Cardiff's week-long competition produced some amazing voices and a final worthy of the best. Testimony to a glorious performance in her earlier concert round, Moldovan soprano Valentina Nafornita, at 24 the youngest competitor, won the audience prize. She is clearly a star in the making, but emerging as winner of the main jury prize was less predictable.
The velvet richness of Olesya Petrova's mezzo is a voice the operatic world needs more urgently, and both the authenticity of her Rimsky-Korsakov aria and intensely vivid Verdi showed her to be a great prospect. The lovely lyric baritone of Ukrainian Andrei Bondarenko, also 24, was even more assured and aristocratic of tone in Prince Yeletsky's aria from Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades. He has comedic gifts, too, but imprinted on the memory will be his elegant Korngold aria from Die tote Stadt earlier in the week, as well as the Schumann and Sviridov which won him the Song Prize. Such departures from conventional competition fare were much appreciated and, significantly, the South Korean Hye Jung Lee's stratospheric soprano delivering I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung from John Adams's Nixon in China saw the hall erupt with delight. Her form in the final couldn't quite match that.
Soprano Meeta Raval, representing England, proved a fearlessly dramatic and accomplished performer. She should also go far. Yet Nafornita's quietly charismatic presence, her natural vibrancy, together with the silver gleam at the top of the voice, was evident enough in Regnava nel silenzio from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. That she should come through the tiredness barrier with poise suggests an underlying stamina ultimately essential to realising her formidable potential.
