Rolando Villazon sings his first Wagner
NewsThe former star tenor, now more often a stage director, will break new ground in Berlin tomorrow as Loge in the Staatsoper’s Wagner Ring.
Villazon says: ‘This is my first Wagner role on stage. It’s a character that all Wagner fans love and that’s a big responsibility for me.’
Wonderful. It’s such an incisive
understanding of the character, and it is interesting to learn how he built from the diction the rhythm, over three years, to the music. Four timbres (colors) in
sentence…yes! This will be great to hear.
Just waiting for Matthias Goerne to sing Scarpia.
You make me laugh but there is truth in your cynical remark as so many idiots are casting nowadays and Germany gets the lead
Achim, it’s bad enough Goerne is doing all three Wotans…
His Piazarro was also dull…
At this point he’d probably be a better Mime.
Villazon claims that German is the most challenging language for him but he sounds pretty good to me. Can anyone fluent in German give their opinion, please?
His German is very heavily accented and his syntax is off. Not surprising.
But he communicates fluently on the job in Salzburg. But is that relevant for Loge? How will it sound sung? Anyone knows. WHY is he singing Wagner, or singing at all (his voice is, in my opinion, shot)? I put it down to an eccentric casting department with too much tax-payer money looking for a box-office magnet for an audience that probably also flocks to Netrebko et al. There are so many young singers with potential who could do the part better.
Those ever present nameless young singers…whose German is always fluent…necessary for singing Loge….the Esperanto version doesn’t cut it
https://www.rbb-online.de/rbbkultur/radio/programm/schema/sendungen/rbbkultur_radiokonzert/archiv/20221002_1800.html
listen to it yourself, the whole ring will be available as audio life stream and available for a bit longer on demand. His German was quite good, better than in the interview, however, the voice was not always OK – he struggled… His acting may have been quite nice (we will see later when they make the video available)