(The week before, in San Francisco for performances of Il Trovatore, she injured her ankle struggling with a purse snatcher outside a Walgreen’s near the San Francisco opera house. In fall 2009, Radvanovsky arrived in Chicago for a new production of Verdi’s Ernani with a five-pound cast on one leg and a broken toe on the other. She is that ideal combination, equally commanding as an actress and a singer.Īnd to top it off, the diva is a trouper.

Whether wearing the flowing robes of a Druid priestess or the vast, jewel-encrusted skirts of a Tudor queen, she immediately captures the audience’s attention onstage, a tall, noble figure with dark, expressive eyes. Physically, Radvanovsky seems born and bred for the 21st-century era of DVDs and HD movie-theater simulcasts. One review of her Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Met in 2011 described her voice in the poignant “D’amor sull’ali rosee” as “a plush column of sound buffed by a shimmering vibrato…tapered to its purest essence in the mournful pianissimos that capped each phrase.” Last season at Lyric Opera of Chicago, her Norma soared and swirled effortlessly through Bellini’s vocal ornaments, but her voice became an implacable force, a bone-chilling, tidal wave of fury as the high priestess ordered her people into battle. Her soprano is powerful, agile, and capable of infinitesimally subtle nuance. Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth I-to great acclaim in a single season at the Metropolitan Opera, she scored a kind of operatic Triple Crown.īorn in 1969 in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, Illinois, an alumna of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists Development Program, a headliner at the world’s major opera houses, Radvanovsky is the compleat opera singer. Singing all three of Donizetti’s beleaguered British queens-Ann Boleyn, In 2015-16, already acclaimed as one of her era’s great Verdi sopranos, she achieved a singular feat in the bel canto realm. Opera is an art, not a competitive sport. But every field of human endeavor has its thoroughbreds and frontrunners, and in the opera world American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky belongs to that elite pack. Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role of Bellini’s Norma at the Metropolitan Opera, 2017.

Verdi voices lyric opera