ENO Gala Concert hosted at the Rosewood Hotel
Photo from the ENO Gala evening hosted at the Rosewood Hotel
I was lucky enough to attend 2 gala concert/recital events this week meeting 3 different young ladies with great careers ahead of them.
At the ENO Gala, Soraya Mafi, the Lancastrian born soprano, who studied at the Royal College of Music and is now a Harewood Young Artist at ENO, sang a range of songs from La Traviata - Act 1 Sempre Libera - to Cunegonde’s famous aria ‘Glitter and be Gay’ from Candide, which is amongst the most fiendish challenging coloratura soprano arias, with numerous high c’s and d’s and three high e flats. She blew the audience away with her wonderful rendition of this aria, which was a highlight of the evening.
However, Wexford was not to be outdone. They gave us two outstanding female vocalists to whet the appetite for the new 2017 festival in October this year. We were lucky enough to hear the Italian soprano Giuliana Gianfaldoni, who studied in Bologna and has won numerous prizes in Italy during the last two or three years. Her bright and fulsome voice gave us a number of Italian and French arias, culminating in a rendition of ‘Caro Nome’ from Verdi’s Rigoletto, which was outstanding.
She was supported during the evening by the grand mezzo soprano voice of Rafaella Lupinacci, who studied in Pesaro and has also won a number of singing competitions. Her substantial mezzo soprano voice filled the hall and more and had real quality in the sound, if occasionally a slight lack of subtlety and control in her delivery and a rather wooden stance. However, she is blessed with a wonderful deep instrument, the quality of which is in short supply these days.
All three of the ladies that have been reported here have got great careers ahead of them and Wexford is fortunate that two of them will be performing at the festival in late October/early November 2017. Grab a ticket if you can. It will be worth it!
With kind regards,
David
David Buchler
Monday, 11 March 2017
