Angela Gheorghiu

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2004

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Angela Gheorghiu is one of the world's foremost sopranos, beautiful, a good actress and with a voice that critics say is close to perfect, she has been hailed as the next Maria Callas. She is the daughter of a Romanian train driver and says she knew she wanted to be a singer almost as soon as she could walk. Theatre, music and the arts were a form of escaping the drudgery of everyday life and, as a career, offered a rare means of escape from the most austere of the communist regimes.

She was trained through the communist regime's rigorous schooling system, graduating with a first-class honours degree from the Bucharest Music Academy in 1990. The fall of the Ceaucescu regime meant that as an artist she could travel and develop an international career. Her international debut was at Covent Garden in 1992 in Don Giovanni. Later the same year she was Mimi in La Boheme. It was her first performance with the celebrated tenor Roberto Alagna. They've now been together for nine years and their performances together have resulted in operas that had fallen from favour being staged once again.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Ciocarlia - the Lark by Gheorghe Zamfir Book: A book to learn good English Luxury: A cup of jasmine tea

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an opera singer. Born and brought up in Romania under the Chauchezcu regime,
0:37.6	she was already a star in her own country when he was driven from power. His fall gave her more opportunities and within a couple of years
0:44.9	she'd made her debut at Covent Garden as Mimi in Pucchini's Laboem. Since then she's become one of the best
0:51.2	known and best loved opera stars, her beauty and her voice combining to make her an almost perfect performer in the great roles of the repertoire.
1:00.0	And the on-stage magic is enhanced by the off-stage romance,
1:04.6	her relationship with the famous tenor whom she met when singing poem
1:08.0	and whom she married when his wife died of a fatal illness.
1:11.6	Her life, it seems, is like her art. It's pure opera. She is Angela Giorgu.
1:18.0	That's how it looks from the outside, Angela. It has to be said, I mean you are something of a kind of
1:22.1	pucchini heroine. There's been so much drama and passion in your life.
1:25.6	Is that how it feels from the inside?
1:28.6	I am from Romania from hard time. And in Chaucesse-Good time you just mentioned.
1:36.2	But in the same period, they are not only
1:39.6	the bad things I remember.
1:41.1	You know, for the artist in that time I remember good wonderful moments.
1:46.4	That's all it remains on my head.
1:49.6	And then...
1:50.6	And you found great happiness, you found great romance, great passion, that's my point really. I mean it is like a,
1:56.8	it is like a melodrama.
1:59.2	Yes, it is also, also when I met Roberto in the opera house, it was really, I remember the scene when two people meet for the first time and their hands and their eyes was electricity exactly.
	...

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