Saturday marked the world premiere performance of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain at the Santa Fe Opera Festival and reviews are already coming in for Delos artist Isabel Leonard:
“Higdon had a fine cast of singers to work with. Baritone Nathan Gunn and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard made a handsome Inman and Ada. Both have rich voices infused with luster that lends clarity. Leonard got the opera’s finest aria, perhaps the only expanse to really merit that term, a deeply affecting number in the second act (“I feel sorry for you”) where she is left alone with the unconscious Stobrod and sings about how she wishes he could appreciate Ruby as she does, covering two octaves and sculpting her lines with passionate sweep.” —James M. Keller, The New Mexican
“Everything was so singable that baritone Gunn (the deserter Inman), soprano Leonard (the woman waiting for him) and Morris (the unscrupulous villain) all did some of their best-ever work.” —David Patrick Sterns, Inquirer Arts Critic
Isabel Leonard: Preludios at the Opera
Isabel Leonard will be signing her new Preludios recording on August 15th at 6:30pm at the Santa Fe Opera Shop!
In Isabel Leonard’s first release on Delos, she explores the riches of Spanish song, in all its varied Iberian forms and styles that can be traced back as far as its millennium-old Moorish influences. The generous program encompasses pure folksongs, folk-influenced art songs, dances and popular theater songs by quite a few of Spain’s finest composers of the late-19th and 20th-centuries: Mompou, Falla, García Lorca, Sanjuán, Granados and Montsalvatge.
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