Love longings in Richard Wagner’s music
Photo: Снимка – Рихард Вагнер / operasofia.bg
11 Feb 2021Bulgarian National Radio

Love longings in Richard Wagner’s music

https://bnr.bg/hristobotev/post/101419949/lubovni-kopneji-v-muzikata-na-rihard-vagner

On 12 February, in the Chamber hall of the Sofia Opera, concert will give Tsvetana Bandalovska, Radostina Nikolaeva, Silvana Pravcheva, Mariana Zvetkova, Martin Iliev, Kostadin Andreev, Biser Georgiev. Each one of them has chosen his or her favourite aria and duet from an opera by Wagner. Not all of them are from the spectacles, which at the moment are in the theatre’s repertoire. Together with the fragments from “Die Walküre”, “Siegfried”, “Götterdämmerung”, “Tristan und Isolde” the singers have sought inspiration also in “Tannhäuser”, “Lohengrin”, “Der fliegende Holländer”. On the grand piano will be Yolanta Smolyanova. She has worked with them still since the time of Richard Trimborn, who in 2009 arrived in Bulgaria to train the artists “to learn the style, taste and vocal culture in a new thinking and new artistic state of mind”, connected with Wagner’s operas.

Tsvetana Bandalovska: “The people, who know me, know my love for Wagner and Strauss. These are the composers, who most of all inflame my imagination and who are closest to my conception of the world.”

Mariana Zvetkova: “Wagner is my endless love ... This isn’t the passion, which I feel, when I am singing Puccini, nor the sublimity and poetic spirit of Verdi ... When you are on the stage and you sing Wagner, it is one super feeling of a person with many possibilities. In Wagner’s music I find a purely feminine, human satisfaction ...” – shares Mariana Zvetkova and you can hear more in the sound file.

Radostina Nikolaeva: “Wagner is a magic, an incredible challenge, but at the same time a world, which reveals many possibilities before every performer, who had the audacity to get in touch with him...”.

Silvana Pravcheva: “I remember years ago, when Acad. Kartaloff gathered us and said: “We shall make the entire “Ring”. We were stupefied. Until then we were singing Verdi, Rossini. But we followed him in this exceptional undertaking and here it is – ten years we reap the sweetest fruits of our work”.

After this concert, the Sofia Opera revives on the stage the musical “Mamma Mia!”, the operas “La traviata”, “Norma”, “Tosca”, “La Cenerentola” and “Carmen”, the ballets “The Nutcracker” and “Carmina Burana”.

Interview of Svetlana Dimitrova with Tsvetana Bandalovska, Mariana Zvetkova, Radostina Nikolaeva and Silvana Pravcheva