Berlin 24-04-2010
Victoria de los Ángeles www.foto-face.com
Victoria de los Ángeles (in Catalan, Victòria dels Àngels) (November 1, 1923 – January 15, 2005) was a Spanish Catalan soprano and recitalist of the highest rank whose career began in the early 1940s and reached its height in the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.
While she is not a ‘Spanish Composer’ as such - we felt that her importance to Spanish musical life in general and her unique place as a Spanish classical artist without equal in the repertoire she sang – makes her a member of this other august grouping of Spanish composers, whose works she often sang and promoted.
Therefore we felt it only fitting to including her in the OTA-Berlin new apartment building as a ‘Spanish Composer’ or ‘Spanish Musical Personality’ would perhaps be a more accurate description.
Victoria de los Ángeles must be counted among the finest singers of the past last century – with an astoundingly pure and beautiful voice that at the height of her career in the 1950s and early 1960s had no equal –[ please don’t even think of mentioning Maria Callas – who could act better than she could sing].
Her voice was flexible as a full lyric soprano should be along with having enough weight [we are not referring to ‘weight’ as in kilos – Victoria de los Angeles remained an attractive and slim woman all of her life] and volume to sing both lyric and dramatic roles.
She also sang some roles more commonly associated with the mezzo-soprano repertoire. In her early years in particular she also sang a good deal of florid music. While she later made fewer appearances in opera, she continued to give recitals, focusing on mostly French and Spanish art songs, into the 1990s.
Born Victoria de los Ángeles López García into a humble family in Barcelona, she studied at the Barcelona Conservatory, graduating in just three years in 1941 at age 18. That year, she made her operatic debut as Mimì at the Liceu, but then resumed her musical studies.
In 1945, she returned to the Liceu to make her professional debut as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro. After winning first prize in the Geneva International Competition in 1947, she sang Salud in Falla’s La vida breve with the BBC in London in 1948.
In 1949 she made her first appearance in the Paris Opéra as Marguerite. The following year, she debuted in Salzburg and Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as Mimi, and the United States with a recital at Carnegie Hall. In March 1951, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in New York as Marguerite, singing with the company for ten years. In 1952 she became an instant favorite in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colón as Madama Butterfly. She returned many times until 1979.
She made widely acclaimed recordings of La vida breve, La bohème, Pagliacci, and Madama Butterfly. The last three paired her with the outstanding tenor Jussi Björling.
She also sang at La Scala in Milan from 1950 to 1956. In 1957 she sang at the Vienna State Opera.
After making her debut at the Bayreuth Festival as Elisabeth in 1961, she devoted herself principally to a concert career. However, for the next twenty years, she continued to make occasional appearances in one of her favourite operatic roles, Bizet’s Carmen. She was among the first Spanish-born operatic singers to record the complete opera; she recorded it in 1958, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham using the recitatives added by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet’s death.
Though Carmen lay comfortably in her range, she nevertheless sang major soprano roles, best known of which were Donna Anna, Manon, Nedda, Desdemona, Cio-Cio-San, Mimi, Violetta and Mélisande. Like Montserrat Caballé, she was a true exponent of bel canto singing.
De los Ángeles performed regularly in song recitals with pianists Gerald Moore and Geoffrey Parsons, occasionally appearing with other eminent singers, such as Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
She sang at the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, aged 68.
On January 15, 2005, she died of heart attack in Barcelona at age the age of 81.
[Biography based on information from WIKIPEDIA]
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As a continuation of our’ OTA-Berlin Constituency Blog Mini-Composer-Biography Series’ we present the eleventh of the Spanish Composers for the new OTA-Berlin serviced apartments building opening in beginning of May 2010 at Metzer Strasse 8 in Berlin Mitte
Tags: Victoria de los Ángeles
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