With starring roles at New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva may be said to have arrived, and the time was right for a mainstream album of arias that her growing body of fans can lap up: her earlier albums have reflected her first specialty, the Baroque. They'll get exactly what they want here: a collection of popular Verdi arias with the requisite couple of offbeat choices (from Attila and Stiffelio, both works that history treated unkindly but that have been finding new exponents). It's ...
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With starring roles at New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva may be said to have arrived, and the time was right for a mainstream album of arias that her growing body of fans can lap up: her earlier albums have reflected her first specialty, the Baroque. They'll get exactly what they want here: a collection of popular Verdi arias with the requisite couple of offbeat choices (from Attila and Stiffelio, both works that history treated unkindly but that have been finding new exponents). It's interesting to compare this album with the Verdi collection released around the same time in 2018 by Yoncheva's sometime stage-mate, the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja. Where Calleja offers scenes, Yoncheva goes for tunes. From Otello, you get only the set piece Ave Maria, piena di grazia, from Yoncheva, whereas Calleja digs into the meat of the drama. The result is a program that doesn't allow Yoncheva to stretch out interpretively. One may also note that an outcome of her heavy schedule...
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