Main Competition - Fourth Round

I decided on a shorter entry for this heat, largely because it's quite tiring to blog 
through the whole 1.5 hours of the TV programme!

The soprano Ida Falk Winland was great stuff, as far as I'm concerned. Her bearing, her vocal production in the Handel aria and her physical glamour were all marvellous, and I'd have been happy to see her win the heat.

Irish baritone Owen Gilhooly has lots of charm and is a great actor, but Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville was several bridges too far.

For me, Anna Viktorova, the mezzo from Russia, was by far the weakest entrant in the whole competition. She has a great voice but this is was too early for her (she's still at university!). A disaster from start to finish - I cringed through Dalila's aria particularly.

The darling of the night, coloratura soprano Mari Moriya from Japan won the heat with renditions of Gilda's aria, The Queen of the Night's aria and the mad scene from I Puritani. And yet, I wasn't convinced. The top notes weren't there in the Mozart; the style was all wrong in the Verdi; and the phrasing was bad in the Bellini. I was not surprised when she won, but I was disappointed. I didn't enjoy her very much, even though I did admire her attack of the Queen of the Night, which was sexy, seductive and powerful.

American baritone Ryan McKinny had much to offer and, in my opinion, was no better or worse than Moriya. The Rake's Progress was given an interesting interpretation; the style, if not the squillo, was there in the Mozart; and the rare aria from Rachmaninov's Aleko was imaginative and darkly powerful.

But Moriya does at least have a professional sheen to her presentation, and I understand the judges' decision (which, incidentally, took a long time!)