���غ���

Praised for her unparalleled acting ability and beautiful soprano voice, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is among the most celebrated opera stars of her generation. A major attraction at opera houses and recital halls around the world, Te Kanawa was elevated to celebrity status with a performance at the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Te Kanawa is especially known for her Mozart and Richard Strauss roles, though her performances and extensive recording catalog covered operas by many composers as well as concert works, musical theater, recitals, and even jazz and blues, reaching well beyond the realm of strictly classical music listeners. Te Kanawa was given the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gramophone Classical Music Awards in 2017.

Te Kanawa was born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron on March 6, 1944, in Gisborne, New Zealand. She was adopted as an infant by Thomas and Nell Te Kanawa, who named her Kiri after Thomas' father. Studying with Dame Sister Mary Leo Niccol, she began her career performing in New Zealand clubs. A win at the 1965 Mobil Song Quest awarded her a grant to study in London. That year, her first recording was issued, an EP containing the Nuns' Chorus from Johann Strauss II's Casanova and Handel's "Let the Bright Seraphim" from Samson. This recording became the first-ever gold record produced in New Zealand. In 1966, after appearing in the film Don't Let It Get You and winning the Sun Aria contest in Melbourne, Te Kanawa enrolled at the London Opera Center, where she studied with Vera Rózsa and James Robertson. Shortly after, she made her first stage appearance as the Second Lady in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.

In 1969, Te Kanawa appeared as Elena in Rossini's La donna del lago at the Comden Festival and made her debut at Covent Garden in the role of Xenia in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov the following year. Her U.S. debut came in the summer of 1971 at the Santa Fe Opera as the Countess in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, which also featured a young Frederica von Stade. Te Kanawa's career took off when she reprised the role later that year at Covent Garden under Sir Colin Davis. After her audition for the role, Davis was quoted in The Royal Opera House in the Twentieth Century as saying, "I couldn't believe my ears.... Let's hear her again and see if we're not dreaming." While her Countess made Te Kanawa famous, she quickly expanded her repertoire, adding roles in the Mozart operas Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Her Metropolitan Opera debut came in 1974 as a short-notice substitute for Teresa Stratas as Desdemona in Verdi's Otello. Te Kanawa continued to make major opera house debuts throughout the 1970s, and in 1977 at the Houston Grand Opera, she made her first appearance in the titular role in Richard Strauss' Arabella, a composer whose works also garnered her fame. Other R. Strauss roles she championed were the Countess in Capriccio and Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier.

In 1981, Te Kanawa performed at the wedding of England's Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and her performance of "Let the Bright Seraphim" was broadcast worldwide to an audience of more than 600 million viewers. The following year, she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire for services to opera and was named Artist of the Year by Gramophone magazine. Leonard Bernstein tapped Te Kanawa in 1984 to star alongside tenor José Carreras as his leads in a new recording of West Side Story, with the composer conducting. The recording was released in 1985, along with a documentary made during the recording sessions, The Making of West Side Story. The new recording was a hit, earning a Grammy Award for Best Cast Show Album.

Te Kanawa remained active into the 21st century, stepping back from operatic appearances but remaining busy as a recitalist, concert soloist, educator, and recording artist. In 2004, she founded the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation in New Zealand to mentor, support, and offer financial assistance to young musicians. In 2010, with BBC Radio 2, she held the Kiri Prize Competition, which received more than 600 auditions. The winner, Shuna Scott Sendall, performed with Te Kanawa and Carreras at the BBC Proms that fall. That year, Te Kanawa made two appearances as Marschallin at the Cologne Opera and returned to the Met as the Duchess in Donizetti's La fille du regiment, a speaking part, reprising this role over the next few years at several opera houses. In 2013, she was featured on the television series Downton Abbey as Dame Nellie Melba. Te Kanawa's final performance, though only she knew at the time, was in a 2016 concert in Ballarat, Australia. She officially announced her retirement in 2017 but continued teaching and mentoring young singers. That year, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement from the Gramophone Classical Music Awards. Auckland's Aotea Centre renamed its ASB Theatre the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre in 2019, with the famed soprano honored with a gala at its unveiling. ~ Keith Finke

Edita Gruberová was a coloratura soprano, best known for her performances of Mozart and Strauss operas, but also strongly identified with the bel canto revival. She studied in her hometown of Bratislava, and then in Vienna and Prague, finally making her professional debut as Rosina in Rossini's Barber of Seville at the Slovak National Theater in 1968. An engagement to sing Mozart's Queen of the Night with the Vienna State Opera in 1970 was pivotal in establishing her career. She joined the company as a regular member in 1972, and before long she had made successful debuts at Glyndebourne (1973), the Salzburg Festival (1974, as Thibault in Verdi's Don Carlo with Karajan), and the Metropolitan Opera (1977, again as Mozart's Queen). During the late 1970s and early 1980s she debuted at many of the world's other major houses, including Covent Garden, La Scala, and the Chicago Lyric, but her schedule remained focused around the houses of central Europe -- a trend that continued throughout her career. Gruberová pursued a full schedule of operatic and concert appearances well into the 2000s.

Other Mozart roles that Gruberová was strongly associated with included Constanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail and, somewhat surprisingly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni -- a more lyrical role that lacked the high-flying coloratura that was usually her calling card. Her performances of Zerbinetta in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos were considered among the best ever heard. Among the bel canto operas, Donizetti's Lucia and Anna Bolena, Rossini's Semiramide, and Bellini's I Capuleti e I Montecchi figured prominently in her success. Edita Gruberová died on October 18, 2021 in Zurich, Switzerland. She was 74 years old.

One of the most famous African-American sopranos, Kathleen Battle received her vocal training at the Cincinnati College Conservatory, where she studied voice with Franklin Bens and also worked with Italo Tajo. While at Cincinnati she came to the attention of conductor Thomas Schippers who brought her to the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina to sing the Brahms Requiem in 1972. She made her stage debut in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia as Rosina with the Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit in 1975. Susanna in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was her New York City Opera debut role in 1976. During this time, she also sang orchestral concerts in New York, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. James Levine brought her to the Metropolitan Opera in New York as the Shepherd in Wagner's Tannhäuser in 1978, and she appeared frequently at the Met in important roles until 1994. She first appeared in Europe in 1978 at the Italian Spoleto Festival, and in 1979 debuted at the Glyndebourne Festival.

Her first appearance at Salzburg was in 1982 at an all-Mozart concert, and she often returned in concert, recital and opera. Her important opera roles at Salzburg were Susanna, Zerlina, and Despina, three Mozart roles with which she has been associated at many opera houses around the world. She has appeared at most of the major opera houses of the world including San Francisco, Chicago, Covent Garden, London, Geneva, Vienna, and Berlin. In 1985, she was the soprano soloist in Mozart's Coronation Mass at St. Peter's Cathedral at the Vatican, in a performance conducted by Herbert von Karajan. She sang Handel's Semele in a highly acclaimed performance in 1985 at Carnegie Hall and later recorded the role. In 1990 she was joined by Jessye Norman for a concert of spirituals which was conducted by James Levine at Carnegie Hall. Although best known for roles in the operas of Mozart and Strauss (Zdenka, Sophie and Zerbinetta), Battle has also had great success in Massenet's Werther, Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Don Pasquale, and La fille du regiment, Verdi's Un ballo in maschera and Falstaff and Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and L'Italiana in Algeri. Battle has maintained an active recital career, and her Schubert interpretations are very fine. Her recital programs have also featured songs by Mozart, Strauss, Fauré and Rodrigo.

Kathleen Battle's voice is a high, very pure soprano with great charm. She has excellent technical control, which has allowed her to sing the difficult coloratura roles of Rosina and Zerbinetta though her approach is always more lyric that that of most coloratura sopranos. She is an excellent actress and tries to give full characterization to each of her roles. Several of her best roles were televised live from the Metropolitan Opera, New York and later released on video.

A perfectionist in her own work, Battle became more and more difficult to deal with as her career moved forward. Some felt that her demands were becoming unreasonable, and her behavior became erratic. These difficulties came to public attention when she was dismissed from the Metropolitan Opera in 1994 for "unprofessional conduct." Battle has continued to appear in concert and recital and remains a favorite of the public.

A true bass voice is a relative rarity in the operatic world (though not as rare as a true contralto), and all too often, even the major candidates "gravel out" at the bottom of their ranges instead of singing, or have a tendency to bark or at least overuse sprechstimme while singing. Kurt Moll was one of the basses known for singing every note of his roles, even the lowest notes for Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio. The richness and sonority of his voice and sensitivity to the inflections of both music and text made him one of the foremost performers of Wagner bass roles, especially King Mark in Tristan and Isolde; Gurnemanz in Parsifal, and Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier, perhaps his most acclaimed role. He was also known for his lieder singing, and was especially admired for his renditions of Brahms' Four Serious Songs. He and Hermann Prey championed the songs of Loewe, a composer greatly overshadowed by Schubert and Schumann.

He first studied at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik, and while a student, made occasional appearances in small roles at the Cologne opera, though his official debut was not until 1961, as Lodovico in Otello. He sang at most of the small opera houses in Germany during the 1960s, slowly rising to larger parts and more prestigious houses. He joined the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1970, the same year of his Salzburg debut, and he made his Bayreuth Festival debut in 1974 as Fafner in Das Rheingold. His La Scala debut was also in 1974 as King Mark in Tristan and Isolde, and his Covent Garden debut was the next year as Caspar in Der Freischütz.

In 1982, he first began to perform Russian roles, first singing Pimen in Boris Godunov at the Vienna State Opera, and adding the title role of that opera to his repertoire in 1983, also at the Vienna State Opera. He was cautious about adding new roles, repeatedly turning down Wagner's Wotan and Hans Sachs, as they are written in a higher tessitura, closer to bass-baritone than bass, and so might require the kind of pushing that could have damaged his voice. Moll officially retired from the stage on the last night of the 2006 Munich Opera Festival, after a performance in Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg. He died following a long illness in March 2017.

He credited conductor Herbert von Karajan for guiding him to many of his most telling musical and dramatic insights, and recorded both his Gurnemanz (DG 413 347-2) and Baron Ochs (DG 423 850-2) under von Karajan; though both these recordings have some less than ideal aspects, the casting of Moll and his performances are not among the flaws.

This Swiss bass, known as an outstanding oratorio and concert singer, actually began his musical studies by earning a diploma in violin playing at the Conservatory of Neuchâtel in 1963. After vocal training in Fribourg with Juliette Bise, Huttenlocher won an international singing competition held in Bratislava in 1972. In 1974, he toured Japan. With the Ensemble Vocal de Lausanne and the Choeurs de la Fondation Gulbenkian in Lisbon, he became known as a significant interpreter of the works of Bach both in concerts (Montreux Festival, Strasbourg Festival, the Ansbach Bach Weeks, Flanders Festival Weeks, Festival de la Wallonie, and the 1978 London Bach Festival) and in his first recordings. In the field of opera, he had his first success in 1975 singing the title role in Monteverdi's Orfeo, followed by appearances in Geneva in Dido and Aeneas by Purcell and in Les malheurs d'Orphée by Darius Milhaud. Huttenlocher has also sung at the State Opera of Vienna, State Opera of Berlin, the State Opera of Hamburg, at La Scala in Milan, and at the Edinburgh Festival.

José van Dam has recorded nearly 150 roles, appeared in multiple world premieres, received most of the awards given to singers, is one of the most respected musicians of his generation -- and almost nobody outside the world of classical music has even heard his name. His presence is rather austere, and his singing is notable for subtlety and attention to detail. His bass-baritone voice is rich, and his phrasing is impeccable in nearly every musical style, from Baroque to contemporary. He is an intense though introverted actor, and even starred in Le Maitre de Musique, a film about a reclusive singer who retires from the operatic stage to teach. While his somewhat limited bottom range makes the lowest notes of the bass roles problematic, his musicianship and sense of drama more than suffice to win him critical acclaim as Philip II and as Boris.

Unusually for an opera singer, his family was not a musical one. When he was 11, a family friend encouraged him to join the church choir. He began to study sight-singing and piano, and at 13 he became the pupil of Frederic Anspach of the Brussels Conservatory. He entered the Conservatory at the age of 17; won the first prize of the Conservatory the next year; at 20 won first prizes at the Liege and Toulouse competitions; and was engaged by the Paris Opera in 1962, where he made his operatic debut in Berlioz's Les Troyens, as Priam and the Voice of Mercury. In 1964 he sang the role of Escamillo for the first time, appearing in this role countless times in the future and recording it no fewer than four times. In 1965, he joined the Geneva Opera, where he sang the role of Maitre Fal in the world premiere of Milhaud's La mère coupable. Lorin Maazel engaged him to sing in his recording of Ravel's L'heure Espagnol on Deutsche Grammophon and invited him to become a member of the Deutsche Oper. He made his La Scala and Covent Garden debuts in 1973; in 1974, was named a Berliner Kammersänger and won the German Music Critics' Prize; and in 1975, made his Metropolitan Opera debut.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he continued to add new roles to his repertoire and began his long-standing partnership with Herbert von Karajan and with the Salzburg Festival. As he and his voice matured, he dropped certain roles, such as Escamillo and Figaro, and added roles such as Philip II, the Flying Dutchman, and Simon Boccanegra. In 1983, he sang the title role in the world premiere of Messiaen's Saint-François d'Assise. He also continued to perform and record oratorio repertoire and became a noted interpreter of German lieder and French song, particularly the music of Henri Duparc. In the mid-'90s, he began again to explore new operatic repertoire, portraying Scarpia for the first time in 1995. He fared well in the inevitable comparisons to Gobbi. Both took a similar approach to roles -- studying the historical and literary sources for the character, but regarding them as supplementary to what the composer and librettist created.

He recorded widely for many labels. His aria recital CD on Forlane displays his versatility as an opera singer and his dramatic power. In the Wagner repertoire, his Amfortas in Karajan's recording on DG is a vivid depiction of that tormented king. In French opera, his Don Quichotte (EMI) under Plasson, brings out the humor, nobility, and pathos of the title role. He also was an admirable Leporello in the Losey film of Don Giovanni.

The Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg has a long history reflecting its home city's location near the border between France and Germany. Designated as one of France's national orchestras, it has an international reputation and has toured widely.

The Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg was founded in 1855 with Josef Hasselmans as its first conductor. During periods of German control over Strasbourg, it has been known as the Straßburger Philharmoniker. The orchestra has had a long succession of renowned music directors from Germany, France, and beyond, including Hans Pfitzner (1907-1915 and 1918-1919), a young Otto Klemperer (1915-1918), Paul Paray (1929-1940), Theodor Guschlbauer (1983-1997), Marko Letonja (2012-2021), and, as of 2021, the Aziz Shokhakimov. In addition to giving concerts, the group shares with the Orchestre Symphonique de Mulhouse the duties of permanent orchestra of the Opéra national du Rhin. With 110 musicians, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg offers an annual season of performances at the city's Palais de la musique et des congrès "Pierre Pflimlin." In 1994, the orchestra recorded the album Bal au Second Empire for the FNAC Music label.

That year, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg received designation as one of France's national orchestras. That brought international as well as national recognition, and since the turn of the century, the group has toured widely, appearing in major European halls such as the Philharmonie de Paris, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and the Musikverein in Vienna, as well as traveling as far afield as Brazil, Japan, and South Korea, mounting a major tour in the latter in 2017 and immediately being invited for a return visit. The orchestra has played host to several major composers-in-residence, including Kaija Saariaho (an album of whose works the group recorded in 2015 under Letonja), Jean-Louis Agobet, and John Corigliano. The Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg has recorded for a variety of labels, including PentaTone, Ondine, and, as of the early 2020s, Warner Classics, where in 2022, it issued an album of works by Leoš Janáček that included the Glagolitic Mass. ~ James Manheim

Alain Lombard is among the leading French conductors from the latter half of the 20th century. He has held numerous prestigious positions both in the operatic and orchestral realms. Lombard is best known for his interpretations of French opera, particularly of Bizet's Carmen, Gounod's Faust and Roméo et Juliette, Delibes' Lakmé, and Massenet's Werther. He has also garnered notice for his Puccini and Verdi, as well as for instrumental works by Berlioz, Debussy, and Ravel. Lombard's repertory is hardly limited to French and Italian music, however, as it takes in chunks of Prokofiev, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and many others. He has made numerous recordings since the 1960s for a range of labels, including EMI, Elektra, Erato, Forlane, and Valois.

Lombard was born in Paris on October 4, 1940. He was a prodigy, studying at the Paris Conservatory and receiving his first appointment before his 21st birthday, that of assistant conductor at the Lyons Opera in 1961. He was soon appointed principal conductor there, but departed in 1965. The following year he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Conducting Competition in Athens and also accepted the post of conductor of the Greater Miami Symphony Orchestra, having earlier scored a notable success in the United States: his New York debut was at the American Opera Society in 1963 when he led a highly praised performance of Massenet's Hérodiade.

Lombard became an assistant to Leonard Bernstein and in 1967 debuted at the Metropolitan Opera with Gounod's Faust. From 1974 to 1980 Lombard served as director of the Opéra du Rhin, based in Strasbourg, but also performed in Colmar and Mulhouse. By 1980 Lombard had become a major force on both opera and concert stages.

In the 1980s he held a string of impressive posts: from 1981-1983 he was music director of the Opéra National de Paris, then served in the same capacity at the Paris-based Opéra-Comique (1983); and in 1988 he accepted the dual posts of music director of the Bordeaux Opéra and the Bordeaux Aquitaine Orchestra. In 1990 he was appointed director of the Bordeaux Grand Théâtre.

Lombard was also busy in the recording studio, especially throughout the 1990s and the new century, turning out recordings of Lakmé (1990; EMI), the Mahler Fifth Symphony with the Bordeaux Aquitaine Orchestra (1998; Forlane), and several of Carmen, including the 2004 DVD of the Franco Zeffirelli/Verona production on TDK.