ARDA MANDIKIAN: SOPRANO CHAMPIONED BY BENJAMIN BRITTEN
The Times/uk
November 17, 2009
Arda Mandikian, left, as the ghost of Miss Jessel with Jennifer Vyvyan
in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw A singer whose repertoire
ranges, with authority, over more than 2,000 years is likely to be
unusual. Arda Mandikian was surely unique.
She was born in 1924 in Smyrna (Izmir), the daughter of Armenian
survivors of the 1915 massacre; they moved from Turkey to Athens
when she was very young. At the Athens Conservatoire she studied with
Elvira de Hidalgo, who also taught Maria Callas, and with Alexandra
Trianti. A charming photograph exists of Mandikian and Callas, both
late teenagers (one short and slight, the other very large indeed)
at one of a number of concerts they gave together in 1942.
Mandikian’s interest in Greek folksong had led her back to the
music of Ancient Greece and an encounter with James Matthews and Alan
Collingridge, musicians serving in the British Army in Athens, brought
her to England in 1948 where she met Egon Wellesz, the leading scholar
in Byzantine and early Greek music. She had already had a serious
look at the remaining fragments of the latter; Wellesz encouraged
and developed her interest, finally in 1949 helping her to prepare a
recital at Morley College – "Twenty-one centuries of Greek song". The
programme included two of the six existing Delphic hymns, Byzantine
monody, Greek folksong and songs by contemporary Greek composers.
(Mikis Theodorakis was later to write a song cycle for her.) The great
Ernest Newman was mightily impressed and the recital was repeated in
Oxford, where Wellesz was in residence, at the Wigmore Hall and on the
Third Programme. Even more remarkable was her recording of all six
Delphic fragments in the Greek theatre at Delphi, absolute silence
being secured by a detachment of Greek soldiery who suppressed all
interruption. The recording was later issued, on 78s, as the first
item in one of HMV’s Histories of Singing.
The Oxford connection through Wellesz bore rich fruit in 1950 when
Jack Westrup engaged her as Dido in the second part of Berlioz’s
Les Troyens, a big undertaking – it was her opera debut – which she
carried off with dignity and passion. Her love of the role is evident
in two recordings: a rare and rather dim set of 78s made at one of
the Oxford performances and a commercial set of LPs, released by HMV
in 1955, which Hermann Scherchen conducted.
Doors now began to open on an extraordinary ten-year career in the UK.
In 1951 she appeared at the Mermaid Theatre as First Witch in Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas (Kirsten Flagstad was Dido), later graduating to
Sorceress, which she recorded twice, the second time in Benjamin
Britten’s version, the composer conducting. That autumn she took
the title role in Wellesz’s comic opera Incognita at Oxford. In 1952
she was Emma Hamilton in a concert performance at the Wigmore Hall
of Lennox Berkeley’s Nelson and at the Edinburgh Festival she was
Thomas Beecham’s soprano in Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ. She was
dissatisfied with her contribution, citing Edinburgh’s dry east wind
as an unexpected vocal handicap, Beecham later engaged her for one of
the sisters in Andre Gretry’s Zemire et Azor at Bath. The Paris Opera
cast her as Eurydice in 1953 and Covent Garden took notice of her the
same year, giving her a Niece in Peter Grimes, Musetta in La boheme
and (a year later) the title role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or.
More valuable, though, was Britten’s interest: he gave her the Female
Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia, an English Opera production that toured
in Hamburg, Geneva, Aldeburgh and London. In Venice that same year
(1954) she created Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw, a production
then seen at Sadler’s Wells. The composer let it be known that the
role had been written for her particular dramatic and vocal gifts.
Other later roles included Alice Ford (Verdi’s Falstaff) for the
Chelsea Group in 1955, Savitri (Holst) with Peter Pears and Thomas
Hemsley in 1956, Elettra (Mozart’s Idomeneo) at St Pancras Town
Hall in 1958. In the autumn of 1959 at the Wigmore Hall she gave a
recital that encapsulated her special strengths: Ancient Greek hymns,
Byzantine monody, Greek folksong, Pizzetti and Respighi in the first
half; Gluck, Duparc, Berlioz, Debussy and Satie in the second.
In the early 1960s Mandikian’s elderly mother began to fail and she
returned to Athens where in due course she spoke out against the
junta, refused to sing in public and became, in the colonels’ eyes,
an unreliable citizen who was best kept under surveillance. Though
important offers came her way from abroad, she felt unable to accept
them for fear of being refused permission to return to Greece.
In effect she was robbed of the climax of an extraordinarily
distinguished performing career. Instead, she turned to administrative
work, being joint director of Greek National Opera (1974-80) and,
later, president of the Maria Callas Society, which administers
Callas scholarships. This work she took most seriously, as she did
her informal role as an adviser to young singers. Indeed, she became,
as it were, Greece’s Singing Supremo and was a familiar figure at
Athens’s principal musical occasions until late in her life.
Arda Mandikian was a quite exceptional artist. Her soprano was strongly
individual and she used it, when required, for powerfully emotional
expression; she was also a fine exponent of French melodies.
Her facial profile was pure classical Greek (it can be found on vases
and coins in museums all over the world) framed in raven-black hair.
English friends saw much less of her after 1960, although she came to
London from time to time and had acquired a nicely English sense of
humour. A good friend who sometimes visited in Athens recalled that
"to be with Arda is to laugh and laugh".