Remember Salbek Opera Masterclass & Gala 2024
A historic castle; a vocal nursery of young talents; a summer celebration of opera.
Written by Peter Quantrill
What is Salbek? It is several things at once, as I found out for myself over the course of a week at the end of August last year. It is a magnificent old pile, a country-house ruin in the north of Transylvania, about an hour and a half’s drive from the city of Arad. Acquired by Ana Maria Mihaiescu in 2019, Salbek Castle has become the focal point for a summer festival of vocal masterclasses and performances which brings together some of the finest young singers in Romania, and from the rest of Europe.
Salbek is, you might say, a Glyndebourne in the making. We opera-lovers in the UK are familiar with the culture of ‘country house opera’, embodied first and foremost by Glyndebourne in east Sussex, as a model now much emulated, by the likes of Garsington in Oxfordshire, Longborough in the Cotswolds, Grange Park in Surrey. But then the Salbek Opera Festival is building on what is already a strong culture of opera in Romania, founded both on Italian principles of bel canto and on strong state and public support. With a population of 19 million, Romania supports ten opera companies, so that’s roughly one for every two million people.
For comparison, if the UK had anything like the same kind of political and popular commitment to opera as an intrinsic element of its cultural patrimony, we would have at least 30 state-supported opera companies. Instead of which there are six principal companies in the UK, most of them surviving almost hand to mouth, plus a patchwork of privately funded summer enterprises such as Glyndebourne and Garsington.
The creators of Salbek have plenty to learn from pioneers of country-house opera, but the learning process can and should travel in both directions. As the artistic coordinator of the Salbek Opera Festival, the musicologist Oltea Șerban-Pârâu, has established working relationships with both English National Opera and the Royal Opera in London. In both Salbek and Bucharest, where she is artistic coordinator of the annual opera festival, she is leading initiatives to celebrate Romanian operatic culture while presenting it to the rest of the world.
Last summer, on a blazing hot day, we drove out of Arad and into deepest Transylvania. We passed ox carts, and tenant farmers, living off the land. Down a side turning off a side turning, we came to the village of Roşie, and I found myself cast back to my beginners’ Romanian lessons. O roşie roşie – a red tomato. In August, of course, the schools are out, and the village hall is free. And so here, in the village of Tomato, is where I find three international-class opera singers, passing on the values of their art and the experience of their craft to 24 singers of the next generation.
‘The voice is the alpha and the omega,’ says Ramon Vargas to one soprano. ‘But of course there are all the letters in between.’ Vargas and his colleagues are not there to instil the basics. The students he is coaching are mostly in their twenties, many of them on graduate Masters programmes in vocal studies at illustrious conservatoires in Europe – in Lausanne, Geneva, in Paris and London.
‘The letters in between’ – what does Vargas mean by that? I would sum it up as text, language, gesture. The first line of the Barcarolle Duet from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann becomes a focal point of concentration on getting the vowels to sit in the right place, both for the sake of good French, and for good projection. Vargas is patient, but demanding. The day’s schedule is a punishing one, but at that very moment, he seems to have all the time in the world.
Down the road, Ruxandra Donose takes another young pair of singers through the Susanna/Marcellina duet from the first act of The Marriage of Figaro. When each character echoes the other, so much personality comes through both physical and vocal gestures: tiny inflections led by continual awareness of what their partner is doing. Then Leontina Vaduva coaxed fine subtleties of poetry in motion from a Micaela in the making.
Some of these students already have Violettas and Don Giovannis in their locker of experience, but there’s nothing quite like the coaching and encouragement they receive at Salbek from singers who have been there and done that. Young Romanian singers often go abroad to study, but just as often they make their careers back home, and the Salbek masterclasses serve an invaluable purpose in bringing them home at a pivotal point in their formation. This is what prevents Romanian operatic culture from becoming a museum piece, and keeps the tradition of lyric theatre alive and healthy.
The dream of putting on a full opera at Salbek may be a couple of years off – but Mihailescu and her team have made extraordinary strides in a few short years given the challenges they have faced. Salbek Castle is a conservation site where every element of the renovation must be accomplished with historically authentic materials and methods. Furthermore, the castle sits in grounds of many acres where even the grass seed is a protected species. A rural idyll cannot simply be turned into a building site for the sake of a new opera festival, however honourable the intentions.
For now, the labours of both teachers and students come to fruition in an operatic gala, held back in Arad at the end of the week of masterclasses. The evening is hot, and Arad is not short of competing attractions on a Saturday night, but the town square attracts a crowd of thousands, in front of an open-air stage hosting the Arad Philharmonic under David Crescenzi, all 24 students on the course, plus Donose, Vaduva and Vargas, and the soprano Valentina Nafornița.
At this point, it’s worth underlining that opera companies and theatres in Romania are embedded within the social and cultural life of their home cities. They perform Die Fledermaus one night, Cinderella the next; Aida followed by The Sound of Music. In doing so, these opera companies serve the people of their cities without making the kinds of distinction that trouble us in the UK between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Unlike Romanian performers and audiences, we suffer from a pervasive anxiety over the supposed elitism of opera, as though elitism was a bad thing anyway, when what the term means is a gathering together of talents and resources to present the very best in a field of endeavour, whether that’s academic research, or sport, or in this case lyric theatre.
On that Saturday night in Arad, with everyone on stage joining forces to sing the Brindisi drinking song from Die Fledermaus, it was possible to forget all these problems and distinctions, and to take delight in the power of opera to bring people together. For 2025, the plans include an ‘opera picnic’ back in Salbek, bringing to audiences in Romania the kind of al fresco music-making enjoyed by audiences at Kenwood House in London, and Tanglewood or the Hollywood Bowl in the US. The will is there, and the resources and plans are falling into place, year by year, to make the Salbek Opera Festival another destination point on the operatic map of Europe.
Peter Quantrill is a British music journalist, author, editor, and project manager with over 20 years of experience in the field.