This channel is the re-establishment of previous channels that have been sadly terminated.
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Tatiana Troyanos--mezzo-soprano
Sir Georg Solti---conductor
LPO
1976
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"Tatiana Troyanos Is Dead at 54; Mezzo Star of Diverse Repertory
By Allan Kozin Aug. 23, 1993.
Tatiana Troyanos, an American mezzo-soprano whose enormous repertory covered the full range of operatic history, from Monteverdi to Philip Glass, died on Saturday evening at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was 54 years old and lived in Manhattan.
Her manager, Janice Mayer at Columbia Artists, said the cause was cancer.
Miss Troyanos's dark, flexible mezzo was ideal for the wrenching emotionalism of such characters as Carmen, Kundry in Wagner's "Parsifal," Eboli in Verdi's "Don Carlo," Santuzza in Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana," and both Purcell's and Berlioz's Didos.
She was also a superb player of trouser roles. Her Octavian in "Rosenkavalier" was long the centerpiece of her repertory, and early in her career she gave highly regarded performances as Cherubino in "Le Nozze di Figaro" and Romeo in Bellini's "Capuletti e i Montecchi." And she was prized for the kind of vocal and dramatic agility, as well as the ability to learn difficult roles quickly, that made her a singer of choice for revivals of rarely performed Handel and Mozart works.
Her appearances in the last year indicate the scope of her repertory. In September she created the role of Queen Isabella in Philip Glass's "Voyage" at the Met. She performed in two "Ring" cycles, as Waltraute in the Metropolitan Opera's "Gotterdammerung" and Fricka in the Lyric Opera of Chicago's "Rheingold." In May she gave what James R. Oestreich called in The New York Times "a searching, almost harrowing reading" of the Mahler Third Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and last month she sang Clairon in the San Francisco Opera production of Strauss's "Capriccio."
Tatiana Troyanos was born in New York on September 12, 1938, and grew up in Forest Hills. Her mother was German and her father Greek, and though she admittedly neither spoke Greek nor cared for Greek food, she identified closely with her father's homeland and described herself as Greek-American.
Both her parents were singers, and she sang in school and church choruses, but her first serious musical training was as a pianist. It was only during her high school years, when she began to listen to Maria Callas recordings and attend Metropolitan Opera performances as a standee, that she decided to study singing. While working at Random House as a secretary she enrolled at the Juilliard School, but left when the dean refused to let her study with the teacher of her choice, Hans Heinz. She studied privately with him for many years, continuing even after she began to sing professionally.
Miss Troyanos found few opportunities in New York, but she was a fighter: When the Met offered her small roles, she turned them down, and when she was denied a chorus role in "The Sound of Music" because Richard Rodgers thought her too glamorous to play a nun, she returned looking disheveled and got the part. Her first break was in 1963, when Julius Rudel signed her to the New York City Opera roster. She made her debut that year as Hippolyta in Benjamin Britten's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and also sang Jocasta in Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex."
In 1965, following Heinz's suggestion that she would benefit from experience at a European house, she joined the Hamburg State Opera, where she made her way through a large part of the mezzo-soprano repertory in her decade there. But her first major appearances were at Aix-en-Provence, France, where she made her debut in 1966 as the Composer in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos," and at Covent Garden, where she performed her first Octavian in 1969, learning the role in a week to fill in for another singer.
Miss Troyanos made her Met debut as Octavian in 1976, and became one of the house's most frequently heard mezzos. Among the many roles she sang there were the Countess Geschwitz in Berg's "Lulu," Sesto in Mozart's "Clemenza di Tito," Charlotte in "Werther," Adalgisa in "Norma," and her regular showpieces, Carmen, Kundry, Santuzza and the Composer.
In addition to her opera appearances, Miss Troyanos was an eloquent recitalist. Particularly interesting in recent years were her duo recitals with the soprano Benita Valente. After their last New York performance together, at Alice Tully Hall in January 1992, Bernard Holland wrote in The Times: "Ms. Troyanos's mezzo-soprano is intended less as a thing of beauty (which it often is) than as a conduit for the pain, exaltation and rushes of emotion that suffuse her musical personality." A Recorded Legacy
She is survived by her mother, Hildegard Fournier of Florida, and her brother, John, of New York."; nyt (edited)
