Celebrate The Holidays With Deborah Voigt in Back-To-Back PBS/THIRTEEN Broadcasts
on Dec 11 & 19
Television audiences have two opportunities to celebrate with Deborah Voigt this holiday season. One of music’s most versatile and endearing personalities, this Thursday (Dec 11) she hosts PBS/THIRTEEN’s Encores! Great Performances at the Met, presenting 19 of the most unforgettable aria and duet performances – including her own rendition of “Isoldes Liebestod” – from the past eight seasons of the Metropolitan Opera’s celebrated Live in HD transmissions. Then, just eight days later on Friday, December 19, the Grammy Award-winning soprano returns to the small screen when PBS/THIRTEEN broadcasts her special guest appearance in Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, recorded live in concert last season, and now also available on both CD and DVD. (For local PBS listings, check here.)
Already beloved as a regular host of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD cinema broadcasts, Voigt was the natural first choice for Encores! Great Performances at the Met. She hosts this special new edition of PBS TV’s Great Performances series from the Grand Staircase of the great New York opera house, interspersing selections from favorite operas like Carmen, Rigoletto, and La bohème with her own commentary and backstage interviews with some of the singers. The broadcast features such operatic luminaries as Natalie Dessay, Joyce DiDonato, Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Juan Diego Flórez, Elina Garanca, Jonas Kaufmann, and Anna Netrebko, as well as Voigt herself, in excerpts drawn from the more than 75 Met productions that have aired in the company’s award-winning Live in HD series; as Voigt quips, with a characteristic twinkle, these are “high pressure performances that separate the divas from the girls.” Among the 19 arias and duets chosen to highlight the past eight seasons of the series is the soprano’s own “impassioned, courageous and vocally thrilling” (New York Times) account of Isolde’s aria “Mild und leise wie er lächelt” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Voigt returns to television screens when PBS premieres Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which captures her special guest appearance in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra’s annual holiday extravaganza last December, when she sang before combined audiences of 80,000 people in Salt Lake City. Her renditions of the English carol “The Holly and the Ivy” and the lighthearted “The Twelve Days After Christmas” crown a program of seasonal favorites that also includes a dramatization of “A Dickens Christmas”: soaring overhead in a dazzling scene of aerial choreography, British actor John Rhys-Davies stars as the Ghost of Christmas Present.
As Voigt explains:
“The holidays are always my favorite time of year and I’m overjoyed when I have the opportunity to sing Christmas music in concert. Performing with the iconic Mormon Tabernacle Choir and John Rhys-Davies made the experience extra special for me.”
Her performance in Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is now also available from PBS on both CD and DVD.
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On the heels of her holiday broadcasts, the New Year brings the fruition of Voigt’s most personal project to date: the HarperCollins publication of her candid, funny, soul-baring, and utterly compelling memoir, Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva. A heartfelt, inspirational story offering devastatingly honest insights into the life of an outstanding artist and a remarkable woman, the soprano’s literary debut hits bookstores on January 27. In the meantime, Call Me Debbie may be pre-ordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BAM!, and Indie Bound, while further information is provided at HarperCollins.
Deborah Voigt: holiday broadcasts on PBS
Encores! Great Performances at the Met
Host: Deborah Voigt
In New York on THIRTEEN on Thursday, December 11 at 8:30pm; check here for local listings.
Natalie Dessay: “Chacun le sait, chacun le dit” from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment
Juan Diego Flórez: “Ah, mes amis” from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment
Joyce DiDonato, Elza van den Heever: “Figlia impura di Bolena” from Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda
Jonas Kaufmann: “Pourquoi me réveiller” from Massenet’s Werther
Elina Garanca, Roberto Alagna: final scene from Bizet’s Carmen
Anna Netrebko: “So anch’io la virtù magica” from Donizetti’s Don Pasquale
Matthew Polenzani: “How soft and sweet your magic tone” from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte
Diana Damrau: “En proie à la tristesse” from Rossini’s Le Comte Ory
Plácido Domingo (with Adrianne Pieczonka, Marcello Giordani, James Morris): “Plebe! Patrizi!” from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra
Renée Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky: final scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin
Peter Mattei: “Largo al factotum” from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia
Mariusz Kwiecien: “Fin ch’han dal vino” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni
Sondra Radvanovsky: “D’amor sull’ali rosee” from Verdi’s Il trovatore
Deborah Voigt: “Mild und leise wie er lächelt” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
Piotr Beczala: “Questa o quella” from Verdi’s Rigoletto
Patricia Racette: “Un bel dì vedremo” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly
René Pape: Death Scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov
Kristine Opolais, Vittorio Grigolo: “O soave fanciulla” from Puccini’s La bohème
Bryn Terfel: “Loge, hör!” from Wagner’s Die Walküre
Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
With special guests Deborah Voigt and John Rhys-Davies
In New York on THIRTEEN on Friday, December 19 at 9pm; check here for local listings.
Christmas Is Coming
On this Merriest Christmas Day
The Holly and the Ivy (Voigt)
And there were Shepherds Abiding in the Fields
Magnificat in D major
Ring Those Christmas Bells
The Twelve Days after Christmas (Voigt)
Christmas Wishes medley
A Russian Christmas Festivity
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
A Dickens Christmas (Rhys-Davies)
Coventry Carol
Luke 2: The Christmas Story (Rhys-Davies)
Angels, from the Realms of Glory
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