Sondra Radvanovsky at her recital in Toronto on Tuesday.
Sondra Radvanovsky At the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto on Tuesday
A good seat in the orchestra for one of soprano Sondra Radvanovsky's performances in the title role of the Canadian Opera Company's Aida last fall would have cost you $215. On Tuesday, about 250 people in Toronto got to hear her for nothing, during a lunchtime recital at the Four Seasons Centre's Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.
By night, during performances, the amphitheatre is just part of the upper lobby. The only clue to its regular daytime function as a concert space is the deep, bleacher-like steps that march down to the broad area where, on Tuesday, Radvanovsky sang five big arias from her repertoire of dramatic roles by Verdi and Puccini.
Radvanovsky, who is from Chicago but drove in for the recital from her home west of Toronto, has a big warm soprano that sounds deeply acquainted with tears. The gleam at the top of her voice is matched by the heft and power of her lower register (she mentioned between songs that she sang her first roles as a mezzo).
Hearing that stupendous instrument from about as far away as the conductor's position in the pit was mind-blowing in itself, but Radvanovsky never just gave us a beautiful sound. I'd say she never even just held a note, in the usual sense: Her melodic line was always in motion, through each part of the phrase, no matter how small. She's a lyrical singer through and through, so invested in the molten flow of the music that it hardly mattered when her diction wasn't quite by the book.
She took hard-worn arias from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi ( O mio babbino caro) and Tosca ( Vissi d'arte) and made their familiar phrases sound fresh and sometimes even surprising. A short, rapid crescendo near the end of Vissi d'arte sent chills down my spine, as with one note she drove right to the brink of the abyss that this aria tries to fend off with a wounded prayer.
Two Verdi arias from Il Trovatore ( D'amor sull'ali rosee) and Un Ballo in Maschera ( Ecco l'orrido campo… Ma dall'arido stelo divulsa) took us into still darker territory, as Radvanovsky plumbed the depths of Verdi's heavier idiom. Il Trovatore's Leonora has been her big signature part, and maybe a gilded cage, from which she has broken out three times this year with major debuts in Tosca, Aida and Un Ballo. During her spirited and often personal remarks about the arias on her program, she said she'll have her debut in the title role of Bellini's Norma in Spain next year, before performing the opera at "a theatre closer to all of you." About 30 paces distant, I would bet.
She closed the recital with Senza mamma, from the title role of Puccini's Suor Angelica, which I heard her sing in Los Angeles two years ago. The aria felt a touch less magical on Tuesday, but there is only so much even a great singer can do in street clothes and broad daylight, without the whole dramatic apparatus that, in the opera, brings us to that climactic episode.
Even so, she took us a long way in a brief hour, with excellent support from pianist Liz Upchurch. The world seemed a slightly different place when it was over.