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14 APRIL 2013

14 APRIL 2013 COVER STORY

MARTY SOHL

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A LONG WAY FROM PIET RETIEF: Pretty Yende as Countess Adle and renowned Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flrez as Count Ory during a rehearsal for Rossinis Le Comte Ory in New York in January

A VOICE
TO BUILD A DREAM ON
South Africans heard Pretty Yendes voice fill the stadium when she sang alongside Andrea Bocelli and Bryan Adams at the opening of the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Shes filled a few more places since then, as Sue de Groot and Joseph Nhlapo discover

RETTY Yende is one of those people who inhabit their names. Vincent Bath was head of the Rand Water Board. Li Ka-shing is the eighth-richest man in the world. Yende, the 28-year-old soprano from Piet Retief in Mpumalanga, is indisputably very pretty. In this months issue of US Vogue, where she appears looking soulful on the People Are Talking About page, she is asked if its her real name (it is). I guess my mom saw beauty, she tells interviewer Molly Creeden. But its not her pretty face that has music aficionados from Milan to New York searching for superlatives. Its her voice. Listen to clips of her singing on the internet and youll hear a fraction of what she sounds like live a pure, thrilling voice able to master the style called belcanto. In Italian this means pretty song, or the art of singing, but it also refers to a specific quality of voice needed to perform certain parts, a skill which opera directors seek and hardly ever find. Yende describes this style of singing as very delicate and difficult. Vogue, the New York Times and a ruffle of other international publications are all talking about Yendes glowing January 17 debut as the countess Adle in Gioachino Rossinis comic opera, Le Comte Ory, at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera House. She received a thunderous standing ovation for what is one of operas trickiest belcanto roles, sung in French. She had a week to learn it. As often happens in showbiz, her big break happened by accident. Scheduled soprano Nino Machaidze fell ill and Yende was given the part at the last minute. On opening night she fell down a flight of steps on stage. Instead of falling apart, she got up, dusted herself off and sang her heart out. She told the Sunday Times that seeing the funny side of the fall helped to focus

her. That was a bizarre moment most people in the audience were not sure if it was part of the production, because of the sadness of the countess Adles farewell to her brother as he went to war, or whether it was indeed a fall. Everyone backstage was shocked and worried, but I was laughing, asking myself: Why, when in all my days on stage I have never fallen, why now? But the amazing thing was that during those few seconds when I was down there, I felt good. All the tension went away. After this triumph, Pia Catton of the Wall Street Journal wrote: When an audience at the Metropolitan Opera House wants to make its approval known, its roar is unmatchable. When the crowd is rewarding a new singer, whose career is poised to take off, the explosion of applause becomes a quintessential New York moment. Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met Opera House, added this: Its not that big a list of singers who can sing certain roles. This is a role that requires a coloratura soprano who can sing in the higher register with great beauty in the voice. Opera director Bartlett Sher, who spent seven intense days helping Yende prepare, told Vogue: You could tell it was the best voice wed heard in a million years, but the key to understanding how good she was going to be was that every day got exponentially better. The difference between the good performer and the great performer is the level of courage. When you really know to take the big risks and the big steps. Yendes career so far is a series of giant steps. At Ndlela Secondary School in Piet Retief, she played netball and was a church youth leader. I was a very determined young lady who wanted to be an accountant, she said. That dream changed when she heard opera music for the first time, in a British Airways ad on television.

I am fortunate to have parents who were willing to let me follow my heart . . . my instinct . . . but I had to assure them that if my choice turned out badly, I would study BCom accounting. The first week I was at the University of Cape Town to pursue my music dream, I knew I belonged there, and Ive never looked back. She auditioned for a place at UCTs South African College of Music after winning a choral award at the age of 16. Angelo Gobbato, director of the opera school and CEO of Cape Town Opera, remembers the first time he heard her. We were all very taken by the beauty of the voice, this very clear sound, and at the same time this luminous, very lighthearted personality onstage, he first singer in the history of the Operalia Competition to win all three top prizes. She has won the Montserrat Caball Competition in Spain, the Savonlinna International Singing Competition in Finland, the Leyla Gencer International Voice Competition in Turkey, and the Bellini Belcanto Competition in France. She says her grounding comes from a very loving and caring father and mom and two brothers and a sister, as well as my highschool teachers who believed in me in my home town Piet Retief Mr Sithole and the late Ms Luthuli. And my mentors at the SA College of Music, Angelo Gobbato and Virginia Davids, gave me treasure that will forever enrich my singing career. Virginia Davids is an incredible woman. She was not only my teacher, she prepared me for the world. Yende lives in an apartment in Milan and is fluent in Italian, naturally. She tries to come home to see her family in South Africa twice a year, and when she has free time she likes to cook, but her schedule is arduous. This week shell be in Cape Town for her debut in the title role of Donizettis Lucia di Lammermoor, conducted by the esteemed Richard Bonynge whose late wife, Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, revived the belcanto style. After that comes an appearance at Londons Wigmore Hall (Europes leading chamber music venue), followed by a stint as Micaela in Bizets Carmen in Los Angeles (conducted by Placido Domingo), followed by various gigs in Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, Washington, New York and Paris. She has to turn down more offers than she accepts. I have come to learn that in order to have a great career, one has to have the courage to say no. This is art, its a human voice, not a product, and this human needs her time to grow healthily, patiently, and to be honest about how I feel when I sing. We need to learn to sing what the voice says we can sing, and not necessarily what will make us the talk of the town. Perhaps the girl from Piet Retief should have been called Pretty Amazing Yende. Pretty Yende performs in Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti with the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, in collaboration with Cape Town Opera, at the Artscape Opera House in Cape Town on April 18 and 20. Book at Computicket.

ROLLICKING ROSSINI: Yende and Flrez in another scene from the Metropolitan Operas staging of Le Comte Ory

SA STARS ON STAGE
South Africans are not afraid to make their voices heard in the world of opera. These are a few of our other stellar singers: In addition to Pretty Yende, the South African College of Music in Cape Town has produced Pumeza Matshikiza, a soprano who has performed at Covent Garden in London and now works at the opera house in Stuttgart, Germany; Musa Ngqungwana, a bass-baritone now studying at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia; and Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi, a soprano who has performed at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Soprano Elza van den Heever

DULCET DUO: Yende and Andrea Bocelli perform on the great lawn in Central Park, New York, in September 2011

YOU COULD TELL IT WAS THE BEST VOICE WED HEARD IN A MILLION YEARS

told the New York Times. She graduated cum laude with a postgraduate qualification in opera and performance. Then came another huge step. In 2009, Yende won four categories in the Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna. Ilias Tzempetonidis, casting manager of La Scala in Milan the worlds temple of opera heard her and invited her to join La Scalas Academy.

All of us in the jury realised that there was a diamond there, he told the New York Times. She has this incredible charisma and this beautiful voice. When she sings, you think she sings for you. While studying at the academy in Milan, she made her acclaimed debut at La Scala as Berenice in Rossinis LOccasione fa il Ladro. In 2010, she won the Vincenzo Bellini International Voice Competition. In Moscow in 2011, she became the

(pictured) is a regular on lofty European stages and made her debut as Queen Elizabeth I in Maria Stuarda at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera House in January. She shaved her head for the role. On the male side, we have a slew of established names as well as rising stars such as tenor Given Nkosi, bass Kaiser Nkosi and baritones Njabulo Madlala and Abel Moeng. And the teenaged Mthetho Maphoyi, from Zwelihle township outside Hermanus, whose performance at a New York festival last year prompted a BBC documentary. And let us not forget the incredible Sibongile Khumalo or her niece, Sibongile Mngoma.