BBC Cardiff Singer of the World

BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2015 prize winners
Jongmin Park (song), Nadine Koutcher (main), Amartuvshin Enkhbat (audience).
Photo Brian Tarr

The BBC Cardiff Singer of the World finished on Sunday (21 June 2015) and as usual the final left me with great sympathy for the judges having to decide on a single winner. Inevitably there were some artists who did not quite make it, but whose exposure has surely been valuable. The bass Jongmin Park from South Korea described himself as a 'baby bass', surely recognising that bass voices only really mature when the singer is in his late 30's or more, so Jongmin Park at 28 has a long way to go. But he presented a wonderfully finished instrument, and clearly impressed because he received the Song Prize on Saturday 19 June 2015. Another singer who impressed in the final was the baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat from Mongolia who is a Principal Soloist of the State Academic Opera House of Mongolia in Ulan Bator. Highly beautiful baritone voice won him the Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize on Sunday.

The winner was of course Nadine Koutcher from Belarus and who studied in St Petersburg. She had a big, dramatic coloratura voice which had very little about it to remind us of Russian voices of old. We only heard her on the radio, but her repertoire of Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov and Delibes clearly impressed everyone present in the hall, not just the sound she made but the vivid way she presented the drama in the music. She sang Dona Isabel in Peter Sellar's Indian Queen at the Teatro Real in Madrid, and already has engagements lined up with the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro and the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor at Théâtre du Capitole, Toulouse and Amenaide in Tancredi at Teatro Municipal de Santiago de Chile.

The other singers who missed out in the final were Lauren Michelle from the United States, Oleksiy Palchykov from the Ukraine. They are no less talented and I am sure we will be hearing much more of them - you can catch Oleksiy Palchykov at Garsington in 2016 singing Lensky in Eugene Onegin.

If you missed out on the Final, then it is available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.