NCH, Dublin
The singing is over, the celebrations and commiserations have begun. The Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition has chosen its 2010 winner, with the €10,000 first prize going for the first time to a South African singer, 30-year-old soprano Pumeza Matshikiza.
Matshikiza was the fourth of the six finalists to be heard, and was the first whose performances put her in obvious contention for the top prize. The way she opened Come scoglio, from Mozart's Così fan tutte,had an immediately arresting strength, establishing her as a performer who carries the message "you must listen to me".
The sheer stamina of vocal emission didn't always sound exactly Mozartian, but it boded well for her approach to Signore, ascolta!, from Puccini's Turandot,where the easy fullness of tone more fully matched the musical style. The Song to the Moon,from Dvorak's Rusalka,was again vibrant, though little touched with tenderness.
The audience's favourite on the night appeared to be another South African soprano, Sarah-Jane Brandon(25), who took the €5,000 second prize as well as the two Wil Keune prizes of €1,000 each for the best song performance and the best performance of Mozart. In the finals she sang with clarity and command, and made her strongest impression in Dove sono, from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, offering the evening's highlight in terms of inwardly reflective soft delivery.
Just as the Dublin International Piano Competition has never been won by a woman, the Veronica Dunne competition has never been won by a man, and male Irish singers have not fared at all well, producing just one finalist in the five competitions between 1995 and 2007. Their presence was a little more notable this year, with an Irish baritone, 21-year-old Benjamin Russell, and a 24-year-old tenor, Dean Power, making the final cut.
Power offered the evening's most unusually balanced programme, including Il mio tesoro, from Mozart's Don Giovanni(which showed off Power's purity of tone and unstressed high notes), and the piano-accompanied Prologue from Britten's Turn of the Screw(delivered with real narrative skill), with Lensky's Aria from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Oneginoffering a contrasting finish.
Power took the €4,000 third prize, the €3,000 Anthony Kearns Prize for best male singer (Kearns was the competition’s only previous Irish male finalist, in 1999, when he also took third prize), the €500 Dermot Troy Prize for best Irish singer, and the €500 Handel Prize.
Benjamin Russell, the youngest singer, took the €2,000 fifth prize and the €500 Dame Joan Sutherland Prize for most promising young singer. And promise was what he showed in abundance, in his selection of Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Gershwin. The voice was beautiful and adaptable (sometimes with clear, tenorish overtones), but still shows both the up side and down side of youthful freshness.
The 28-year-old Russian mezzo soprano, Anna Victorova, who took the €3,000 fourth prize, was a sometimes smoky-toned performer, with a voice of real fibre, but her chosen arias by Donizetti and Saint-Saëns didn't seem to bring out the best in her.
US baritone Christopher Magiera(26), who took the €1,000 sixth prize, is booked to sing Rossini's Figaro with the Semperoper in Dresden this year. His problem in Dublin was easy to explain: he just didn't manage to project well enough to be heard properly in arias by Rossini and Korngold. You might be tempted to point the finger at his musical partners, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Laurent Wagner. But their contribution to the evening was so adaptable and generally sensitive that the explanation must lie elsewhere.
