Hitting the high notes – SA’s divas soar in Cape Town as Operalia comes to Africa for the first time

South African 2023 Operalia participant, Sakhiwe Mkosana. Image: Supplied / Artscape

By Keith Bain

1 Nov 2023

From Brittany Smith in La traviata to Cape Town hosting the world’s greatest opera competition, South African voices are having a moment.

It was Thursday, two nights before the Rugby World Cup final, and you really had to be there to understand, to feel it, to have the opera breathe its special magic into your soul.

For a few hours we were transported from the Artscape Theatre auditorium to a very different Paris, one where, instead of a floodlit Stade de France and a nation’s prayers for Siya Kolisi, we were being enchanted by the music of Giuseppe Verdi, in the grip of world-class singing and a frankly mind-bending staging of his 170-year-old crowd-pleaser, La traviata.

If you thought the rugby was heart-stopping, you obviously don’t realise how much drama an Italian composer is capable of cramming into a tragedy.

La traviata, about a high-class courtesan who gives up her whirlwind hedonistic lifestyle in exchange for true love – only to end up, by Act III, at death’s door, frail and ashen – really packs in the emotions.

For the audience as much as Violetta, the “fallen woman” of the title, it is jammed with glorious arias and beautiful duets, and even when the chorus sings about partying it up in the first act, your heart has reason to soar. But, as someone from the audience pointed out during the second interval: “You just know someone’s going to die, don’t you?”

divas Brittany Smith Siphe Kwani and Brittany Smith in 'La Traviata'. (Image: Danie Coetzee)

Yes, it is a tragedy, and nothing can prevent that beautiful music and those intense expressions of love conveyed through lavish singing from ultimately breaking your heart as it all ends very differently to what transpired on the rugby field over the weekend.

What truly set this production apart was its uncanny psychological depth and cutting-edge aesthetic. It was directed and designed by virtuoso theatre-maker Marí Borstlap who – to use a metaphor from a completely different ball game – absolutely hit it out of the park.

Her innovative set included a transparent rectangular box in which some of the action took place and which had sliding doors that were used to symbolise various degrees of entrapment and isolation, depending on whether characters were inside or outside the box. Added to this were dramatic lighting cues, otherworldly costumes and huge backdrop videos, all of it adding layer after layer to a kind of timeless parallel universe that was evoked on stage.

And while all these individual elements elevated the whole, the pièce de résistance had to be Cape Town soprano Brittany Smith who played Violetta and consequently endured an entire gamut of emotional peaks and troughs.

Operalia 2017 winner, tenor Levy Sekgapane. (Image: Kartal Karagedik)

By the end of the performance, I was so caught in the grip of her emotional reality, that I’d forgotten Smith was a singer on a stage. It came as a genuine shock when she arrived for the curtain call, wiping away tears that were both her own and those of her character. The standing ovation went on forever, and rightfully so.

To anyone who wasn’t already aware, what La traviata made abundantly clear is that Smith has become the opera version of a rock star: a diva capable of transporting audiences beyond reality – even beyond imagination.

Smith, who won this year’s Fleur du Cap Award for best female opera performance (for her turn in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, produced by Cape Town Opera in 2022), gave the kind of performance that lets you know South African opera is in a moment.

It really is. Quite literally.

This week, Plácido Domingo’s Operalia, the world’s most prestigious singing competition, is being co-hosted by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and Cape Town Opera at Artscape through 5 November. It’s the first time in its 30-year history that the event is being held in Africa.

The competition, hugely significant in the music world, helped launch the international careers of two South African opera superstars, Pretty Yende and Levy Sekgapane.

Yende, who has gone from rural Piet Retief in Mpumalanga to headline engagements at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, is about as close to a household name as one finds in the world of opera. You might have caught her performing at the coronation of Charles III in April. The monarch-in-waiting had heard her sing at the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s 75th anniversary celebrations at Windsor Castle in 2022 and personally asked her to perform at his crowning.

While Yende has made a name for herself by shattering various glass ceilings (such as being the first black opera singer to perform Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Paris), her singing roots were in South African church choirs (amakhorasi) and school eisteddfods, not to mention singing at home with her family.

She has over the past 20 years become a kind of measure of the unprecedented potential and power of the trained voice; the apotheosis of what the human vocal instrument can achieve. Yende won Operalia in 2011 and she has never looked back.

Sekgapane, a bel canto tenor, won the competition in 2017. He says the boost it gave his career was unprecedented. For the better part of a decade, he’s been based in Munich, Germany. From there he is almost constantly on tour – across Europe and now also regularly in the US. He has become a specialist in the role of Count Almaviva, the young Spanish grandee in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, an opera that is always being performed somewhere. He says he’s lost count of how many times he’s sung the part.

Sekgapane calls legendary Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli his “stage wife”, having performed with her on a tour last year. And he has recently toured Europe with American tenor Robert Brownlee, one of opera’s most in-demand singers. He’s also sung with Plácido Domingo himself.

In May, shortly after Yende had raised the roof at Westminster Abbey, Sekgapane had the rare opportunity to perform in Cape Town (where he somewhat reluctantly studied opera). He was here to sing the role of Nadir, a lovestruck fisherman, in Cape Town Opera’s semi-staged production of The Pearl Fishers, an obscure early work by Georges Bizet (who later wrote Carmen). Brittany Smith was in that production, too, playing a priestess who becomes one part of an elaborate love triangle. They were both ravishing.

Sekgapane, who was raised in the small Free State town of Kroonstad (where he sang in church and school, and by age 13 was imitating Pavarotti), says it’s true that South African opera is having a moment. He says he’s become aware of it through the manner in which European audiences respond to South African voices during recitals and at full-scale productions.

“They’re crazy about these concerts,” he says.

“People are talking about the talent coming out of this country. Everybody in the business is talking about us, too. My colleagues say things like, “Oh, my god! What do you guys eat there?”’

It’s long been a matter of almost mysterious speculation, leading some to suggest that South Africa’s soul-stirring voices are the result of some mystical alchemy of oxygen, water and fierce African sunlight.

Sekgapane says it has very little to do with either diet or climate. “It is in our blood,” he says. “Music is in our veins… we are born with it, this something special.”

He believes it’s down to our country’s rich diversity and our nation’s culture of celebration, something that invariably always involves singing.

“We celebrate almost every moment by singing. Funerals, weddings, any big moment, we are singing. And our huge choir competitions have long been an important tradition. We are always singing – it’s part of our lives, part of who we are.”

That tradition could be witnessed in Paris on Saturday night when Siya Kolisi sang into a microphone in front of everyone at Stade de France.

And, in Cape Town, all week long, there will be voices ringing out, raising the rafters at Artscape as some of the world’s most talented opera singers compete to follow in the footsteps of Yende and Sekgapane, two of our opera superstars.

The weeklong competition not only means that top international singers are in Cape Town to compete, but that some of the most promising opera talent from South Africa will have a chance to shine on a global stage.

South African 2023 Operalia participant, Nombulelo Yende. (Image: Supplied / Artscape)

South African 2023 Operalia participant, Thando Mjandana. (Image: Supplied / Artscape)

South African 2023 Operalia participant, Luvo Maranti. (Image: Supplied / Artscape)

South African 2023 Operalia participant, Sakhiwe Mkosana. (Image: Supplied / Artscape)

Among the rising stars shortlisted to compete is Yende’s younger sister, Nombulelo, another skilled soprano who has been winning competitions and carving out a career for herself in Europe.

Other South Africans in the competition are tenors Luvo Maranti and Thando Mjandana, baritone Sakhiwe Mkosana and mezzo-soprano Siphokazi Molteno.

For the singers, much rides on the competition. For South African opera, it is evidence that we are indeed having a moment. DM

Placido Domingo’s Operalia is being held at Artscape Opera House; the two quarterfinal rounds (seven hours each) are on 30 and 31 October, the semifinal (five hours) is on 1 November, and the main competition (two hours) and final announcement are on 5 November. Tickets via Computicket.

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