Meet Danielle de Niese - you will want to

Here she is: born to sing, the cosmopolitan crown-princess of opera who sent Glyndebourne up in flames when she took the role of Cleopatra there a couple of years back. She's back soon to be Poppea. My article about her is in today's Indy, but it had to be cut (mea culpa, it was too long - and more was requested on some topics, so less appeared on others), therefore I'm pasting the original below in its entirety. The story of her Glyndebourne audition, the inspiration of Dame Kiri and her insights into the character of Poppea should be worth a read. Indy website includes a clip of her as Cleo, so do take a look there too.



Danielle de Niese, a petite young woman with a big voice and an even bigger future, has an unusual problem with visa officials. “They look you up and down, and they’re like, ‘You’re an opera singer? You don’t look like an opera singer, you look like a pop star.’ And I’m like, ‘Thank you, but I am an opera singer! The stereotype is changing. This is 2008.’”

Anyone who thinks that a diva is a heavyweight in a winged helmet would be startled when confronted with de Niese, 29. She shot to fame here in 2005, singing Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne in David McVicar’s award-winning production: her exotic beauty and star-quality stage presence created shock-waves as she was instantly acclaimed as one of the sexiest sopranos ever to set foot to stage. Moreover, there’s a charisma that seems to emanate from her voice itself – a notably young but still extraordinarily powerful and bell-like soprano. Her debut CD of Handel arias is just out on Decca, and this summer she’s back at Glyndebourne to sing the title role in Monterverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.

But now there’s a twist to the Glyndebourne tale: de Niese’s name is being linked with that of Gus Christie, the chairman of the whole Glyndebourne family package, which functions in a way not dissimilar to royalty. The legend goes that when Gus’s grandfather, John Christie, fell in love with the young soprano Audrey Mildmay, he promised to build her an opera house at the family home in Sussex if she would marry him. She accepted; he kept his word, and Glyndebourne’s operatic activities duly began in 1934. The opera house is still very much a family matter; Gus took over after his father George’s retirement in 2000. But when Gus broke up in 2004 with his wife of 11 years, Imogen, who took their four young sons with her, the future of Glyndebourne was thought to hang in the balance, so vital is the Christies’ participation in the opera house’s relationship with its patrons and the media.

It looks an unlikely combination – a glamorous, streetwise Australian-American in the land of English country picnics and sheep peering over the ha-ha; yet on one level, the romance is potentially a little like Glyndebourne’s history repeating itself.

“We are together,” de Niese confirms, “and we’re having a wonderful time!” She met Gus for the first time at her audition in 2004. “And in 2005 I was working here, but we didn’t actually get together until two years later. It’s a very surprising but wonderful thing.” She’s eager to emphasise that business and private life stay separate – “All the roles I’ve been doing were planned by Glyndebourne’s casting team, who obviously didn’t know what was going to happen with me and Gus. But I think everyone is very tickled – they’re all very happy for us. So far, so great!” But she’s not about to become the hostess of Glyndebourne corporate sponsorship functions; she makes it clear that she’s lodging elsewhere throughout her stay this summer.

De Niese’s first glimpse of Glyndebourne seemed less auspicious. She’d missed a plane after being directed to the wrong terminal in Paris and, following a nightmare journey, arrived just twenty minutes before she was due to sing. “The receptionist said ‘Do you want to go the long way or the short way?’ I went for the short way, which I didn’t know was over the lawns. It was grey and wet, I was in high heels and holding my pants off the grass, looking at the sheep and thinking ‘Where am I?’ But the gods must have been with me that day…”

Her astonishing looks derive from a background as international as her career. “Both my parents were born in Sri Lanka,” she explains, “but they are Sri Lankan Burghers – people of mixed descent from the island’s colonial days.” Her father had Dutch roots and her mother’s family was partly Scottish; they both left Sri Lanka as teenagers and moved to Australia. Danielle was born in Melbourne, where she started classical voice lessons at the age of eight.

“My great heroine was Dame Kiri te Kanawa,” she says. “It wasn’t only that she’s an incredible artist, but also she’s from New Zealand and I was growing up in Australia; besides, she was of mixed background. And for me, being of mixed background, that was such an inspiration. I thought: she’s made it, so I can do something in this field and make an artistic statement as well.”

When she was ten, the family moved to Los Angeles, not least so that she could study at the Colburn School, which specialises in educating talented children. There she studied more than just classical music – jazz and tap-dancing were also on the agenda. “I was there often at evenings and weekends, and performing a lot – I made my recital debut when I was 12. But at the same time I was very much a normal kid. Though what is normal? I don’t know!”

She insists that she was never pushed beyond her capabilities and that her parents were endlessly supportive. “My dad’s in banking, my mum manages the American branch of a Swiss vitamin company; they’re really busy, but they still come to all my premieres.” She tried her hand at TV as a teenager: after she was featured on a programme called LA Kids, she was invited to present the show, did so for several years and won an Emmy. Then, at 18, she became the youngest singer ever accepted onto the Lindemann Young Artists Programme at the Metropolitan Opera, where she made her debut as Barbarina in Le nozze di Figaro. “I wasn’t even of a legal age to have a glass of champagne afterwards!”

Her role in Glyndebourne’s new production of L’incoronazione di Poppea is, like Cleopatra, that of a powerful, sexy and self-aware woman embroiled with a Roman ruler: Poppea is the mistress of the emperor Nerone. Written in 1642, the work’s sophistication and psychological complexity hasn’t dimmed with the centuries. The story appears simple: Poppea and Nerone gradually do away with anyone who stands in the way of their love and their power, from their former spouses to the philosopher Seneca. They can come across as ruthless, power-crazed individuals; but at the end when the pair finally marry, Monteverdi presents one of the most beautiful love duets ever composed; we promptly forgive them everything.

So is Poppea is driven by love or by ambition? “For me, it’s both,” de Niese declares. “She happens to have fallen genuinely in love with someone who can help her ambition. She doesn’t only want power; she loves Nerone and cares about his interests. What’s so challenging is that it’s easy to go for the one-dimensional, superbitch character, cold and icy, or warm, seducing but manipulative and not fully engaged. But Monteverdi gave her some incredible music and therefore there’s a warmth, a sincerity to her that’s absolutely transparent. It’s much harder, yet much more natural, to go with that.

“She can be seen as a bad person. But bad people also fall in love, get married, have children and protect their interests. When Poppea betrays Seneca to Nerone, people think she wants to kill him so that he won’t get in her way; he doesn’t like her, so it wouldn’t be a bad thing for her if he died. But also he’s been undermining Nerone’s power – if someone is betraying you behind your back, of course you’re going to tell someone you love about that person. She’s completely justified in her own conscience. And how often does a woman fall in love with a man who says he’s trapped in a loveless marriage? It happens all the time. That’s what makes Poppea so relevant and timeless: it’s about human nature. I don’t think the audience should look at Poppea and judge her. It’s important to understand what makes her tick.”

There’s one danger with playing Cleopatra and Poppea in quick succession, plus a host of other Handel and Rameau heroines: de Niese could easily be landed with the label of Baroque Babe. “I won’t let myself be pigeon-holed,” she insists. Nor should she be – she’s sung Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Lauretta in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, amongst other roles, and she longs to sing Anne Truelove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. For her next album, she says, “I would like to do Mozart”.

Top dream role? “Massenet’s Manon. I was completely bitten by the bug for that role when I first saw it at the Met. But for now I’m looking at some Donizetti, which is a good way to broaden from the early and classical repertoire, just to take another step into bel canto.” Naturally her voice is still developing and changing. “I’m a puppy growing into my skin,” she admits. “But even if I am a puppy, I still have a lot to say as an artist, and I want to do that to the best of my ability.”

She’s nothing if not committed to her life in opera; it’s not as if temptation hasn’t come her way. When she moved to New York, offers arrived from the directors of soap operas as well as opera houses. “My manager said, ‘If you leave opera for three years and become a famous actress, then come back, you’ll still be younger than anyone else.’ And I just said, ‘Are you kidding? I can’t be off the stage for three years.’ I’ll die if I’m not on stage! The itch is stronger than me. And I’m glad. I hope it never dies.”

She needn’t worry. With her Covent Garden debut in Handel’s Acis and Galatea next season, another Cleopatra at Glyndebourne in 2009 and a dream coming true when she works with her heroine Dame Kiri te Kanawa later this summer, it doesn’t look as if de Niese will be off the stage at all for quite some time. As for her off-stage association with Glyndebourne, she wisely refuses to speculate on what the future may hold.


L’incoronazione di Poppea is at Glyndebourne from 18 May. Box office: 01273 815000

Masterclass with Andras

"Silence is the most beautiful thing in music..."

In case you were wondering,

...here's why the Sokolov situation is so deeply depressing. Just try this.

Sokolov makes a stand

Here in Britain we can scarcely help but recognise that we live in a society increasingly driven by surveillance, paranoia and infantilisation, but even so I was shocked to read in today's Indy this leading article about one of the world's most miraculous pianists, Grigory Sokolov, who is refusing to come and play here because he hasn't the time to deal with the latest spate of UK visa idiocy.

The issue is explained at greater length here.

In the article, a spokesperson says:

"Some artists just can't quite handle that sort of intrusion into their music. For someone like Sokolov, who languished behind the Iron Curtain for years and his career in the West started very late, having suffered at the hands of that regime, to find all this obstruction to playing in a country he's played in for 18 years is very distressing."

More uncomfortable news, too:

The visa regulations are soon due to change again to a points-based system, raising more concerns over the cost of entry to the UK for classical musicians, who are often poorly paid. Atholl Swainston-Harrison of the International Artist Managers' Association, said: "Our concern is that, in the classical music world, many acts are not well-paid. With the cost of a visa, it's not going to be worth coming to the UK." Iama is campaigning for visas to be extended from one year to two to cut costs.

It can take a great artist, rather than a politician, to speak up about unpalatable home truths. I will shortly post a link to my recent interview with Krystian Zimerman, just out in Pianist magazine, who utters some very strong words about why he doesn't intend to go to America for a while.

(Update: here is my article from International Piano about Sokolov, from Sept 06)

A big day at the Beeb

Such is the excellence of our national broadcaster's communicative power that it managed to schedule two of its biggest music-biz bashes for the very same day (yesterday). First, the waterborne BBC Music Magazine Awards went off with the usual splash on the Thames. There's a full list of winners here, and I can promise that there are some absolutely fantastic recordings to sample on it.

Among them: Mitsuko Uchida's Beethoven 'Hammerklavier' (which scooped Record of the Year too), Natalie Dessay and Emmanuelle Haim getting a Handel on Il trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno, tenor genius Mark Padmore in more Handel, the Jerusalem Quartet in Shostakovich, Martha Argerich in more Shostakovich, Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites on DVD, and much more.

And don't forget to check out the runners-up. Voting between the final three can be a close thing, involving flying fur and chocolate biscuits in meltdown in the bowels of the Beeb's conference rooms (I remember well from last year), and very often the other two are just as deserving of a prize. For instance, this year's instrumental category shortlist also featured Steven Isserlis's stupendous Bach Cello Suites and JDCMB favourite Rachmaninov-player Rustem Hayroudinoff making total magic out of the Etudes-Tableaux.

Don't get me started on the issue of more deserving discs that, generally speaking, don't make shortlists, or longlists, because some critic somewhere might have preferred to give five stars to something second-rate yet English (I am not alleging that this took place this year, since I wasn't there, but it's something that does occur in the British music press from time to time). This line-up is a worthy list and I look forward to feasting on the ones I haven't yet heard.

Meanwhile, over at the Proms Launch in South Kensington, apparently there were scenes outside the Royal Albert Hall when Nigel Kennedy turned up to play his violin (watch him here, courtesy of, er, Hello Magazine). Yes, he will be back at the Proms at last (after 21 years), to perform the Elgar Concerto, conducted by Tod Handley. And after the rave reviews he got for his recent rendition of it in the RFH, I wanna be there.

We hear that Murray Perahia is also to perform in the series for the first time in something like 20 years (you wonder where he's been all this time...and then start thinking about all the other great musicians who have also not been there for 20 years...or ever...) and that Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will give two concerts. Vaughan Williams features in a big way to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, as does Messiaen for his centenary (on the organ), and Helene Grimaud, piano virtuoso and a stunning-looking lady well suited to the cameras, has made it to the last night. There's also to be a Dr Who Prom. Is this a step up from Michael Ball? I'll reserve judgment until the night. Oh, and there's a folky Prom involving a spot of Maypole dancing.

I didn't make the Proms launch party, because the absolute priority last night was listening to Tasmin Little and Piers Lane giving a terrific recital together at Cadogan Hall, that undersung star of London concert halls. Bravo, chaps - your Elgar Sonata had me succumbing to serious snuffles, and we won't forget the 'Banjo and Fiddle' encore in a hurry!

Mad props meanwhile to Blogged, which has rated this blog 8.6 on the Sviatoslav Richter scale; Classical Music Magazine, which sent its estimable Hornblower along to the Hungarian Dances launch and kindly put in a picture and report on the Diary page (featuring Solti the cat, naturally); Pliable on the Overgrown Path, who featured Korngold and some wonderful pictures of Bruges the other day; and some marvellous Hungarians doing interesting things in Budapest, of which more, I hope, soon.