Soprano from St. Charles stars in Met Opera broadcast

Portraying an aging, embittered Queen Elizabeth is hard work, but for Sondra Radvanovsky there's a moment late in Donizetti's opera "Roberto Devereux" that's a real guilty pleasure.

"In the last scene, when I get into full chest voice and denounce Sarah and Nottingham, it's a lot of fun," the soprano said in an interview. The Tudor queen is blaming the couple for failing to save her beloved Roberto, the Earl of Essex, from the executioner's ax.

"This woman is angry at everyone!" Radvanovsky said. "And I don't sing many angry characters, because temperament is something that I'm still learning to control vocally. Temperament can really take a toll on the voice. It makes it tight, and then your technique just goes out the window and that's when bad habits creep in."

Opera fans can hear for themselves how well Radvanovsky - a former resident of St. Charles - negotiates the challenges when she stars in the Metropolitan Opera's HD broadcast on Saturday. The critics, by and large, judged her opening-night performance a triumph, with Justin Davidson writing in New York magazine that "she achieves with her voice all the wild freedom that her character is denied, and makes something splendid even of her ruthlessness and regret."

Her performance caps a historic accomplishment, making her the first singer ever at the Met to take on the lead roles in all three operas that comprise Donizetti's so-called Tudor Trilogy. The last singer to do it in New York in a single season was Beverly Sills at the City Opera in the 1970s.

For Radvanovsky, Elizabeth in "Roberto" is more difficult than the title characters in the earlier operas, "Anna Bolena" and "Maria Stuarda."

"It's not long, but from beginning to end it's probably the hardest of the three because of the physicality of playing an older woman at the end of her life, the emotion of it," she said. "Also vocally it's extremely demanding. This has the most coloratura singing of the three. My coach and I call it temperature-chart singing: You go up, you go down, you go up. ... And to sing these huge outbursts, but still do it in the bel canto style and not the verismo style, it's always a very tight line."

The Met's HD broadcast of "Roberto Devereux" is conducted by Maurizio Benini and directed by David McVicar. It will be shown starting at 11:55 a.m. Saturday at theaters across the country. A list of theaters can be found at the Met's website: www.metopera.org/Season/In-Cinemas/Theater-Finder/. In the U.S., it will be repeated at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 20.