strong emphasis on the psychological aspect of my character. I need to understand how a real person would react in those situations. That helps me make sense of the libretto, especially when the story gets complicated. It gives me insight into why certain events happen, why a character responds the way they do. This process also deeply informs my acting, how I respond emotionally on stage. It's really a journey from A to Z. If I have historical or literary sources available, I read as much as I can to thoroughly understand the context. Sometimes, in theater, I have the freedom to shape and reinvent the character. But with opera, the libretto often leads in a completely different direction. So, I try to compare the two approaches. For example, when I was studying Tosca, it was very important to me to highlight that she is very young, deeply in love, and profoundly religious. She's also a diva. These layers helped me shape her in a more nuanced way, not just portraying the arrogant side we've often been shown over the years. That's my approach. The restaurant I love most near the Met is: Bouloud. I really enjoy being there - I even stop by during intermissions or breaks between rehearsals. You'll often find me at the Boulou bar, having a salad and a coffee, and soaking up the sun, if it's out. The morning after a big performance, I: The morning after a performance, I'm usually trying to make sense of what just happened. I'm often completely drained, like a squeezed lemon, because premieres are such an intense emotional experience. The second, third, fourth, and fifth shows get a bit easier, as I settle into the rhythm of the production. But that opening night really takes the biggest toll on the body. By the next morning, I usually have muscle aches everywhere. It's tough - physically and mentally - but there's also a sense of relief. The nerves are gone, and that's when I finally start to enjoy the city. I can go out, meet friends, and have some fun. The destination I love to travel to most for work is: If I could choose a dream location to work, it might be something like a grand, beautiful theater - like the Met - but set on a beach in the Caribbean. That would be incredible! But honestly, I love all the theaters I perform in. I feel truly privileged to work in places like Vienna, Munich, New York, London, Paris, Milan, and Rome, such beautiful cities. Each one has its own unique charm, and I genuinely feel at home in all of them.
