Radvanovsky shines brightly in Lyric’s sumptuous Puccini feast
On Saturday night, Sondra Radvanovsky inhabited twelve different heroine roles in her all-Puccini recital at the Lyric Opera. She was accompanied by the company’s orchestra, led by music director Enrique Mazzola.
The Verdi and Donizetti arias that Radvanovsky is more associated with are more conventional in structure. But Puccini’s arias are freewheeling character monologues, filled with sudden shifts of tempo and mood.
One of the finest qualities of Radvanovsky’s performances was how well she delineated the dramatic arc of these arias. Her pacing—which Mazzola and the orchestra matched with precision—was ever-sensitive to the characters’ changing emotional states. Her dynamic control remains as reliable as it ever was and was deployed with great intelligence.
While Radvanovsky’s timbre has always throbbed rather than ringing bell-like, and that vibrato has become more pronounced with time, yet not unpleasantly so. It perhaps undercut the shy girlishness that one expects in “Mi chiamano Mimì” from La bohème. But it suited the more impassioned arias very well.
Radvanovsky remarked that she was crazy to program twelve Puccini arias in one concert, the implication being that this was something of an endurance feat. But if anything, she sounded in even better voice after the intermission.
Her “Laggiù nel Soledad” from La fanciulla del West (which she said she was performing live for the first time) had the most intimacy and clarity of any aria she sang all evening. “Addio, mio dolce amor!” from Edgar put the breadth of her dynamic range on full display. Her “In questa reggia” humanized Turandot, that most unlovable of Italian opera protagonists, making her cruelty seem an understandable reaction to the horrors she could attest to.
This is not to shortchange her “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca in the first half, a role she has sung to acclaim, capped with a lovely pianissimo.
The programming also provided Radvanovsky with ample opportunities to take a breather, as it was peppered with overtures and intermezzi. Mazzola proved himself a capable Puccinian in these. His emphasis was on melody, rather than color or texture, with phrasing and rubato that pulsed and breathed very naturally.
The instrumental highlight was the intermezzo to Manon Lescaut. Mazzola wrung real drama from this concert evergreen, and it featured effectively plangent solos from concertmaster Robert Hanford and first desk viola and cello Carol Cook and Callum Cook.
The one distraction from the music-making was the projections on the rear of the stage, which looked like Macintosh screensavers from the early 2000s. Each portrayed a gradually changing landscape (such as sunlight slowly filling a forest for the prelude from Le villi or snow swirling outside for “Sì. Mi chiamano Mimì”).
Not all of these made sense. (“Sola perduta, abbandonata” is meant to be set in a desert, not a swamp.) They gave the impression that the audience could not be trusted to pay full attention without visual diversions.
Those who did remain attentive might have noticed that Radvanovsky mentioned twelve arias, but there were only ten listed in the program. Although she made a show of whispering in Mazzola’s ear at the concert’s end, as if the encores were not a sure thing, it was clear that they were always in the cards.
Her choices were “Quando m’en vo” from La bohème and “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi. She played both of them for laughs.
The singer had confined herself to the left of the stage for the main part of the concert. But she strode around for both encores, flirting with Mazzola during “Quando m’en vo,” and phrasing coyly. Her Lauretta was transparently manipulating Gianni in “O mio babbino caro” by being exaggeratedly melodramatic.
The program will be repeated 7 p.m. Thursday and 2 p.m. February 16. lyricopera.org
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6 Responses to “Radvanovsky shines brightly in Lyric’s sumptuous Puccini feast”
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Posted Feb 09, 2025 at 8:21 pm by Karen clausen
She was wonderful and I loved her sense of humor!
Posted Feb 10, 2025 at 2:35 am by Ransom Coates
She seemed to me to be singing with a cold. There were several issues and her breath was hampered, with phrases petering out rather than shaped. ‘In questa reggia’ was very screamy. Even if she had been in top form the lower middle part of her voice is not strong enough to make her a real ‘verista.’ I hated her addressing the audience with a microphone throughout.
And since when are patrons permitted to bring drinks into the house? It’s not a baseball game.
Posted Feb 10, 2025 at 1:46 pm by GCMP
Drinking (and eating) used to be strictly prohibited. Then a year or so before Covid they started allowing cups with covers . . . then during the first year or two after Covid they were back to nothing inside. And then they went back to allowing drinks.
It isn’t very nice to smell wine or other liquor when you should be focusing on the stage. Waiting for the popcorn to make it a real circus.
Posted Feb 11, 2025 at 5:41 pm by Carol DAVIS
The pacing of the concert gave the audience a breather, too. The musical interludes allowed a few much needed minutes to come down from the intensity of each aria.
The beauty of her voice and the weight of emotion were overwhelming in the best way. Brava.
Posted Feb 14, 2025 at 8:42 pm by Christine Demos
I share the dislike of having any food or drink in the theater, but I will add that this has been in place since at least 2016, which is when I first noticed it. I can’t imagine doing this in the theater, but unfortunately, it has become more common in all theaters that I’ve been in in the last many years. I am an old school “don’t move, don’t make a sound, turn your phone completely off” type.
Posted Feb 16, 2025 at 8:15 pm by Sandy
Sondra is a Lyric fan favorite whose three Queens maybe 5 years ago was breath taking. Sunday’s concert showed the wear of singing 12 arias over the week, but was a strong and sure performance of very familiar arias, along with some not-so-familiar ones (Edgar?). A real treat to warm our hearts as we face next week’s freezing temps.