BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, 12/06/2023 (2)

Main Prize - Concert 2

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Ryan Bancroft

Meigui Zhang, soprano (29, China)

Donizetti : "Quel guardo il cavaliere" (Don Pasquale)

Bizet : "Me voilà seule... Comme autrefois" (Les pêcheurs de perles)

Lehár : "Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiß" (Giuditta)

It's hard to know what to say about a programme and performance like this.  The singer has an attractive voice, it's generally well deployed, she's visually appealing, but there's not a lot more to it than that.  That's surely enough, you say, and yes, in normal life, and outside the major houses, yes, it is.  But this is an international and prestigious competition, and here, it's not enough.  It's a little like my problem with Sungho Kim's programme last night, we've heard it all done a thousand times before, and Zhang brought nothing new to it.  As usual with me, it's the French repertoire that ruffled my feathers the most, I felt she had little empathy with the role.  And she really needs to get out of the habit of sticking her right arm up in the air in a triumphant salute at the end of upbeat numbers.

Ogulcan Yilmaz, bass-baritone (31, Turkey)

Rachmaninov : "Ves' tabar spit" (Aleko)

Mozart : "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" (Don Giovanni)

Bellini : "Vi ravviso... Tu non sai" (La sonnambula)

This was one of only two singers who did not compete for the Song Prize, so we were all discovering this voice tonight.  There have been a couple of stellar performances of Aleko's Cavatina at this competition in recent years, so Yilmaz had some strong memories to contend with, and he did not quite come up to scratch.  There was not the long, flowing line and the easy, endless breath control that one looks for here, and that great hairpin swell and ebb on the last note did not carry the necessary impact.  The Catalogue Aria was fair, delivered with some flair, but there was a touch of cracking in the voice, and some unevenness of timbre throughout.  Finally came the second of the three "Vi ravviso" performances in this competition - the third was also in this round - but unlike Thomas, Yilmaz (and Nežić) included the cabaletta.  This, I actually quite liked, I felt Yilmaz had the tone of nostalgia right, but he was tiring by the end of the cabaletta.  On the whole, it was not a particularly notable showing.

Jessica Robinson, soprano (32, Wales)

Donizetti : "Chacun le sait" (La fille du régiment)

Mozart : "Vado, ma dove", K. 583

Verdi : "Volta la terrea" (Un ballo in maschera)

Grieg : "Kanske vil der gå både Vinter og Vår" (Peer Gynt)

Dove : "It's my wedding" (The Enchanted Pig)

The Cardiff audience is usually pretty discerning, but naturally, all bets are off when it comes to the home team.  That said, Wales has produced more than its fair share of extremely fine singers, so they're on fairly safe ground usually.  I said before that Robinson had a soubrettish quality to the voice, but she was going for more of a coloratura here, for at least part of the programme, beginning with the fireworks of Donizetti's La fille du régiment.  It has to be said that when she goes for the really high notes, they're there, but they're not always especially pretty, and I found the Mozart a little arch.  Verdi's Oscar, as the pre-concert commentator remarked, is kind of annoying at the best of times, and Robinson wasn't able to make him any less so, despite a neatly turned number.  However, she became really interesting with Solveig's Song, which finally brought some real emotion to the voice, and a limpid simplicity.  She ended with a wickedly witty number from Jonathan Dove's 2006 chamber opera The Enchanted Pig, and Robinson turned full-on Bridezilla with glorious relish.  Pure singing didn't matter so much here as the delivery of the text, and deliver Robinson did, in spades.  

Toni Nežić, bass (31, Croatia)

Halévy : "Si la rigueur et la vengeance" (La juive)

Verdi : "Il lacerato spirito:" (Simon Boccanegra)

Bellini : "Vi ravviso... Tu non sai" (La sonnambula)

The Halévy was an interesting choice, but I have to say I do tend to find most of La juive fairly tedious, and Nežić wasn't able to convince me otherwise.  However, he did give it a good showing, and his Fiesco was also good, with nice, resonant low notes.  His Bellini was less sympathetic than Yilmaz's, the sense of affectionate nostalgia not as clear, and the coloratura fuzzier.  He's a long, gangly figure with a bad haircut which did him no favours, and the voice needs just a little more stability of timbre, but there's a lot of promise there.

However, there was no question that Jessica Robinson presented - successfully - the most interesting, the most varied and the most demanding programme all round, and she duly won the Round Prize, to the immense delight of the audience, which spontaneously broke into the Welsh National Anthem. 

[Next : 13th June]