Elina Excellent

I like music, despite having a dreadful voice and failing with every instrument I even so much as touched. And I despair of  the modern wailing 'lerve' and lust  and screetching lewdness from under-dressed young women and from pseudo-blokes with four days beard growth who rap filth. 

But, as a chap rides slowly across field and through forests searching out dragons and the occasional small beast for supper, I do like to hum to m'self. And my mind goes to favourites artists, usually people whose career I have followed.

One such who I have admired from afar for more years than this tavern has been around visited the Music Room for the evening. The delectible Elina Garanca. I swear that were I 40 years younger and she had played her cards aright, she could have had me. But I am content to be an admirer of her womanliness and superb voice. And her choice of repertoire. 

For example, here, "Mon Coeur S'ouvre à Ta Voix" (My Heart Opens Up At the Sound Of Your Voice) from the opera "Samson and Delilah"  by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. On May 2018 Garanča made her stage role debut as Dalila in Camille Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila at Wiener Staatsoper conducted by Marco Armiliato.

Elīna (born 16 September 1976) is a Latvian mezzo-soprano. 

With a musical family background, she began to study singing in her hometown of Riga in 1996 and continued her studies in Vienna and in the United States. By 1999 she had won first Place in a significant competition in Finland and had begun a career in Europe. Worldwide engagements quickly followed her 2003 Salzburg Festival appearances.

Her father was a choral director, and her mother Anita was a lieder singer, a professor at the Latvian Academy of Music, an associate professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture, a vocal music teacher at the Latvian National Opera, and also a private voice tutor. Her brother Jānis (sometimes spelled Jaanis) Garančs, three years older than Elīna, started out in music studies, but is now an artist and consultant working with interactive computer-generated visual media. Since 2015 she has been continuing her vocal development with voice teacher Dale Fundling.

She entered the Latvian Academy of Music in 1996 to study singing with Sergej Martinov. She continued her studies in Vienna with Irina Gavrilovici and in the United States with Virginia Zeani. Garanča began her professional career at the Meiningen Court Theatre in Meiningen, Germany, and later worked at the Frankfurt Opera. In 1999, she won the Mirjam Helin Singing Competition in Helsinki, Finland.

Here is a very early appearance, in competition. Villa-Lobos' Aria-Cantilena, a piece not played and sung often enough, From the Mirjam Helin Contest 1999.

Elina's international breakthrough came in 2003 at the Salzburger Festspiele when she sang Annio in a production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Major engagements followed quickly, such as Charlotte in Werther, Dorabella in Così fan tutte at the Vienna State Opera (2004) and Dorabella in a Paris production directed by Patrice Chéreau (2005). In 2006, she returned to La clemenza di Tito, this time singing the part of Sesto. 

On 12 January 2008 Garanča made her company and house debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in the role of Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia.  Of her debut, Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times: 

"Ms. Garanca is the real thing ... Modern singing techniques adapt with difficulty to Rossini's early-19th-century emphasis on speed, lightness and athletic articulation, and Ms. Garanca was the only one onstage sounding completely comfortable. The lyric passages sang out; the episodes of racecourse delivery were fully in hand". 

She spoke for herself too, impromptu, sitting in a quiet corner of the Tavern's music rooms. 

Garanča sang the leading role of Georges Bizet's Carmen in the 2010 production of the Metropolitan Opera. In the opening concert of the 2011 Rheingau Musik Festival in the Eberbach Abbey she performed Alban Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder with the hr-Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Paavo Järvi.

She is also very well known, not only for 'spirited gal' roles but for her renditions of Sacred music.

Elina Garanča: "To me it’s not professional to go onstage and burn up. My first goal is to present my voice. To this, I add—in no particular order—expression, character, emotion. But first of all it’s about the voice. I’m a singer after all. Otherwise I would have been an actress."

Awards
1999: First Place: Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition (Finland)
2000: Latvian Great Music Award
2001: Finalist: Cardiff BBC Singer of the World Competition (UK)
2005: Nominated: Grammy Award for the recording of Bajazet
2006: MIDEM Classical Award: "Best Opera", recording of Vivaldi's Bajazet with Fabio Biondi, conductor; Patrizia Ciofi, David Daniels, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, Vivica Genaux and Marijana Mijanovic.

And she is a fine duetist. Here singing the Flower duet with Anna Netrebko (Lakmé de Delibes)

2006: European Culture Prize in Music (Soloist Category) awarded by the Pro Europa / European Foundation for Culture (Switzerland/Germany)
2007: Echo Klassik Award: "Singer of the Year" for the solo CD "Aria Cantilena"
2007: Three-Star Order: awarded by the Latvian State
2009: Echo Klassik Award: "Singer of the Year"
2010: Musical America Award: "Vocalist of the Year"
2010: MIDEM Classical Award: "Singer of the Year"
2010: Latvian Great Music Award
2013: Austrian Kammersängerin
2013: Echo Klassik Award: "Best Solo Recording of the Year", (duets/opera/opera arias for Romantique, works by Berlioz, Donizetti, Gounod, Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky and Vaccai). Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Dir. Yves Abel

2015: Echo Klassik Award: "Solo recording of the year"

I could look at and listen to her all day. There is music that can set feet a'tapping. A pleasant background when doing something. There is music that can raise the heart rate and pump the blood.  Or fists in the air. The mindless young seem to be captivated by it... and often not in a good way. 

I prefer music that can touch my heart: caress it; shed tears on it. Music that enters my Soul and lifts it: turns my attention to Higher matters and is a Gift to Him in the Crypt.

It is a counter to the Dragon's breath.

But now I have ale to serve.

Drink up and drink in real music from a most excellent songstress.

Pax