Fringe: Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha in Concert
St Andrews’s and St George’s West Church - 09/08/22
Masabane, an operatic star in the making.
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha first came to public attention when she won the song prize at the 2019 Cardiff Singer of the World in 2019. Many of us thought she should have won the competition outright. She was young, black and beautiful with an outstanding voice. Masabane is from South Africa and is joining a number of young singers from that country such as Pretty Yende and Angel Blue who have begun to make a name for themselves in the opera world. She has been in the Jette Parker Young Artist Programme at Covent Garden and is about to begin her international operatic career at Bern but also with appearances at Hamburg and Covent Garden. I predict within a few years she will be one of the stars of the international opera stage, so congratulations to promoter Ian McFarlane for bringing her to Edinburgh first. Ian it should be said has a track record in spotting winners; he brought us Catriona Morison soon after she won the Singer of the World and she returned the following year in the official festival programme. I predict the same will happen to Masabane indeed I will send a copy of this review to incoming festival director Nicola Benedetti.
The concert was in the splendid setting of St Andrew’s and St George’s West Church in George St. As Masabane who grew up singing in churches in South Africa said, “I feel at home here.” There was a very good audience in the church and Masabane came onto the stage in a splendid red dress accompanied by her pianist Simon Lepper. Simon is an internationally renowned pianist and is an official accompanist at the Cardiff Singer of the World, no doubt where he met Masabane. He was a superb accompanist throughout and also gave Masabane a break with a solo recital of Franz Liszt’s transcription of Elsa’s Dream from Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’.
Masabane’ s programme was wide ranging and allowed her to display the qualities of her superb voice from the opening classic Lied, Mahler’s ‘Das Knaben Wunderhorn’ ,through Liszt and Wagner on to a really tough modern work, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915, ending with traditional South African songs and spirituals. She sang every song without a score and was word and note perfect with very good German pronunciation. Above all she displayed this superb instrument of enormous power which filled the church and could have filled the Usher Hall. When she began I worried that she was possibly too operatic to interpret traditional Lieder like Mahler, but opera singer and Edinburgh Music Review critic Brian Bannatyne-Scott said no it was a perfectly legitimate interpretation, and went on to say, “I don’t think I’ve heard a voice as good as Masabane’ s for a very long time. Clear, vibrant, luminous, effortless, she sang Mahler, Liszt, Wagner and Barber with utter control and seemingly limitless power. I am for once lost for words!”
At the conclusion she got an enthusiastic standing ovation and rewarded us with a South African “click” song. She also stayed behind to sign autographs and have photographs taken with audience members and a very impressed critic. We were all very grateful to Ian McFarlane for bringing her to Edinburgh and convinced she will return as a star of the International Festival.
