Rumour has it that Snoop Dogg may be serenading the royals there in a couple of months' time, but this afternoon it was the most agile, even and full soprano voice of all which rang from the vaulting of Westminster Abbey. Thanks to the noble co-operation of the Royal Opera House - serving up its orchestra and music director, Antonio Pappano - the Australian High Commission and the Australian Music Foundation, we celebrated the life and works of Dame Joan Sutherland in the high, orchestrated style which only this kind of event could have done full justice.
She WAS the Bright Seraphim of Handel's Samson aria, as reproduced here from one of the great albums of all time, Decca's The Art of the Prima Donna, with Francesco Molinari-Pradelli conducting the Royal Opera House Orchestra. And she WAS the other Norma - by which I mean not alongside her biographer, Dame Norma Major, there to read a lesson, but as an equally significant, very different interpreter of Bellini's Druid priestess from Maria Callas (La Divina to the Italians, just as Sutherland later became, in exceptional homage, La Stupenda): we heard "Casta diva" from the complete recording conducted by Sutherland's bel canto crazy husband, Richard Bonynge, who movingly took his place for the second reading just as the aria was coming to a close.
Hear the Joan Sutherland recording of Handel's "Let the Bright Seraphim" played at the Thanksgiving Service
The live music could hardly be as epoch-making, nor was it meant to be, but Pappano and the Royal Opera musicians served up a pre-service feast of Handel, Verdi and Massenet, with all due subtlety and luminosity, and the soprano who shared the Westminster stage, as it were, with La Stupenda, lived up to her role as a symbol of the new generation. Sydney-born Valda Wilson, member of the young ensemble at Dresden's Semperoper and supported in her studies by the homeland, sang the "Pie Jesu" from Fauré's Requiem and the "Alleluia" from Mozart's Exsultate, Jubilate with already assured nuance and control. We'll be hearing much more of her.
Former Royal Opera House General Director Sir John Tooley gave us all the facts of the diva's life, the Westminster Abbey Choir celebrated with Byrd and Vaughan Williams, and the Abbey's assistant organist James McVinnie maintained the note of thanksgiving by rolling us out with Bach/Dupré and Parry. Who knows how many among the thousands had their own stories to tell about how Sutherland brought them to opera, or held them spellbound across four decades? Anyway, it's back to the recordings and further memories.
Find the Decca Sutherland recordings on Amazon- Read tributes to Dame Joan Sutherland from Ismene Brown and David Nice on theartsdesk
