Sonya Yoncheva has devoted her second solo album to the music of Handel, showing another facet of her wide-ranging repertoire. Being an alumna of William...

Sonya Yoncheva has devoted her second solo album to the music of Handel, showing another facet of her wide-ranging repertoire. Being an alumna of William Christie's Le Jardin des Voix, the Baroque era formed her musical understanding at an early stage of her career, laying the foundation for her versatile and broad-reaching repertoire. Currently praised as "the best Traviata in the world at present" (Die Welt), Sonya Yoncheva is one of today's fastest rising opera stars. She is a regular guest at the world's leading opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House and Wiener Staatsoper. A great composer of vocal music, Handel based some of his most beautiful operas and oratorios on the enchanting sensibility of the feminine voice. His heroines are strong, independent women determining their own destiny - attributes Sonya relates to in all respects.

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REVIEWS:

No soprano these days sings Bellini’s Norma, then Verdi’s Violetta, then Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana, then releases an album of Handel arias, all in a few months. A singer might do them all in a single career, but hardly in a single season. Unless that soprano is Sonya Yoncheva, the brilliant 35-year-old Bulgarian whose silky, flexible voice effortlessly shifts from Handel’s quicksilver Baroque runs to Tchaikovsky’s Romantic heft.

– New York Times (Zachary Woolfe)

She displays ample agility, and a sense of whooping joy, in Morgana’s ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ – a Handelian show-stopper – and lives each phase of Agrippina’s baleful scena ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormenti.’ Yoncheva is surprisingly, and effectively, restrained in ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, ornamenting the repeats tastefully, and brings a flirtatious lightness of touch to Cleopatra’s entrance aria ‘Non disperar.’
– Gramophone