Asia’s passion for singing and karaoke may be legendary, but now Asians are so enamoured of Western opera that Europe’s music academies are bursting at the seams with young Korean and Chinese opera students with stars in their eyes.
”The Koreans are mad about opera,” Christophe Capacci, the new artistic director for classical music and jazz at Midem, the world’s premier music-industry trade fair, said in an interview.
But then Korea has something other Asian countries do not yet have — its very own international opera star, the graceful coloratura soprano Sumi Jo, who is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her international stage debut this year.
The classical-music-loving Japanese however, are also big opera fans, and the Chinese, with their own rich history of traditional opera, are also turning their gaze increasingly westward.
And music experts say the Asian trend is having a major effect on the opera scene across continental Europe, from Italy through France and Germany up to Scandinavia and Russia, as well as in North America.
”There have been several waves of young opera singers coming to Europe from Asia in recent years,” Gerard Founau, director of the internationally renowned Centre National d’Insertion Professionnelle d’Artistes Lyriques in the southern French city of Marseilles, said in an interview.
Singers from Japan were the first, a few years back, to come in large numbers to study in Europe, Founau said.
Now they have been overtaken by even larger numbers of young singers from South Korea and ”today we’re seeing a large number of opera hopefuls coming out of China”, he said.
His centre is a sort of ”finishing school” that accepts only a handful of the most talented young opera singers for a one-year programme aimed at putting the final polish on vocal and performance skills.
Two of the 15 students currently there hail from Asia. One is from Taiwan and the second, 29-year-old Korean soprano Hye Myung Kang, shared the stage at Midem’s opera night with Jo.
Attraction
Jo said Europe, and particularly Italy’s long history as the birthplace of opera, is the major attraction for the young singers. Another overriding reason is learning the languages in which classical operas are predominantly sung — Italian, German and French.
But Sumi Jo, whose agile, effortlessly high coloratura soprano was described by conductor Herbert von Karajan as ”a voice from above”, said the odds are stacked against them achieving their dreams to climb to diva stardom.
”They seem to prefer European faces on the cover of [CD] albums and on the stage,” Jo said in an interview, but added that until now she has probably only been passed over for two or three parts because of her Asian origins.
And, in fact, many young Asian singers are breaking through on to international opera stages around the world.
Korean soprano Hayoung Lee won one of the most highly sought-after prizes at the prestigious 2005 Cardiff Singer of the World competition, which is held twice-yearly and considered to be one of the main springboards to success.
Korean singers also made history this week by becoming the first Asian singers to sing the two lead roles at the Metropolitan Opera theatre. Tenor Wookyung Kim, who won the Placido Domingo International Voice Competition in 2004, sang the role of Alfredo opposite soprano Hei-kyung Hong, whose debut in the role of tragic heroine Violetta earned her rave reviews.
Among the best roads to success in the fiercely competitive opera world are the numerous singing competitions held around Europe, which is how Jo herself was propelled to stardom. These competitions have become so popular among Asian students that the percentage of Asians competing is often as high as 60%, Founau noted.
While there are as many talented students from European countries as there are from Asia, according to Founau, he said young Asians often have an edge through their willingness to work hard.
Jo herself, speaking of the sacrifices to family commitments that she had to make to succeed, put it succinctly: ”Where there is no pain, there is no gain.” — AFP
