Ana-Carmen Balestra’s Guildhall Wigmore Prize Recital

“Not your average Wigmore recital” is how I would describe Ana-Carmen Balestra’s concert last night to those who weren’t there. An opera singer by nature (even her name bears traces of an operatic destiny), Ana brought her compelling personality and charm from the theatre stage to the intimate Wigmore Hall and enlarged the space with her great sonority.

Every year a student from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama is awarded the Wigmore Prize, which gives him or her the opportunity to perform a recital at the esteemed Wigmore Hall. For the past three years the award has gone to a pianist, but this year it was awarded to Ana-Carmen Balestra, who is studying the Opera Course at Guildhall.

For her recital, Ana curated a programme that is extremely diverse and personal. She even brought in harpist Heather Brooks (also studying at Guildhall) who accompanied her for two songs and offered a lovely solo interlude in the form of André Caplet’s Divertissement à l’espagnole. As Ana explained at the beginning of her recital, she wanted to create a programme that was personal to her and represented an emotional journey. Seeking inspiration from her Dutch and Argentinian roots, the programme opened with a few Spanish-language songs (heavily flavoured with flamenco and tango dances) by Obradors and Piazzolla before moving onto French and American composers.

Ana’s sound was pure and clear, and in a hall with such good acoustics as the Wigmore, the force of her intensity projected all the way to the back. With incredible skill, she presented phrases with rich and varying tone colours so naturally. High notes were effortless to her, but it was her rich sonority that really caught me, and made the starkly emotional songs such as Bernstein’s So Pretty or Guastivino’s La Rosa y el sauce that much more heartbreaking.

She excelled in the more dramatic songs and seemed very much at ease in those infused with Spanish or Argentinian dance elements. Making use of dramatic gestures but never overdoing it, the opera singer was able to hold the audience’s breath with just a slight lift of her hands, and could therefore weave together different songs to form one cohesive strand.

This was also helped by sensitive playing from Aleksandra Myslek, who Ana chose to collaborate with in presenting her programme. Aleksandra created beautiful resonances in which Ana’s voice could harmoniously bask, resulting in a perfect blend of piano and voice. I loved how Aleksandra sometimes played interludes to link pieces, always aware of the dramatic contrast between the songs.

Ana ended her recital with her own arrangement of Violeta Parra’s Gracias a la vida (Spanish for “thanks to life”), an apt conclusion to a very unique recital programme crossing vast periods and genres which showcased her dramatic personality as an opera singer and highlighted her connection to her various cultural heritages.