Jason Victor Serinus

What a difference a change of principals can make. Instead of the overhyped Anna Netrebko, who, as Violetta in the first five performances of San Francisco Opera’s production of Verdi’s La traviata, simplified her coloratura, shunned the much-anticipated E-flat at the end of a hardly free “Sempre libera” (Forever free), and mostly scratched the surface of her role, we now have the alive-in-the-moment soprano of Elizabeth Futral.

For her much-anticipated second EMI recital disc, the elegant British
soprano Kate Royal (b. 1979) graces us with a collection of gorgeously
sung arias from the last century. Inspired by the role of the Governess
in Benjamin Britten’s gothic psychodrama The Turn of the Screw, which
she sang with Glyndebourne on Tour in 2006, Royal hones in on
20th-century operatic females who, in her own words, share the
Governess’ combination of “intensity and abandon.”

Chora Nova certainly doesn’t shy away from challenges. Since its artistic director, the conductor and countertenor Paul Flight, came on board to direct the auditioned community chorus in July 2006, it has tackled the challenging works of Kodály, a number of greater and lesser Baroque masterworks, Brahms’ “German” Requiem and Neue Liebeslieder, and the music of Michael Haydn.