SF Opera Lab to Feature Super Diva in Recital

We were wowed by her at the world premiere of “Two Women when she starred with SFO in June 2015. Now there’s a chance to see internationally acclaimed soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci in a unique and intimate setting.

SF Opera Lab presents three performances of Francis Poulenc’s 1958 monodrama La Voix humaine (The Human Voice) starring Antonacci with pianist Donald Sulzen on March 11, 14 and 17, 2017.

In these rare appearances outside of Europe, Antonacci will perform “Elle,” the distraught character at the heart of the opera and one of the soprano’s most celebrated portrayals, along with a program of French art songs in the intimate, 299-seat Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater at the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera.

Based on Jean Cocteau’s play about a woman’s desperate, final phone conversation with a soon-to-be ex-lover, Poulenc’s score complements the rhapsodic narrative with musical tension. A vocal and dramatic tour-de-force, La Voix humaine requires a virtuoso performer and Antonacci has emerged as one of the work’s leading interpreters today.

After a recent performance at New York’s Alice Tully Hall, The New York Times observed, “Ms. Antonacci’s remarkable talent is a suspension between artifice and naturalness, theatricality and subtlety. She may be putting on an act, but she’s also telling the truth.”

La Voix humaine marks Antonacci’s fifth engagement with San Francisco Opera, a relationship that began in 1992 when she performed the title role of Rossini’s Ermione, followed by Adalgisa in Bellini’s Norma in 1998. The Italian soprano thrilled San Francisco Opera audiences in 2015 when she returned to perform two roles in repertory:

Cassandre in Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Cesira in the world premiere of Marco Tutino’s Two Women, the latter a role that was composed with her in mind. The San Francisco Chronicle called her Cassandre “riveting” and proclaimed her Cesira “a dynamo of emotional and vocal majesty.”

Along with La Voix humaine, Antonacci and Sulzen will perform Berlioz’s dramatic ballade “La mort d’Ophélie” (“The Death of Ophelia”) and a series of art songs, including Debussy’s trio of erotic mélodies set to poems by Pierre Louÿs, Chansons de Bilitis, and Poulenc’s seven-part song cycle La fraîcheur et le feu (The Cool and the Fire), which the composer dedicated to Igor Stravinsky.

San Francisco Opera presented Nicolas Joël’s production of La Voix humaine on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House in 1979 with the famed Italian soprano Magda Olivero as Elle, and it was revived in 1986 for American soprano Karan Armstrong.