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NADINE KOUTCHER was crowned BBC Cardiff Singer of the World at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall at the weekend, beating off 20 singers to carry off the £15,000 prize.
It was a year of phenomenally high standards, justifying Cardiff’s claim to host the “world’s greatest singing competition.”
The prize money may be modest but there are many additional spin-offs, including a piece of music composed for the winner by John Lunn, to be premiered at next year’s BBC Proms.
The 32-year-old Koutcher gave everything in seven days of intense competition.
For her, it began a week before when she was the first singer on stage for the song prize which runs in tandem with the main event.
She hit the high notes in every sense with her performance of The Bell Song by Delibes and her repertoire also included Ach, ich liebte by Mozart and Marfa’s aria from The Tsar’s Bride by Rimsky-Korsakov. Her consummate technical ability captured the audience’s hearts.
The Ukrainian tenor Oleksiy Palchykov, who won the heat of the main competition with the sheer beauty of his voice, had been to Paris for opera rehearsals in between which may explain his choice of a less demanding programme for the final. The other finalist was Lauren Michelle, the sophisticated soprano from the US.
The £5,000 song prize went to the 28-year-old South Korean bass Jongmin Park, whose roller-coaster week also saw him make the final of the main competition.
Beaten in the heat for the main prize by Palchykov, he picked himself up for the song prize heat, got to that final and then heard that he was the wild card for the main final.
In the song prize final he will be remembered for the winning personality flowing through his performance of Francesco Tosti’s Ideale and the impatient enthusiasm of his performance of Du Nam Cho’s Boat Song, sung in Korean.
In the final of the main competition he gave another masterful performance and another who seized his chance was the 29-year-old Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat.
Originally a reserve who didn’t made the final 20 singers, he won the public vote for the Joan Sutherland Audience Prize, worth £2,000.
We speak of lyric tenors but he is a powerful yet gentle lyric baritone and it was a privilege for Cardiff to present this singer, already a hero in his own country, to the rest of the world.
