Vancouver Sun
14 August 2010 Filed in: Concerts
Yet this week’s true revelation was a much more modest event Thursday afternoon: soprano Yannick-Muriel Noah and pianist Rena Sharon at Christ Church Cathedral. Madagascar-born Noah is a rising vocal star with an impressive track record of competition wins, awards, and scholarships. She has a voice roughly the size of the Pacific Ocean, and an even bigger talent. Her instrument is dark, rich, and ultra-concentrated, and she delivered with all-or-nothing intensity. (So did Sharon, whose mid-concert solo rendition of Brahms’s A major Intermezzo op. 118 was unbearably moving.) Noah received a tremendous and entirely deserved ovation following arias by Verdi and Puccini; I found her Strauss and “Marietta’s Lied” from Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt my favourite moments in a truly unforgettable short recital.