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Arda Mandikian: Soprano Championed By Benjamin Britten

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  • Arda Mandikian: Soprano Championed By Benjamin Britten

    ARDA MANDIKIAN: SOPRANO CHAMPIONED BY BENJAMIN BRITTEN

    The Times/uk
    November 17, 2009

    Arda Mandikian, left, as the ghost of Miss Jessel with Jennifer Vyvyan
    in Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw A singer whose repertoire
    ranges, with authority, over more than 2,000 years is likely to be
    unusual. Arda Mandikian was surely unique.

    She was born in 1924 in Smyrna (Izmir), the daughter of Armenian
    survivors of the 1915 massacre; they moved from Turkey to Athens
    when she was very young. At the Athens Conservatoire she studied with
    Elvira de Hidalgo, who also taught Maria Callas, and with Alexandra
    Trianti. A charming photograph exists of Mandikian and Callas, both
    late teenagers (one short and slight, the other very large indeed)
    at one of a number of concerts they gave together in 1942.

    Mandikian's interest in Greek folksong had led her back to the
    music of Ancient Greece and an encounter with James Matthews and Alan
    Collingridge, musicians serving in the British Army in Athens, brought
    her to England in 1948 where she met Egon Wellesz, the leading scholar
    in Byzantine and early Greek music. She had already had a serious
    look at the remaining fragments of the latter; Wellesz encouraged
    and developed her interest, finally in 1949 helping her to prepare a
    recital at Morley College - "Twenty-one centuries of Greek song". The
    programme included two of the six existing Delphic hymns, Byzantine
    monody, Greek folksong and songs by contemporary Greek composers.

    (Mikis Theodorakis was later to write a song cycle for her.) The great
    Ernest Newman was mightily impressed and the recital was repeated in
    Oxford, where Wellesz was in residence, at the Wigmore Hall and on the
    Third Programme. Even more remarkable was her recording of all six
    Delphic fragments in the Greek theatre at Delphi, absolute silence
    being secured by a detachment of Greek soldiery who suppressed all
    interruption. The recording was later issued, on 78s, as the first
    item in one of HMV's Histories of Singing.

    The Oxford connection through Wellesz bore rich fruit in 1950 when
    Jack Westrup engaged her as Dido in the second part of Berlioz's
    Les Troyens, a big undertaking - it was her opera debut - which she
    carried off with dignity and passion. Her love of the role is evident
    in two recordings: a rare and rather dim set of 78s made at one of
    the Oxford performances and a commercial set of LPs, released by HMV
    in 1955, which Hermann Scherchen conducted.

    Doors now began to open on an extraordinary ten-year career in the UK.

    In 1951 she appeared at the Mermaid Theatre as First Witch in Purcell's
    Dido and Aeneas (Kirsten Flagstad was Dido), later graduating to
    Sorceress, which she recorded twice, the second time in Benjamin
    Britten's version, the composer conducting. That autumn she took
    the title role in Wellesz's comic opera Incognita at Oxford. In 1952
    she was Emma Hamilton in a concert performance at the Wigmore Hall
    of Lennox Berkeley's Nelson and at the Edinburgh Festival she was
    Thomas Beecham's soprano in Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ. She was
    dissatisfied with her contribution, citing Edinburgh's dry east wind
    as an unexpected vocal handicap, Beecham later engaged her for one of
    the sisters in Andre Gretry's Zemire et Azor at Bath. The Paris Opera
    cast her as Eurydice in 1953 and Covent Garden took notice of her the
    same year, giving her a Niece in Peter Grimes, Musetta in La boheme
    and (a year later) the title role in Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or.

    More valuable, though, was Britten's interest: he gave her the Female
    Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia, an English Opera production that toured
    in Hamburg, Geneva, Aldeburgh and London. In Venice that same year
    (1954) she created Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw, a production
    then seen at Sadler's Wells. The composer let it be known that the
    role had been written for her particular dramatic and vocal gifts.

    Other later roles included Alice Ford (Verdi's Falstaff) for the
    Chelsea Group in 1955, Savitri (Holst) with Peter Pears and Thomas
    Hemsley in 1956, Elettra (Mozart's Idomeneo) at St Pancras Town
    Hall in 1958. In the autumn of 1959 at the Wigmore Hall she gave a
    recital that encapsulated her special strengths: Ancient Greek hymns,
    Byzantine monody, Greek folksong, Pizzetti and Respighi in the first
    half; Gluck, Duparc, Berlioz, Debussy and Satie in the second.

    In the early 1960s Mandikian's elderly mother began to fail and she
    returned to Athens where in due course she spoke out against the
    junta, refused to sing in public and became, in the colonels' eyes,
    an unreliable citizen who was best kept under surveillance. Though
    important offers came her way from abroad, she felt unable to accept
    them for fear of being refused permission to return to Greece.

    In effect she was robbed of the climax of an extraordinarily
    distinguished performing career. Instead, she turned to administrative
    work, being joint director of Greek National Opera (1974-80) and,
    later, president of the Maria Callas Society, which administers
    Callas scholarships. This work she took most seriously, as she did
    her informal role as an adviser to young singers. Indeed, she became,
    as it were, Greece's Singing Supremo and was a familiar figure at
    Athens's principal musical occasions until late in her life.

    Arda Mandikian was a quite exceptional artist. Her soprano was strongly
    individual and she used it, when required, for powerfully emotional
    expression; she was also a fine exponent of French melodies.

    Her facial profile was pure classical Greek (it can be found on vases
    and coins in museums all over the world) framed in raven-black hair.

    English friends saw much less of her after 1960, although she came to
    London from time to time and had acquired a nicely English sense of
    humour. A good friend who sometimes visited in Athens recalled that
    "to be with Arda is to laugh and laugh".
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