Thursday, August 20, 2015

Wallis Giunta Profile: More Than A Queen Of The Night In Opera

Glamorama: Wallis Giunta captures a styling moment before a high-style photo shoot. (Photo: Facebook)
"This month, the mezzo sings Tiffany in Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky for her Rome debut. Wallis Giunta’s mezzo boasts a silvery top and a hearty midrange, both deployed with crisp diction in an ever-growing repertoire of modern and classic roles. In November, she makes her German debut as Cherubino at Oper Leipzig, where her other assignments through June are Rossini’s Angelina, Siébel in Faust and even a Valkyrie. A July debut in Frankfurt, as Mercédès in Carmen, follows. An alum of the Met’s Lindemann Program, which she completed in 2013, the Canadian began her studies in Ottawa and Toronto, where her first undergrad assignments were quintessential soprano roles — Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Susanna. Now, she says, 'I have high notes, but I can’t live there. It’s not that I have a bad technique and I’m actually a soprano in hiding. The most colorful part of my voice is the middle. So if anyone ever says to me, ‘I think you’re a soprano,’ I say, ‘Well, yes, I am. A mezzo-soprano is just a different kind of soprano, and that’s the kind I am.'" [Source] Watch a video of Wallis Giunta singing "Parto, parto," from Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito, after the jump.