Vivica Genaux in Conversation with Michael Miller: A Podcast

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Vivica Genaux. Photo Harry Heleotis.

Vivica Genaux. Photo Harry Heleotis.

The distinguished mezzo-soprano, Vivica Genaux, who just sang Arsace in Rossini’s Semiramide at the Caramoor Festival to great acclaim, very kindly agreed to an interview. We talked about a great many things, from her fondness for Caramoor (This will be her fifth complete opera performance there.) and her future plans to baroque performance practice, Regieoper, the famous castrato Farinelli, gender and trouser roles (a speciality of hers), her teachers and favorite colleagues, the composers who have most shaped her career—Rossini, Handel, and Johann Adolf Hasse—as well as her fondness for her native state, Alaska, and the opportunities it gave her in finding a place in the arts.

In recent years Ms. Genaux has been much more active in Europe than in North America (She lives in Italy.), but she retains an avid following the in the US, and her recitals and operatic appearances are always sold out. The excerpts from Arsace’s recitative and aria, “Eccomi alfine qui in Babilonia”, which begins and ends this interview, will explain why.

About the author

Michael Miller

Michael Miller, Editor and Publisher of New York Arts and The Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts, was trained as a classicist and art historian at Harvard and Oxford, worked in the art world for many years as a curator and dealer, and contributed reviews and articles to Bostonia, Master Drawings, Drawing, Threshold, and North American Opera Journal, as well as numerous articles for scholarly and popular periodicals. He has taught courses in classics, the English language, and art history at Oberlin, Rutgers, New York University, the New School, and Williams. Currently, when he is not at work on The Berkshire Review and New York Arts, he writes fiction, pursues photography, and publishes scholarly work. In 2011 he contributed an introductory essay to Leonard Freed: The Italians / exh. cat. Io Amo L’Italia, exhibition at Le Stelline, Milan, and wrote the revised the section on American opera houses in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is currently at work on a libretto for a new opera by Lewis Spratlan, Midi, an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea set in the French West Indies, ca. 1930.

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