Elina Garanca at the NCH review: A pleasure from beginning to end

Elina Garanca, NSO/Karel Mark Chichon

National Concert Hall, Dublin

★★★★★

It seemed odd that the National Symphony Orchestra’s celebration of International Women’s Day on Friday didn’t include a single work by a woman. But the programme was also the Dublin debut of the Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, with her conductor husband, Karel Mark Chichon, on the podium. And, as an evening sympathetically showcasing a great woman singer, the occasion was a pleasure from beginning to end.

The repertoire was French, Spanish and Russian (in the language that was dominant when Garanca was born, in 1976, and Latvia was still part of the Soviet Union). Chichon opened with a dashing and disciplined account of Glinka’s dashing Ruslan and Ludmila Overture, in which he managed to banish most of the internal balancing issues and the uncouth climaxes that have been such a disturbing feature in the NSO’s playing of late.

Garanca’s voice is full, rich and deep, her musical manner expressively direct. She doesn’t seem to see the need to oversell either herself or the music. Her undemonstrative certainty in Joan’s Aria from Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans; Plus Grand, dans Son Obscurité from Gounod’s La Reine de Saba; and the altogether better-known Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila was deeply engaging.

[ Classical review: Finghin Collins a tower of strength in Killian Farrell’s unusual, stimulating NSO concert ]

But the generous selection from Bizet’s Carmen in the second half was rewarding in a fuller and freer way. Garanca’s approach to the character was not to try to make her manipulatively seductive, just effortlessly attractive in her self-assurance and her ownership of her surroundings. And even though she did act out in her flaming red dress, it was the lusciousness of the voice and the easy sureness of musical characterisation that made the greatest impact. Rarely does Carmen come across as persuasively as this.

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The purely orchestral numbers were handled with both fire and tenderness, and the Spanish theme of Carmen was set up through brightly orchestrated paso dobles by Pascual Marquina Narro, Santiago Lope and Manuel Penella. Three encores of popular songs brought the highly satisfied audience repeatedly to their feet.