New Classical Tracks: 'Paris, Mon Amour'

Sonya Yoncheva: Paris, Mon Amour (Sony 501720)

Over the course of the last three months, this young Bulgarian soprano has really become the buzz of the opera world. In 2013 Sonya Yoncheva got a last-minute call from the Metropolitan Opera to fill in as Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto. This season, two leading sopranos cancelled at the last minute. Yoncheva was quickly moved from a supporting part to the lead as Violetta in La Traviata in January. Then at the height of the holiday season, she got the call to play Mimi in La Bohème just five weeks after giving birth to her first child.

"Oh, it was really an incredible feeling," Yoncheva recalls, "I only had like a week to prepare all the parts and see the staging here at the Met. I didn't have the chance to go on stage and rehearse there. My first appearance was when I opened this little wooden door on the stage and I saw all these people, expecting that I do something good, that I sing well. And I remember saying to myself, What did you do? How could you come here and do this crazy thing? But my instincts and the colleagues were supportive and the audience was so warm with me so I understood that it was going to be a special night."

You can hear what's so special about Sonya Yoncheva when you listen to her debut solo recording, Paris, Mon Amour. Sonya celebrates her love of Paris, the city where she first launched her career, by sharing arias from the 19th century golden age of the Belle Epoque.

"So you will find many titles like La Bohème, Traviata," she explains, "because these operas, the action is in Paris. And then you'll find really amazing pieces by Massenet and, two completely unknown pieces to me, like unknown jewels — Charles Lecocq, Les Cent Vierges, and also André Messager, Madame Chrysanthème. I really enjoyed so much, singing these pieces."

One of Sonya's favorites on this new collection was written by Charles Lecocq. "Les Cent Vierges is the last title on my CD and I find this really amazing, it's really beautiful. It was on the list with all of the proposition coming from my label and I said, 'Whoa, this title is very attractive to me. Let's listen to it.' And I started to listen and I really fell in love with the music and with the text. It's about a woman who's traveling all around the world — she saw so many places — but never a place like her Paris and her France. And I thought this could be a great title for my CD."

Madame Chrysantème is the Japanese geisha in André Messager's opera of the same name. The storyline is similar to Puccini's Madame Butterfly. Sonya chose the aria "Le jour sous le soleil béni," because it shows off a different quality in her voice. "I wanted to find some voice that is not so typical to mine," she says. "I have a lyric voice and I wanted to sing this aria with a more light voice. Also, it's very coloratura, if you hear it. It's very light but full of different colors and very elegant."

The deepest colors of Sonya's voice come through in Gounod's Sapho, in an aria that's usually sung by a mezzo-soprano. "When I was a child, I was singing in the choruses and I used to be the lowest voice. I was a contralto. So I was always attracted to this chest voice, very woman, very female. And later on I would sing jazz and I was using this kind of voice. And Gounod … it happens that in my past I sang Dido by Purcell, also written for mezzo and I sang it with old instruments … so the pitch was 395. And so it was really, really low for my voice. But I was really enjoying this sound. And I always find that this is the real color of a woman, these chest voices. And I wanted to put a piece like that in my CD. So that's why I chose Sapho. Also because of its melody, it's just amazing. The music is fantastic."

Paris, Mon Amour is filled with sparkling arias performed by Sonya Yoncheva, a rising star who says making her debut release was an experience she'll never forget. "It was just a few days after I found out I was pregnant," she recalls. "And for me it was really an amazing period. When it happens to a woman, being pregnant, being in love and also those beautiful things coming in her life, she feels like she is almost flying. And I remember recording this with all my heart, with all my love … in this nice, beautiful small town, which is Valencia in the south of Spain. And it was warm — it was January, but still the sun was there. I have only wonderful memories."

Gallery

Fullscreen SlidePrevious Slide

1 of 1

Next Slide