Star soprano Anna Prohaska: “Some directors and managers are like vampires”

2024-09-10 12:28:29

Star soprano Anna Prohaska has become more cautious with operas. This is not only due to their pandemic experiences, but also to the power plays of leaders and leaders. But he sang more songs. After a very important presentation, he revealed how he planned his future career.

“We are sitting in the opera house.” This is how a small afternoon of music at the Berlin Chamber Music Hall began. And because the song “Memories” by Charles Ives plays with memories and clichés, Anna Prohaska organizes her work well.

At first his piano partner Pierre-Laurent Aimard had to search for him in a struggle, then he rushed in apparently too late, but immediately took a secret seat next to him on the piano bench, raised and confused. It warbles, trumpets, trills and even whistles: the first laugh has arrived and applause erupts. The entrance was successful, people took with and immersed in the world of lyricism. With many unknown songs by American Ives that have no eternal value, divided into four groups, released in the first part with Russian songs such as Shakespeare’s music by Igor Stravinsky and in the second part with post-Wagnerian, sounds early impressionist by Claude Debussy based on his own words.

A difficult program for everyone, a demanding mind, demanding listening, also damaged, yet surprisingly unknown. Representative for the Berlin Music Festival and its director Winrich Hopp, who brought the British-Austrian musician to Ives. And it is also representative of this professional artist. He explained that he listened to 400 Ives songs, then made his selection and also decided on additional composers himself. In addition to Aimard’s confident technique, otherwise appearing as a solo pianist, he was the only artist who offered two evenings at the early season orchestra meeting at the Berlin Philharmonic: with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra under Antonello Manacorda, Prohaska also sings Music orchestrations provided mainly by Ives and Gustav Mahler first, then again in Verona and at the Lucerne Festival.

Anna is different. It has always been so. He has had a special musical talent since childhood, he has an idiosyncratic timbre, an immediate stage presence, which the 41-year-old knows how to grow with a passion even hotter than opera and concert stages. go. She is spontaneous like a girl, passionate, but now also has the composure of a more mature woman. Her stage dress also speaks of this, sophisticated black with ins and outs, semi-transparent, with strappy shoes, big security pin, parted hair, big arm jewelry and black lipstick. It’s still a little gothic, just like its early years.

“It was a good day, I think the message got across, people were very involved,” he concluded in the chaotic dressing room immediately after the concert. And so his season began as brilliantly as it ended, with a highly acclaimed stage performance with György Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments” for him and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja – which he then performed, without a scene, but with command similar to the stage, also with the Salzburgers Festival, where he also took part in Arnold Schönberg’s second string quartet; After all, it was his 150th birthday.

“Tea is religion”

And as usual, the first thing Anna Prohaska does on Sunday morning after receiving her voice test (“the instruments and the lip rounds, is everything still there?”) is to get out of bed and go to the kettle to drink Earl Gray tea: “For me there is nothing else. Bergamot has made me very addicted and there is no life before tea, it is like a religion.”

Then there’s yoga and stretching, “not too much, but the right exercises to release tension and open the chest.” And then he even sings in the shower, “steam, trail, not cruelty, he kindly changes the fact that the vocal cords still have to be aligned first.” He sang a completely new program from memory – except for four Russian songs, on which his old teacher taught him, who taught in Weimar. That’s why you go through all the words again. And it wasn’t just practice with Pierre-Laurent Aimard the days before, they also worked on connections and polishing interfaces during lunch. You know how important it is to get the audience excited.

Today, with the Kulturforum close, he even treats himself to two more exhibitions, Andy Warhol at the Neue Nationalgalerie and Franz Hals at the Kulturforum: “I always do that when I travel, because I can be there with myself immediately before that. a task, But it’s still distracting me from being productive.” And now after the concert we went to the food truck in front of the Philharmonic, where he ordered family and friends to have a little party, kill and relax. And yes, this system, even if it is unique in this form, will continue to develop and individual music companies will be in other clubs “as aphoristic bookmarks”.

The food truck is the rest of Corona. According to Anna Prohaska’s work is divided into around 60 concerts and recitals, 40 percent opera. “That’s where I’m most flexible, that’s where I find my balance, and that’s why I’m working normally during the pandemic. Even though many good operas were canceled for me, but unfortunately I couldn’t do it, like the wife in ‘Innocence’, Kaija Saariaho’s last opera, which started in Aix-en-Provence. and he is now traveling the world as a success”.

She was a member of Daniel Barenboim’s Unter den Linden opera ensemble for a long time, but she has been working irregularly for many years, having restructured her opera slightly. “Mozart’s maids, Blondchen, Zerlina, Despina, they are finished. But I will continue to keep ‘Figaro’-Susanna, later of Barcelona; Just like his ‘Idomeneo’-Ilia.

When it comes to “Figaro” the Countess, however, is still hesitant. “I almost loved it, but in a small house, Mimì Puccini. It is growing in me, I feel it in more orchestral songs, which I still have to overcome in voice. The road from ‘Freischütz’-Ännchen to Agathe will also be due. And then there was Alban Berg. Do I like more ‘Wozzeck’-Marie or Lulu? I do not know yet. “

His voice, slightly breathy and palatal, fragile and opaque, yet penetrating. He wants to care, he listens to them, even when he is currently doing something in depth. After all, it is still incredibly fluid and seductive, in the baroque record that is so loved by Anna Prohaska and today, which climbs without fear of heights. It is a soprano for every style when used properly. Slavonic music awaits you, Leoš Janáček, possibly also Tchaikovsky.

Anna Prohaska is now careful how she chooses with opera because she is not interested in power plays with directors who still believe that they have to break their heroes to get the material they want: “Some directors and some directors are like vampires, who feed on the singers’ anxiety. And he’s been talking to Andrea Breth for a long time, they’re just looking for the right project. “Because I’m not a singing cow who does moo and can’t beat anything to the level – I want to be vulnerable to a degree in order to say something.”

It was wonderful to see Anna Prohaska and Pierre-Laurent Aimard in rehearsals. By the way, the plan was created in the elevator to Aimard’s apartment, in which the two were stuck for more than 90 minutes. And now ideas for improvement are made on the fly, two role experts working together. “I started early, I always do that when I’m not sure.” – “That’s fortissimo, because it’s a song for baritone. We have to fake it, you must at least play it forte!” a season? Otherwise, the seventh and ninth will merge.” – “Let’s make it more dangerous. We don’t want to get stuck in 9/8.”

Everything is perfect in game. And Charles Ives achieved a repertoire triumph on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Vita

Anna Prohaska was born in Neu-Ulm in 1983. Her mother is a musician and historian, her father a director. His grandfather was the director Felix Prohaska, his grandfather the musician Carl Prohaska. He grew up in Vienna, in the house where Johann Strauss wrote “Die Fledermaus”.

He studied at the Music University of Berlin “Hanns Eisler”. In 2006 he came to the State Opera. In 2009 he participated in the Salzburg Festival for the first time. He worked with directors such as Harry Kupfer and Christoph Schlingensief and with directors such as Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle. On September 14, 2024, he will present a program with Hamburg opera composers at the Bayreuth Baroque Festival, from 16th in Arte.