A few weeks ago, young Czech soprano Lucie Kaňková won third prize at the international singing competition in Bologna, Italy. The Bologna International Vocal Competition is a competition where the first round is a video recording. Out of several hundred submitted images, 97 singers from all continents were selected to compete in the semi-final round in Bologna. 37 singers made it to the final.
Lucie Kaňková studied violin at the Jan Neruda Gymnasium and then at the Prague Conservatory. At the age of twenty-one, she decided to switch from violin to singing. She studied with, among others, the Swiss soprano Barbara Locher. In 2013, she was accepted into the master’s program at the Hochschule der Künste Bern, and then continued her studies at the Hochschule Luzern. In 2015, she took second place in the Junior category at the Antonín Dvořák Singing Competition in Karlovy Vary and won the opera category a year later. In July, Lucie Kaňková took part in the Bologna International Vocal Competition. She received a personal invitation to this competition from baritone Peter Danilov, who leads singing courses associated with this competition. Peter was one of the judges of the audition for the production of The Magic Flute in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, which Kaňková won and in 2020 she will sing the role of the Queen of the Night there as part of the Opernspiele Munot festival.
The Bologna International Vocal Competition is an international competition where the first round is conducted in the form of a video recording. From several hundred submitted images, 97 singers from all continents were selected to compete in the semi-final round in Bologna. 37 singers made it to the finals, singing arias selected by a nine-member jury. The chairman of the jury was the Italian Claudio Orazi from Teatro Lirico di Cagliari. Other members were Daniela Dimova (General Director of Varna Opera House), Maddalena Da Lisca (General Director of Bologna Festival) and Dean Southern (Head of the Voice and Opera Department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Cleveland, USA). The entire competition took place in the concert hall of the Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini. The semi-finals and finals were accompanied by piano accompaniment, and the winners’ concert was accompanied by the Bologna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicoletta Conti. The Italian winner, Christine Arsenova, sang Bellini’s aria Oh quante volte, o quante and Puccini’s Signore, ascolta. Second place was taken by the mezzo-soprano from China, Yue Hu, who performed Mozart’s aria Smanié implacabili. Lucie Kaňková sang Juliet’s aria from Charles Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, which ended the entire gala evening. There were a total of eleven awarded contestants, three main prizes, two honorary mentions (Daniel Noyola from Mexico and Ana Isabel Lazo from Guatemala), five special prizes similar to the second degree honorary mention (Jorge Espino from Mexico, Daeho Kim from South Korea, Yihan Duan from China, Aubry Ballaro from the USA and Kara Mulder also from the USA).
In the following season, Lucie Kaňková will perform at the Silesian Theatre Opava in the role of Ännchen in Weber’s The Magician and in the lead role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. She will also perform in the lead role of Poppaea in Monteverdi’s opera The Coronation of Poppaea at the J.K. Tyl Theatre in Pilsen.
Harmonie, 22.8.2019
