Joyce el khoury biography of rory

What led you to choose Rosina Storchio – perhaps most famous as Puccini’s original Butterfly – as the subject for your new album?

Over the last 10 years, when I started to sing verismo roles like Madama Butterfly, Suor Angelica and others, I have heard often from different singers, conductors and managers that the established way to sing these roles was only for dramatic sopranos. I took this approach as the established rule for good reasons until I checked the score, read Puccini’s letters, and in the end heard the old recordings of Rosina Storchio. I had a hunch that there was something wrong with the established opinion but kept it to myself for a while. Her voice and approach were the reason for this album. It revealed a truth that had been buried wrongfully.

Ermonela Jaho. Photograph © Fadil Berisha

What do you think it was it about Storchio that made so many important composers line up to write roles for her?

Storchio was a pure lyrical soprano that not only Puccini, but almost all the verismo composers begged to debut their “dramatic” new operas. Composers needed veracity and they couldn’t care less...

If there’s one thing that the Santa Fe Opera’s new production of Bizet’s Carmen proved last Friday night, it’s the power of positive projection. And I don’t mean that à la Freud.

The SFO is no stranger to newfangledness—witness the then-innovative seatback titles installed in 1998. This summer the shock of the new entails a sophisticated apparatus for projecting film and video images onstage to augment the company's hitherto conventional scenic package. A major rebuild of the lighting booth had to be accomplished, plus developing complex film and videotape chops.

There's no doubt that the SFO's new system works smoothly, effectively, stylishly in the current Carmen. Maybe it works almost too well. I came away impressed by the screened images but dismayed by Stephen Lawless' splashy stage direction. While the production may be hyper-energetic, amply provided with eye-candy and often fun to watch, it's about as shallow as the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez on a hot summer day.

Which by the way is not an entirely inappropriate metaphor, since Lawless shifted the action from exotic, gypsified España to a gritty border town that could be Juárez around 60 years back. We're not smuggling whatevers across the border as in the Prosper Mé

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