TATYANA TROYANOS

 

Tatyana Troyanos nasceu em Nova Iorque, EUA, em 1938.

  Debutou no New York City Opera em 1963 como Hippolyta, personagem da ópera Sonho de uma Noite de Verão,  de Benjamin Britten.
Gravou uma Carmen memorável com Domingo, Te Kanawa e Van Dam, sob a regência de George Solti.
Participou da histórica gravação de West Side Story ao lado de Carreras e Te Kanawa. Ópera composta, regida e dirigida por Leonard Bernstein.

  Sua Voz de Mezzo-soprano era pequena. Compensava com um timbre escuro  e brilhante. Sua versatildade,  aliada a uma sensualidade que irradiava no palco, fez dela uma grande cantora.

 Tenho em vídeo, com a Troyanos, uma Norma onde ela faz par com Joan Sutherland,  gravada no Canadá. Les Troyens de Berlioz gravada no MET, versão fantástica e inesquecível,  mostra Troyanos em uma intepretação arrebatadora. Cavalleria Rusticana,  gravada no MET, onde Troyanos, embora  não tenha a voz para a Santuzza,  compensa com grande interpretação dramática. 

Ainda tem os Contos de Hoffman,Tannhäuser e a Ariadne in Naxos, todas do MET. O filme da ópera Die Teufel von Loudun, de Penderecki, uma chatice na íntegra, e Capriccio,  de Richard Strauss, outra aporrinhação do Strauss.

   Troyanos faleceu em 1993 vítima de câncer. Nesse mesmo ano,  outras duas grandes cantoras de ópera faleceram, também vítimas de câncer, Lucia Popp e Arleen Auger.

  Em 1994, o Metropolitan Opera House de Nova Iorque fez um concerto em homenagem a Tatiana Troyanos, regido por James Levine. Grande homenagem póstuma.
 Por essas e por outras que Tatiana Troyanos é cantora internacional em destaque. Com Louvor e Distinção

Ali Hassan Ayache

O canto suntuoso de Tatiana Troyanos

Ela fez sua estreia em 1976 no Metropolitan Opera House e se tornou uma das mezzo-sopranos mais frequentes nas produções dessa casa. Nasceu em Nova York em 12 de setembro de 1938.

Tatiana Troyanos gravou 17 óperas completas e seu canto está preservado em 35 registros ao vivo produzidos pela Metropolitan disponíveis on-line no site do MET. A cantora morreu prematuramente em 21 de agosto de 1993, aos 54 anos de idade, no auge de sua carreira.

Born in New York City, Troyanos spent her earliest days in the Manhattan neighborhood where Lincoln Center, the new home of the Metropolitan Opera, would arise a quarter century later. She grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and attended Forest Hills High School. 

Her early childhood was clouded by a deep sense of abandonment; her parents, operatic hopefuls who, she said, "had beautiful voices" her father, born on the Greek island of Cephalonia, was a tenor, and her mother, from Stuttgart, was a coloratura soprano — had separated when she was an infant and later divorced, "ill-matched to each other and ill-suited to parenthood" (Opera News).

She was looked after by Greek relatives and lived for around a decade at the Brooklyn Home for Children, which had relocated to Forest Hills. She said of her childhood, "My past is hard to overcome." She described the children's home itself as "bleak but marvelous". 

It was there that her life in music began. She studied piano for seven years, first at the home, where her instructor was veteran Metropolitan Opera bassoonist Louis Pietrini, who had volunteered to teach the children a variety of instruments — initially teaching them solfège, which Troyanos later called "the basis of my musical education" — and her studies continued, on scholarship, at the Brooklyn Music School. 

In several interviews she recalled early expectations of becoming a concert pianist. "Determined since childhood," by other accounts, "to become an opera singer," she sang in school choirs and New York's All City High School Chorus; when she was sixteen, a teacher heard her voice in the chorus and took time "to find out who the voice belonged to ... and got me to the Juilliard Preparatory School and my first voice teacher."

In her late teens, she moved to the Girls' Service League in Manhattan and later to a co-ed boarding house on E. 39th St., not far from the old Met, which she frequently attended as a standee. 

She was employed as a secretary to the director of publicity at Random House, and performed in choruses, ranging from church choirs (with a scholarship at the First Presbyterian Church) to musical theater; "Tatiana Troyanos, almost hidden in the chorus, came soaring through with a pellucid and magnificent quality of tone as the Arab Singing Girl," proclaimed Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe in his review of a summer stock production of Fanny in September 1958.

Continuing at the Juilliard School, Troyanos was chosen as a soloist for Bach's St. John Passion in 1959 and for the Verdi Requiem in 1962, by which time she had begun vocal studies with Hans Heinz, who "understood my voice and helped me open it up at the top ... and gradually I found all my top notes."

 She described Heinz, with whom she continued to study after her graduation in 1963, as "the major influence in my life ... Our work together built the foundation that was so essential to my career."