Press

More rave reviews for Sonya Yoncheva: two of Berlin’s most important newspapers, Tagesspiegel and Morgenpost have published awesome reviews about Ad una Stella, the recital Sonya and Malcolm Martineau performed at the Berliner Philharmonie on April 20:

“A prima donna enchants her audience”

“She is almost unrivaled in opera, but she also masters the more intimate art form: Sonya Yoncheva’s delightful recital at the Berlin Philharmonie.”
(…)
“Song recitals, (…) put into a large concert hall, only work if a famous guest sings, who also knows how to overcome distances in pianissimo. A prima donna assoluta. One like Yoncheva.
A few days ago she appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Petrenko at the Easter Festival in Baden-Baden, as “Iolanta” in Tchaikovsky’s eponymous opera: a signature role. Now Sonya Yoncheva came to Berlin to perform the first piano song recital of her career here. She has worked on twenty little songs, some French, some Italian, with her piano partner Malcolm Martineau, all rarities: a pioneering achievement.

After just a few seconds the hall is electrified

It starts with “L’Invitation au voyage” by Henri Duparc, after Baudelaire. After not even half a minute of the song, with its hypnotic continuous accompanying, over which the voice is laying a mysterious magic of words in a fragrant parlando, the gigantic hall already seems to be getting smaller. … everything focuses on the cone of light on the stage, where Yoncheva is standing at the grand piano. She sings without any trace of effort, radiantly, with easily reached top notes, with balsamic timbre, crystal-clear intonation and delicately dosed mezza di voce. She sings of Utopia or of Venice, a strange city in purple and gold, with canals and boats, luxury and indulgence. When the song is over, we’re all hooked on the threads of this accomplished art, utterly enraptured.
Three other songs by Duparc tell of exotic longings, pain and sorrow, in symbolic images and agogic phrases. This abundance of beauty is almost unbearable. It’s a good thing that Yoncheva’s soft, cloudy French hardly knows any hard consonants. (…)

Standing ovations at the end

“Haï luli” by Pauline Viardot-Gracia is at last so well known that it triggers the first intermittent applause. And after the intermission, … the program laps into fiery drama, and Yoncheva also acts semi-staged. Here, in the Italian Canzoni, she is at home. She serves Puccini’s little song “Sole e amore” almost nonchalantly… . Verdi’s “Ad una stella” is a gem.

This versatile, intelligent singer has already tried her new program elsewhere… . (…) Everywhere, it is reported, there were full houses and brilliant reviews. In Berlin, too, they don’t want to let her go in the end and give her a standing ovation.“
Eleonore Büning, Tagesspiegel

“There are incredible things to discover”

“Star soprano Sonya Yoncheva gets standing ovations at the Philharmonie… .”

“The Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva gives a song recital in the vocal series of the Berlin Philharmonic. (…) There are probably enough organizational reasons why Sonya Yoncheva and the Scottish specialist for song accompaniment Malcolm Martinau’s recital could not take place in the chamber music hall… . The artistic reason for this becomes clear during the opening bars of Henri Duparc’s first song. It’s Yoncheva’s voice.”

The 40-year-old star singer, who began her international career a good ten years ago as a stand-in for Anna Netrebko – could still fill the Mercedes-Benz Arena even with the intimate art of the piano song. It would be too simple and too little to say that this was “only” due to a great Eastern European operatic voice. Sonya Yoncheva not only has a soft timbre with so many colors that such a recital is really a gift for Berliners to marvel at. The fact that she is owning the hall is not due to the carefully staged change from a black to a blue evening dress over the course of the evening, but to her musical presence.

A song program that thrives on musical contrasts

(…) There are unbelievable things to discover: a piece by Duparc which creates in the piano lines a stone columned hall and in the next moment rolling waves in front of the ears of the audience; a piece by Ernest Chausson, which brings together the tenor part of the piano with the low register of the soprano with ingenious compositional imagination. This is one of those moments in which the almost indescribable musical presence of Sonya Yoncheva, because it never boasts as such, is brought before our ears: It’s not just the beginnings, it’s also the ends of the phrases that she uses in a charismatic, vibrant way of her own – one rarely hears that with this consistency.

Yoncheva and Martinau blindly trust each other in small delays, text interpretations and tempo changes, everything works – and everything in the sense of the emotions presented. The works they present are something like the Romanesque counterpart to the German art song: a piece by Giuseppe Martucci, for example, who “al folto bosco”, “in the dense forest’s quiet shadow” shows a Wagnerian orchestral complexity, a piece by the young Puccini, who tries his hand at impressionistic descriptions of the soul and a piece by Pauline Viardot-García, whose very own tone is only just being discovered in European art music.

Sonya Yoncheva knows how to create all these states of nature and soul in the simplest way and at the same time with great spiritual penetration. … the audience at the Philharmonie … shows with standing ovations at the end that its enthusiasm for this currently unique art of singing is rightly boundless.
Matthias Nether, Berliner Morgenpost