Pretty Yende's career has risen meteorically over the last few years as she has conquered bel canto roles in the world’s great opera houses. For her recital last night at the Gstaad New Year Music Festival, however, the programme showed strong desire to escape the bel canto pigeonhole. Eschewing the typical string of opera’s greatest hits, the bill comprised art song in various styles (liriche da camera from three Italian opera composers, Debussy mélodies and Liszt settings of Petrarch sonnets), with a sweet treat of zarzuela numbers to close.
Yende’s sheer vocal quality is extraordinary, enhanced by her innate sense of the dramatic: she acts every phrase with hands and face as well as her voice. The question was how successful she could be in applying that cornucopia of vocal and dramatic quality to art song.
The reams written about the wonders of Yende’s voice seemed well justified here. Her timbre is consistently warm in all registers, at all power levels and at all speeds. Her phrasing and ornamentation are rock solid in accuracy and beautifully judged: a perfectly turned decoration in Rossini’s La promessa, Bellinian poetry never over-mannered, immaculately even runs in Donizetti’s L'amor funesto, captivating ebb and flow in Debussy’s Beau soir. In the zarzuela numbers by Gerónimo Giménez, Yende’s ornamentation sounded as if she had imbibed flamenco with her mother’s milk. Were zarzuela and flamenco common in South Africa, one wondered? Presumably not...
Yende’s vocal dexterity served her well, negotiating difficult chromatics in Debussy’s La Mandoline, even if she didn’t convince me with low register buffa patter in Giménez’s La Tarántula (the audience loved it, though). In L'amor funesto, we got our first taste of extreme dynamics. Yende’s is a voice that can reach the upper tiers of the Metropolitan Opera House and it’s a big thrill when she hits the loud pedal – but what really impressed was the smoothness of the release when she backed off to pianissimo. The biggest success of the evening was the three Liszt Petrarch sonnets: Pace non trovo was delivered with great drama and long notes reaching fill-the-Met power but still developed through the course of the note. Benedetto sia il giorno was another number where the thrills just kept on building, in spite of some tricky intervals – and I took note of a particularly felicitous descending decrescendo run, delivered with breathtaking smoothness.
But for all Yende’s vocal star quality, there were two significant negatives in the evening. The first is that she was singing from a music stand (in spite of most of these pieces being ones she has sung for many years); her undoubted histrionic talents were considerably impaired by the frequent interruptions of having to look down at the music or turn a page. The dramatic effect was often spoiled.
More importantly, although you could tell that Yende herself was very much connected to the texts she was singing, her diction was so poor that we could hardly make out a word. The Italian was better than the French and Spanish, but I doubt there was a single person in the audience who could have told you what each song was about. For sure, Yende sings with great expressivity and can conjure a series of moods from pure timbre. But we didn’t get words, and that’s a big hole when hearing art song.
Hearing such a voice and seeing such an actress at close quarters in the intimate environment of Saanen church was an unforgettable experience, albeit, in this case, one not without its flaws.
David's stay in Switzerland was funded by the Gstaad New Year Festival
