Teresa Stich-Randall (above) sings Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, with the Radio-Symphonieorchester, Vienna, conducted by László Somogyi. The recording dates from June 1964.
Listen here.
In November of 1963, I attended my first-ever performance at the Metropolitan Opera (at the Old Met!). It was DON GIOVANNI, and Ms. Stich-Randall sang Donna Anna.
Erin Wall, a native of Calgary, Canada, was a finalist at the 2003 Cardiff Singer of the World competition. She had made her international debut the previous year singing Britten’s War Requiem in London. She spent three seasons building repertoire at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and made her Met debut in 2009 as Donna Anna. In 2014, I had the pleasure of hearing her as Strauss’s Arabella at The Met.
Erin Wall’s repertoire includes Freia, the 3rd Norn, Strauss’s Daphne, Marguerite in Faust, Ellen Orford, Chrysothemis, Helena in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Thais, and Mozart’s Contessa Almaviva. She does a lot of concert work, most notably the Mahler symphonies 2, 4, and 8, and Strauss’s Vier Letze Lieder.
Erin Wall – Vier letzte Lieder ~ Frühling
Counter-tenor Matthias Rexroth was born in Nuremberg and made his debut in Purcell’s King Arthur at Stuttgart in 1999. Having won major voice competitions at Barcelona and Vienna, Mr. Rexroth was soon performing Bach and Baroque works all over Europe, and he represented Germany at the 2003 Cardiff Competition. He sang often with conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and also with Riccardo Muti and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. His operatic repertory covers numerous Handel roles and ranges from Monteverdi to Britten.
Watch Mr. Rexroth singing at the the 37th Concurso Francisco Viñas in Barcelona here.
Since 2014, Mr. Rexroth has been professor of voice at the Opera Academy of Warsaw; he also gives masterclasses internationally.
Parts of Ms. Wall’s and Mr. Rexroth’s 2003 Cardiff performances are heard here:
Cardiff 2003 – Matthias Rexroth – Erin Wall
Bucharest-born Ruxandra Donose came to prominence following an impressive showing at a voice competition at Munich in 1990. She soon joined the opera company at Basel, and – thereafter – the Vienna State Opera. Her international career has since continued apace, and lately she has taken on roles like Kundry and Sieglinde.
Above: Ruxandra Donose as Nicklausse in Contes d’Hoffmann; a Marty Sohl/Met Opera photo
I met Ruxandra in 2004 while I was working at Tower Records; she was singing Nicklausse at The Met and she stopped by at the opera room. We had a lovely chat.
Here’s Ruxandra at the 1993 Cardiff competition:
Ruxandra Donose – Allerseelen – Cardiff 1993
And Roger Vignoles is the pianist for Ruxandra’s lovely singing of Dalila’s seduction aria from a 2014 London recital here.
~ Oberon
Teresa Stich-Randall (above) sang Donna Anna in DON GIOVANNI in the first performance I ever attended at the Old Met, in 1963. It took place only a few days after the assassination of John F Kennedy, but the plans had been made, the hotel booked, and opera tickets paid for, so my parents decided we should go ahead and make the trip to New York City. On the evening following the DON GIOVANNI, we saw FAUST.
Teresa Stich-Randall was a native of New Hartford, Connecticut. She studied at Columbia University where, in 1947, she created the role of Gertrude Stein in THE MOTHER OF US ALL by Virgil Thomson.
Arturo Toscanini ‘discovered’ Stich-Randall, calling her “the find of the century”. He engaged her for a series of performances with his NBC Symphony Orchestra, including the High Priestess in AIDA and Nannetta in FALSTAFF (1950), both of which remain available commercially. She also sang regularly for him in his last years, as a soprano soloist in many choral works.
She went on to become a beloved star of the Vienna State Opera, where she performed regularly for two decades. In 1963 the Austrian government conferred on Stich-Randall the honorary title of Kammersängerin; she was the first American to be so honored. She was renowned for her Mozart interpretations.
Today, Stich-Randall is perhaps best-known for her participation as Sophie in the classic 1959 recording of DER ROSENKAVALIER conducted by Herbert von Karajan and featuring Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig.
It was from Stich-Randall’s LP on the Westminster label that I became familiar with the great Mozart soprano arias.
Teresa Stich-Randall – Non mi dir ~ DON GIOVANNI
There is a brief post-script to my Stich-Randall story. In 1980, she returned to Connecticut to care for her aging mother. One Sunday morning, I read in the Hartford Courant a small notice that Stich-Randall was giving a recital that afternoon at a church in New Hartford. It was impossible for me to get there, but I sent her a letter and was surprised to receive a charming reply from the soprano. After her mother passed away, Stich-Randall returned to Vienna where she died in 2007.
Oberon's Glade 