Liliya Namisnyk

After training at AVA, American soprano Corinne Winters made waves in Peter Konwitschny’s Traviata in London in 2013. Since then, she’s become known for her unique timbre and compelling stage presence, regularly working with directors including Krzysztof Warlikowski, Calixto Bieito, and Mariusz Trelinski. Particularly celebrated for her Janácek roles, she scored a big success in Barrie Kosky’s Kát’a Kabanová in Salzburg in 2022. This past summer, she starred in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride in Aix-en-Provence, singing both title roles in a single evening. She returns to the Met next week in a revival of Zeffirelli’s Bohème, and I sat down to discuss her career, fach, and taking on vocal marathons.

Kevin Ng: You made your Met debut back in 2011 as Countess Ceprano in Rigoletto, but you’re back singing your first principal role here as Mimì in La Bohème.

Corinne Winters: It’s interesting that I’m here doing Bohème, because I haven’t sung it onstage in 10 years except for a few jump-in performances. It was one of the first roles I learned as a soprano, and it was the first professional role I did when I was around 24. I always thought that was my fach: lyric Puccini, Traviata – all of the standard lyric soprano roles.

KN: You started your training as a mezzo, and your roles during your training at AVA ranged from Norina in Don Pasquale to Arabella. How did you navigate repertoire when you started your professional career?

CW: My technique took a long time to develop, so for the longest time people couldn’t hear what my sound was. I think people were confused because I always had a richer colour to the voice but I didn’t have a huge instrument. So, I started with Despina and Norina when I was at AVA, and over time I found my sound and my technique.

Arabella was a bit of a wild card – I was originally meant to sing Zdenka, but when we started rehearsing the other soprano and I realized that we were a better fit for each other’s role! I also did Suor Angelica, so it was obvious that my voice was changing.

Tristram Kenton/ENO

KN: Your ENO Traviata really put you on the map, and you’re returning to the role this season in Rome.

CW: Verdi is much more transparent orchestrally than Puccini, so for a lyric soprano with stamina and high extension it’s not too much of a stretch. I did many Violettas early in my career because it was an obvious vocal and dramatic fit for me, but I started doing fewer and fewer because I think tastes have changed and people now prefer a lyric coloratura in the role.

In my early years I always sang the E-flat, but I was basically screaming it out and my voice would be lifted for the rest of the role. Just because one has the note doesn’t mean one should sing it! I don’t think that a lyric versus a lyric-coloratura Violetta is better or worse, it’s just a taste. But throughout the course of my fifteen years as a professional singer, I’ve noticed a general trend where lighter voices are now doing heavier repertoire.

KN: Has that allowed you to take on the heavier lyric repertoire?

CW: A big factor is that my technique has gotten better, especially for high notes. That’s what allows me to sing things like Butterfly and the Janácek roles. I’m not the heaviest voice that sings these roles, but I don’t think that’s necessary – it just needs to work for the house and the acoustic.

KN: You’ve also done some lower roles, getting into the Zwischenfach repertoire: Blanche, Mélisande, Rachel in La Juive, Iphigénie. 

CW: I actually understudied Blanche here over a decade ago, when Isabel Leonard did it! People have always heard me in that kind of repertoire and I love it. I’ve always loved coloring and shading my middle voice and I’ve always had that in my sound, which is why people thought I was a mezzo at first. Iphigénie I took on mostly for the dramatic aspect – I was so intrigued by the idea of playing a single character throughout the course of their life. It was only later that I realized the vocal similarities: Aulide with Mélisande, and Tauride with Rachel and Blanche. I love this repertoire even though it’s not done very often in the US, and I like combining these with the standard lyric repertoire as an intellectual and vocal challenge.

KN: Does the size of the house factor in as well, particularly in Europe versus the US?

CW: I’ll use Salome as an example. Houses are bigger here, so it’s typically cast with a dramatic voice. In Europe, it can work with more of a full lyric voice even though it still has to have a dramatic quality to it. Strauss himself wrote a reduced orchestration, so he clearly wanted the option for a more lyric voice. I won’t tackle Salome until 2029, but I’ll be well into my forties and I’m doing it with a conductor I trust.

KN: You’ve also mentioned the lyric Strauss roles like Arabella, Capriccio, and Marschallin in the past.

CW: Strauss took a while for me, mainly because people don’t necessarily see me dramatically in those roles. There’s a side to me, though, that intellectually really loves that — like the thought of sitting around philosophizing about words and music. I have these kinds of conversations with my friends all the time over a bottle of wine! It’s maybe not how I’m known onstage, but vocally and intellectually as well as to test myself as an actress I’d love to tackle these roles.

I don’t think I’ll do Marschallin quite yet. Not because she’s supposed to be old, and not because there’s anything vocally in it that worries me, but mainly because I want to play energetic young women as long as I can. I think that doing all these Butterflies and Jenufas keeps me energetic and young, and I’d like to continue that while I can.

KN: Talk to me a little bit about Mozart. It’s so often cited as something all singers have to do and you had successes as Fiordiligi and Donna Anna, but you’ve said that they never felt fully comfortable for you.

CW: Anna was quite early in my career, and I’m glad I did it because it taught me a lot – mostly in the sense of “oh, I’ll never sing this again!” Maybe I’m generalizing, but for the singers I know that sing the role a lot it’s a role that comes naturally to them, which it certainly wasn’t for me.

With Fiordiligi I thought it would fit better, but I struggled partially because I was at a point technically where I was in transition. I didn’t really know how to handle switching between the low-lying arias and then having to sit in this high tessitura for the ensembles. I don’t think I did a horrible job by any means, but I don’t think it was my best work.

It taught me a lot about repertoire choices, and I say to young singers all the time that there is a time and a place to take a risk. When it comes to doing something in a high-profile situation, like doing Fiordiligi at Covent Garden in a new production in my early thirties, that was maybe not the time and place to do the role for the first time!

KN: You had a big success as Kát’a Kabanová in Salzbburg, which was when you decided to learn Czech.

CW: I’ve always been drawn to the Slavic repertoire – my grandparents were Ukrainian – and it fits my vocal color perfectly. When I started singing Janácek I didn’t speak the language, and I was overdoing the consonants. All Czech diction coaches will tell you to do the consonants properly but to move through them quickly, because overdoing the consonants gets you stuck on the jaw, and that limits projection. Consonants in Czech can be really expressive, and because they’re so percussive they also help with projection.

Czech is one of the only languages I’ve sung in (other than Mandarin) where it has a sung rhythm. For Janácek in particular, it’s like a sung play and to sound idiomatic, the rhythms need to be adjusted to fit the words. I didn’t really learn that until my time in Salzburg. I was with such amazing Czech specialists who knew how to explain it in a way that was digestible, and I just fell in love with the language even more and decided to commit to learning it.

KN: Have you had to fight for roles that others thought were outside your fach?

CW: It’s such a good question. I feel very strongly about this, and my opinion has changed over the years. I had a phase where I was doing a lot of Janácek, and I was so concerned about getting into the big houses that I wanted to be seen in the more standard repertoire – not necessarily out of my fach, but rep that I was struggling to be considered for by certain houses. Yet after Salzburg, even though it was in Janácek, many houses ended up casting me in Butterfly or other standard rep roles. This Bohème is a good example of that.

What’s funny is that next season I’m doing basically all standard Italian repertoire! So what I’ve been cast in has changed a lot since a few seasons ago, and I didn’t have to push for that. These days, I trust the organic flow of things, and to a certain extent the business decides for you. It’s a business at the end of the day, not just a playground for artistic expression, as much as I wish it were!

KN: You’re doing your first Trittico next season. How do you approach singing three roles in the same evening? How does that compare to singing both Iphigénies in the same night?

CW: Iphigénie was a bit different because I was mainly going brain dead with all of the specificity of the regie. Tcherniakov, as much as I adore him, is always like that: everything is incredibly detailed and specific. He comes to the first day of rehearsal with both a literal and poetic translation of the score, completely annotated with the subtext he wants to bring out. It’s so specific that any little turn of the head or movement is meaningful, and that took a lot of brainpower to memorize. There were also just hours and hours of French recit to remember!

Something like Trittico is much more of a vocal marathon. I did Tabarro and Suor Angelica together a few seasons ago, and what was interesting is that Angelica felt easier after having done Giorgetta. I just did Angelica by itself in Rome and I always felt like a fish out of water in the first couple of lines, which I didn’t feel when I did Tabarro first.

Giorgetta doesn’t have to be a huge dramatic voice but it has to be a voice that can sit low. Low notes are not a problem for me because I use a lot of chest voice and I use it high, but there are a couple of notes that sit at the chest-to-head voice transition for me. But if there are a few notes that aren’t as powerful as I would like them to be, I’m okay with that because the aria sits well for me.

Lauretta doesn’t have all that much music, and I wanted to take it on while I’m still young enough to pull it off! There actually aren’t that many sopranos who have done all three heroines in the US – Scotto, Teresa Stratas, and Patricia Racette most recently. Asmik Grigorian, of course, does it beautifully!

Caitlin Oldham/Washington Concert Opera

KN: Do you have any dream roles inside and outside of your fach?

CW: I have a couple of those roles coming up – I’ll do Liza in The Queen of Spades soon, and Salome is a role I never thought I would do, but the more I listen the more I love it. I’m not doing the full role until 2029, but I’ll do the final scene in concert next season. I did Manon Lescaut earlier this season in concert, and it was a great fit for my personality and voice. I’d love to do a stage production of that, but it doesn’t come around that often.

Of course, every soprano’s dream role is Tosca! I haven’t done it yet on purpose, and to go back to what we were discussing earlier about how one is perceived in certain roles, I think it would be a fight to get people to see me as a Tosca. Vocally, I don’t think Butterly is any lighter than Tosca apart from the D-flat in the entrance, but of course everyone has such strong feelings about what Tosca should look and sound like. But after Manon Lescaut, I felt like I was ready to start thinking about the role down the road.

I’ve also never done any bel canto, and of course there are people who specialize in that repertoire and I don’t want to butcher it! That being said, if I could ever have enough time to fully prepare it, I’d love to do Anna Bolena. All through the pandemic I was singing through the role, just as a vocalise, and it’s my dream bel canto role. I don’t know whether that will ever happen though!

And completely outside my fach, I’d love to do the big Italian baritone roles – the stuff that Ludovic Tézier and Tito Gobbi do. Who wouldn’t want to perform Iago or Scarpia?