NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Hasmik Grigoryan reaches a new low – in a positive way – and does it on one of the best stages in the world.
A stellar soprano, she will sing the title role in Georges Bizet's Carmen, a mezzo-soprano benchmark, at the Salzburg Festival next summer.
“I thought if I want to do 'Carmen,' I need to do it now because I don't want to do it when I'm 54,” Grigoryan, 44, said before this weekend's concert at New York's Carnegie Hall.
Maria Callas, Leontyne Price, Jesse Norman and Angela Georgiou recorded Carmen but never performed the entire role on stage.
Ana Maria Martinez and Danielle de Niese are the most famous sopranos in recent years to perform live performances of the famous seductress, while Victoria de los Angeles took it up late in her career in the 1970s, and Geraldine Farrar and Rosa Ponsel performed it decades earlier.
Grigoryan will perform eight performances of Carmen starting July 26 in a new production by Gabriela Carrizo with Jonathan Tetelman as Don José, Kristina Mkhitaryan as Michaela and Teodor Currentzis conducting the Utopia Orchestra.
“I wouldn’t bet against her,” said Metropolitan Opera General Director Peter Gelb. “She's very much an old-school singer. She's fearless when it comes to new repertoire.”
Grigoryan will sing at Carnegie Hall on Saturday along with Thomas Hampson, Sondra Radvanovsky, Nadine Sierra, Brian Jagde and Anita Monserrat. This performance is unusually timed for a period when traveling singers are often home for the holidays. She will join Hampson in the final scene of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, an opera she will perform at the Met beginning April 20.
Promoter Eugene Wintour, organizing his first event in the United States, wanted to unite stars who had not sung together before. Advance ticket sales for the Carnegie have been slow, and Wintour said he is planning another star-studded concert next year, but before the holidays.
“In Europe, Christmas and New Year's concerts sell out instantly,” he said through a translator. “Working here in the states requires training.”
Grigoryan left Vilnius, Lithuania on Friday; to Zurich and then to New York, heading straight from JFK International Airport to rehearsal at Riverside Church.
“I really promised myself that I wouldn't be absent during Christmas because it's the only day where the whole family, we kind of gather in one place, and it's a very, very important day for me,” she said.
The daughter of tenor Gegham Grigoryan, she made her operatic debut in 2004 as Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni in Norway and has since become one of the world's leading dramatic sopranos. Her current season includes the title roles in Giacomo Puccini's Turandot and Manon Lescaut, as well as Richard Strauss's Salome, and she has tentatively scheduled Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for 2029 at the Vienna State Opera.
Although she sang Michaela, Carmen has a lower tessitura and breaking vocal boundaries can be controversial. When Ponselle first headlined Carmen at the Met in 1935, Olin Downes wrote in The New York Times: “We have never heard Miss Ponselle sing so poorly.”
“If you feel like you have the notes, you have the personality, you have the desire, and you are a star like Hasmik, or you are a star like Ana Maria Martinez, and the theater will give it to you, hallelujah,” said soprano Lisette Oropeza.
Martinez made her debut as Carmen in 2014 at the Houston Grand Opera at the direction of Anthony Freud, the company's general director from 2006-2011.
“The most terrifying aspect of Carmen is the lack of vocals… It's much more about command of the stage.” Martinez said. “Hasmik will be incredible in this role simply because of her stage presence and her magnetism.”
Grigoryan's first performance as Carmen is expected to attract significant attention in the world of classical music.
“I started to live the role a little bit day by day,” she said. “I never know if I can sing something before I start doing it, so maybe this will be my failure? Who knows? We'll see.”
