By Fredric Dannen
Some ideas are so obvious that it unaccountably takes years for people to see what’s right in front of them. The Metropolitan Opera inaugurated a singing competition in the 1930s for young North American talent, and opera stars such as Jessye Norman, Thomas Hampson, Teresa Stratas, and Renée Fleming all kickstarted their careers as contest winners. The contest administrators, the MetOpera National Council, or MONC, evidently neglected to consult a map, because it took until just a decade ago for MONC to figure out that Mexico is part of the North American continent.
When the MONC competition finally was opened to young Mexican singers in 2018, San Miguel was selected as the audition site. That first year, Yunuet Laguna, a young native of Zacatecas, took first prize. She now has her own dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera, and last season sang the role of Kate Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly. She’s been written up in Opera News, and appears headed for stardom.
Since then, apart from pandemic interruption, there has been a special concert in San Miguel every March to feature the most recent winners of the MONC competition in Mexico. Music lovers in San Miguel have an opportunity to hear singers with the potential for international careers.
This year, a pair of Mexican MONC winners, both sopranos with star potential, will perform at the San Miguel Playhouse on Sunday, March 19, at 5pm. The singers are Cristina Nakad, 27, from Puebla City, and Dulce Guadarrama, 28, from Estado de México. Pianist Andres Sarré will accompany them.
This is no ordinary program. Instead of the usual assortment of arias, each soprano will perform what is known in opera as a monodrama, a work for one singer, fully staged with costumes and stage props, directed by theater veteran Ragnar Conde. The opera literature contains many superb monodramas, from Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung to William Bolcom’s From the Diary of Sally Hemings.
The acknowledged masterwork of the form is Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), with the libretto by Jean Cocteau, the French writer and filmmaker, based on his play, about a woman in a last, desperate phone conversation with her lover, who is leaving her to marry someone else. In 2020, the play was adapted as a short movie directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Tilda Swinton.
Cristina Nakad will perform Poulenc’s one-act opera. Nakad, who so impressed the MONC judges, has a lot of stage experience for her young years, having enacted roles such as Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the female lead in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
The other monodrama on the program is an excerpt from a longer opera, Zerbinetta’s bravura monologue from Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The performer, Dulce Guadarrama, was recently one of the stars of the opera gala given annually at the Teatro Macedonio Alcalá in Oaxaca, with the Oaxaca Symphony Orchestra.
The San Miguel Playhouse was chosen for this concert because this is a theatrical event, and because the theater has a system for English and Spanish supertitles, which will make it possible for the audience to follow every word of both dramas.
Reserved seat tickets are 600 and 500 pesos, and may be purchased at boletocity.com, or at the door starting an hour before the performance.
Music
Metropolitan Opera Competition Winners in Concert
Featuring Cristina Nakad and Dulce Guadarrama, sopranos, and Andres Sarré, piano
One-act music dramas by Francis Poulenc and Richard Strauss
Sun., Mar, 19, 5pm
San Miguel Playhouse, Av Independencia 82
Reserved seats: 600 and 500 pesos, available at boletocity.com or at the door
