There are no obituaries this month. Those shown below are from the January edition
Sena Jurinac 1921-2011
One of the most remarkable singers of the post-war period and a beloved star of the Vienna Staatsoper for nearly four decades, soprano Sena Jurinac died aged 90 on November 22nd at her home near Augsburg.
The keynote of Jurinac’s artistry was an incomparable naturalness of expression, combined with a purity of tone and line, that illuminated every role she undertook. Although Mozart and Strauss operas made her name internationally, Jurinac excelled in a stylistically diverse repertoire extending over three centuries.
Born Srebrenka Jurinac of Croatian and Viennese parentage, the singer was a native of Travnik (then part of Yugoslavia, now Bosnia). Showing talent early, she studied at Zagreb’s music academy and was not yet 21 when she debuted with that city’s opera company as Mimì in 1942. Among her other roles there were Countess Almaviva, Marguerite, Nedda, Marenka and a Parsifal Flowermaiden. Following a summer of study on a scholarship to the Salzburg Mozarteum, she received a contract from the Vienna Staatsoper. Shortly after her arrival in the city, however, the house was bombed, and it was six months before she made her debut – on May 1st, 1945, as Cherubino, once performances resumed at the Theater an der Wien.
Jurinac appeared constantly with the Staatsoper company (her first season included more than 150 performances). She became as integral a part of Vienna’s legendary Mozart ensemble as were Schwarzkopf, Seefried, Della Casa, Dermota and Kunz. There was a shortage of appropriate mezzos to sing Cherubino and Dorabella, but the young Jurinac, although a soprano, already boasted a substantial middle register, and both those roles were assigned to her.
It was, in fact, as Dorabella that Jurinac’s association with Glyndebourne began in 1949, when the festival presented its Così fan tutte production at Edinburgh. On ‘home ground’ in Sussex the following year, Glyndebourne presented Jurinac as a dazzling Fiordiligi. Further appearances there through 1956 confirmed Jurinac as a singularly impressive Mozartian (she sang Cherubino, Ilia, Donna Elvira, Donna Anna and Countess Almaviva). Glyndebourne audiences also savoured her standard-setting portrayals of Strauss’s Composer and Octavian.
London welcomed the soprano initially in 1947 when she appeared at Covent Garden as a member of the touring Staatsoper ensemble. The home company presented her as Butterfly in 1959, with later seasons including Donna Elvira, Tosca, the Marschallin and the Tauride Iphigénie.
Jurinac appeared in major Italian and German houses, as well as at the Colón in Buenos Aires. Her announced Met debut creating the title role of Barber’s Vanessa never took place (the official reason was illness, but she indicated many years later that she didn’t like the role and had never agreed to perform it). She did sing Desdemona at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1963 and San Francisco Opera heard her in six roles between 1959 and 1980: the Composer, Eva, Donna Anna, Butterfly, the Marschallin and the Kostelnicka.
The Janácek role would hardly have been anticipated from the silver-voiced Jurinac of the early 1950s. The voice, however, gained steadily in power and breadth. Even in 1955 Jurinac was able to sing the Forza Leonora in Glyndebourne’s production at the Edinburgh Festival. Over the years certain large-scale roles were tried once and then discarded (Senta, for example), but Jurinac did move comfortably from Ilia to Elettra, Marzelline to Leonore, Jenufa to the Kostelnicka and Octavian to the Marschallin. It was in the latter role that the Kammersängerin made her farewell to the Staatsoper in 1982.
Song recitals remained an important part of Jurinac’s activities throughout her career (she last performed in London at the Wigmore Hall as late as 1981). The soprano was especially celebrated for Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, the music that (along with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9) finally introduced her to New York in 1968, when she appeared with the city’s Philharmonic under Bernstein.
Jurinac’s commercial recordings are comparatively limited: Mozart roles – Ilia and the Countess with the Glyndebourne forces, Cherubino and the Erste Dame under Karajan, Donna Anna under Fricsay – plus Leonore (Knappertsbuch), Octavian (Kleiber), the Composer (Leinsdorf) and recital discs of Schumann (an exquisite Frauenliebe und -leben) and Brahms. Supplementing this is a great deal of live-performance material, the result being that Jurinac’s discography now includes a wide variety of Lieder and more than 20 complete operas, several in multiple performances. She is seldom heard in less than superb voice, whether as Gluck’s Euridice (Vienna), Wagner’s Elisabeth (La Scala), Verdi’s Elisabetta (Salzburg), Tchaikovsky’s Lisa (Florence, in Italian; Berlin, in French), Mussorgsky’s Marina (Salzburg), or in such unexpected roles as Monteverdi’s Poppea (Vienna) and Massenet’s Manon (Hamburg radio performance). Testament’s release a few years ago of Jurinac’s Leonore from Covent Garden under Klemperer was a genuinely momentous occasion. Among late-career performances, the soprano’s greatest achievement was the Kostelnicka. That portrayal can be heard in San Francisco Opera’s 1980 broadcast in which Jurinac is unforgettably paired with Elisabeth Söderström, an artist of markedly similar sensibilities.
Onscreen one can see Jurinac as Octavian (Paul Czinner’s famous feature film, made in Salzburg), the Composer (a live Salzburg performance), Berg’s Marie (the Hamburg Staatsoper’s studio-made film) and – in German-language television films – Desdemona and Suor Angelica. All are essential viewing, showing an unmannered, deeply thoughtful singing actress. As a terrific change of pace, Jurinac in late career filmed the Witch in Hänsel und Gretel for Unitel, proving herself a priceless comedienne.
We can remember Jurinac most fittingly by returning to two classic Strauss performances: the Vier letzte Lieder (under Busch, Stockholm, 1951, released many years later by EMI) and the Salzburg Composer (1964, under Böhm, available on DVD from the TDK label). The exquisite serenity of the former and the passionate inner fire of the latter provide especially vivid souvenirs of a unique and irreplaceable artist.
Jurinac spent her last years as a sought-after teacher and coach. She was married twice: first to her Glyndebourne colleague, baritone Sesto Bruscantini, from 1953 to 1956; and then, from 1965 until his death in 2005, to Dr Josef Lederle, a prominent surgeon.
Roger Pines
Montserrat Figueras 1942-2011
The death of Montserrat Figueras from cancer at the age of 69 has robbed the world of music – not only Early Music – of a voice of luminosity and a person of extraordinary warmth and wisdom. With her husband, Jordi Savall, she explored a vast repertoire, including Sephardic songs, Catalan folk music, Iberian Renaissance song, Monteverdi and Mozart, always with a combination of musical (and musicological) intelligence and a sense of humility in the face of great music.
She was born into a music-loving family in Barcelona and embraced music early, being involved with Enric Gispert in the establishment of the Medieval music group Ars Musicae. It was during this period that she met Savall, and the two went to study at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and the Music Academy in Basle, marrying in 1968.
Hespèrion XX (since the new millennium XXI), founded in 1974, became the vehicle for the couple’s artistic vision. Amongst their most striking early projects, which retain all their freshness and sense of exploration, are ‘El Barroco Español’ (1978) and the outstanding ‘Llibre Vermell’ (1978). In 1987 Figueras and Savall returned to Barcelona and founded the vocal ensemble La Capella Reial de Catalunya, with which remarkable projects devoted principally to Iberian music were undertaken, including the transcendently beautiful ‘Cant de la Sibil.la’, recorded in 1988, in which Figueras’s voice was the central focus. In the same year they recorded Monteverdi’s Vespers, and in 1991 Mozart’s Requiem, to both of which Figueras’s velvet singing brought something completely new. During this period they also kept up a non-stop schedule of performing and recording large swathes of the Iberian Renaissance repertoire, both sacred and secular, which formed the linchpin of their work.
In 1998 Figueras and Savall founded their own label, Alia Vox, often revisiting repertoire they had worked on before for EMI and Astrée, but also developing into new areas – the lullaby disc ‘Ninna Nanna’ contains not only Early and folk music but new pieces by Arvo Pärt – and developing projects that are both recording and book, devoted to themes such as Columbus, Cervantes and the Borgia Dynasty, and increasingly to inter-cultural exchange in such projects as ‘Jerusalem’ and, most recently, ‘La Sublime Porte – Voix d’Istanbul’.
Figueras was awarded numerous distinctions during the course of her life, receiving for her recordings the Grand Prix de l’Académie du Disque Français, the Edison Klassik and the Grand Prix de la Nouvelle Académie du Disque. In 2003 the French government made her an Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2008 she and Savall were appointed Artists for Peace by UNESCO and in 2011 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan Government, and won a Grammy for the ‘Dinastia Borgia’ book-CD.
Montserrat Figueras is survived by her husband and their children, Arianna and Ferran Savall, with both of whom she collaborated professionally.
Ivan Moody
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