Hugues Cuénod

Hughes Cuénod was sometimes known as “the tenor with out a tone of voice,” which is fairly untrue. He under no circumstances claimed to truly have a gorgeous tone of voice, but he developed his own essential niche inside our musical lives. Cuénod started his vocal research being a baritone, but along with his teacher’s help proved helpful the tone of voice to an extremely cultivated tenor. Initially he sang mainly light music and cabaret tracks, however in 1928 he sang in the French premiere of Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf. His profession took a big change in path when he begun to sing early music beneath the path of Nadia Boulanger. Shows of Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo and Monteverdi madrigals brought him a popularity as an early on music expert, but he was similarly aware of the music of his contemporaries. He sang in the premieres of Le Diable boiteux by Francaix and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Improvement, Cantata, and Threni. Cuénod sang many personality jobs in operas by Richard Strauss, Giuseppe Verdi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Claudio Monteverdi, and Leos Janacek amongst others. He was mostly of the tenors to sing the Astrologer in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le coq d’Or with all its high phrases. He produced his Metropolitan Opera debut at age 85 as the Emperor in Puccini’s Turandot (getting the oldest person ever to debut on the Met!). He relished producing a complete personality in just a brief period of your time on-stage. He was a normal visitor towards the Glyndebourne Celebration between 1954 and 1977 performing in operas by Stravinsky, Mozart, Strauss, Verdi, Mozart, Monteverdi, Ravel, Cavalli, Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Janácek. Besides carrying on to sing well into his eighties, Cuénod provided get better at classes and coached performers all over the world. He didn’t teach tone of voice, but rather trained the performer where to find their method of interpreting the tune or opera accessible. The tone of voice of Cuénod was definitely not your normal tenor. It had been thin, reedy, and incredibly pure. Having less sensuous beauty needed the listener to focus on the written text and this is of music. He was a fantastic musician, that was why he was the favourite of a lot of composers. He basically tried to place the music out as the composer designed. Cuénod produced many recordings over time. The earliest essential recordings are of Monteverdi madrigals. In the first LP period, he recorded some discs of vocal music from the pre-Baroque period. Later there have been recordings of tunes by Schubert, Fauré, and Debussy which were reissued (LYS 342/3). He in addition has taken component in recordings of L’enfant et les sortileges, Ariadne auf Naxos, Oedipus Rex, Les contes d’Hoffmann, L’ Ormindo, Le nozze di Figaro, Benvenuto Cellini, as well as the St. Matthew Enthusiasm. With Hilde Rossel-Majdan, he documented the entire Schemelli-Liederbuch of Bach. His recordings of Stravinsky’s music are needed listening for just about any devotee of this composer.