Irene Roberts as Kundry in PArsifal on the Bayerische Staatsoper, March 2024 / Photograph: W. Hösl
After having featured the present Munich Walküre‘s Brünnhilde, Miina-Liisa Värelä, earlier this month, Grand Tier Seize Bag turns its consideration to its Sieglinde, the American mezzo Irene Roberts, who has an thrilling season on the horizon.
Roberts, a local Californian, has adopted a time-worn custom for American singers and established herself in Europe, particularly in Germany the place she was an Ensemble Member on the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 2015-2024. Final 12 months, she made her Bayreuth debut as Venus in Tannhaüser, with Parterre Field critic Christian Ocier saying that she “revealed a lyric instrument of promise on this repertory, compact on the onset however blossoming right into a extra richly coloured, house-filling mezzo with the opera’s development.”
However Roberts’s excessive mezzo makes her viable in a number of the traditional Zwischenfach roles, like Sieglinde, Judith, which she brings to Aix-en-Provence subsequent month, and Santuzza, which she’ll sing in Dresden in January.
But it surely’s subsequent spring when issues actually warmth up: in February she’ll be Brangäne in Berlin, a task by which her “full, spherical timbre declared a robust presence,” in accordance to Madison Schindele, after which in July, she’ll sing her first Isolde on the Tiroler Festpiele Erl reverse the Tristan of John Matthew Myers.
This week, Parterre Field contains a little bit of this erstwhile Carmen, Dorabella, and Isabella as Kundry in a efficiency recorded in Berlin in 2024.
Wagner: Parsifal, “Ich sah das Form an seiner Mutter Brust”
Irene Roberts
Donald Runnicles, conductor
Deutsche Oper Berlin
September 2024
In-house
