Press

“Viva la morte insiem!”
“It’s the final high notes the two singers blast out together before being led to the scaffold on a wooden cart, accompanied by mighty orchestral sounds.
But it was not only in their final duet that Michael Fabiano and Sonya Yoncheva captivated the audience.
Fabiano sang the title role with his lyrical and finely resonant tenor, confidently and powerfully hitting every high note.
Yoncheva, as Maddalena, appeared very girlish at first, as the role requires, but over the course of the evening, she revealed increasingly profound emotions and richer nuances.”
Helmut Chr. Mayer, Kurier

“Sonya Yoncheva’s soprano (…) lent both the ladylike elegance of Maddalena and the drastic depths of her soul’s torment expressive force.
A pair that, with their sheer vocal power, seemed almost able to defy death itself, and who were spurred on rather than overwhelmed by Pier Giorgio Morandi’s decibel-rich conducting.”
Christoph Irrgeher, Der Standard

“The first impression is contrasted by preparations for a noble soirée, which simply but perfectly illustrates the backdrop of the French Revolution, especially when the message is conveyed as compellingly as it is by George Petean and Sonya Yoncheva:
here, the pent-up anger of the subordinate; there, the conflicted noblewoman burdened with her luxury problems.
On one hand, she admires Chénier’s humanistic ideals; on the other, she has no comforting words for the poor servant Bersi, who feels ugly and later survives by resorting to occasional prostitution to support her mistress.
The energy with which Yoncheva and Petean extracted the maximum impact from their first appearances, where others simply churn out hollow phrases, carried through the entire evening, with Michael Fabiano in the title role standing in no way behind them.
(…)
Although Maddalena has only one famous aria, “La mamma morta,” it offers great interpretive scope, which Yoncheva used generously: a dark, husky tone for the terrifying account of her expulsion from her home, into which a bright and pure tone of hope breaks like a beam of light – this is always a highlight, and yet Yoncheva still stamped it with her own personal style.
A completely different kind of goosebumps was delivered by Petean with the cynically triumphant “Nemico della patria,”
and his transformation from Saul to Paul was more convincingly portrayed than by many others.”
Bachtrack

[Photo: Michael Pöhn / Wiener Staatsoper]