Brava, Anna Caterina!

That was the astonishing and absolutely unique Anna Caterina Antonacci, in Carmen (at the Opera Comique - that opera's birthplace - with John Eliot Gardiner conducting and Andrew Richards as Don Jose). My interview with her, conducted in the unlikely setting of a pub just off Borough High Street when she was in London for Berlioz's La mort de Cleopatre, is the cover feature in the new issue of Opera News in the US, just out now. I believe she is the nearest thing we have today to Pauline Viardot, of whose voice Alfred de Musset wrote: "It is the same timbre, clear, resonant, audacious … at the same time so harsh and so sweet, which produces an impression similar to the taste of a wild fruit."

Here's the feature. Enjoy.