Virginia Tola: the strength of an authentic voice

Saturday 25.5.2024

/

Last update 14:43

The meeting is in a central bar in the city of Santa Fe. A few meters away stands the historic Municipal Theater 1° de Mayo, inaugurated more than a century ago with the performance of the opera “La Gioconda” by Amilcare Ponchielli, an opera that Tola has not yet debuted and when I tell him this information his eyes fill with excitement as he tells us “it would be a dream to be able to debut it in the Theater where I took my first steps in opera.” It is at that moment when everything begins to add up, if you consider that the guest is our Santa Fe soprano Virginia Tola. The interview is scheduled for 3pm on a cloudy Monday and Tola arrives a few minutes early.

While the photo session is taking place, his charisma is already evident: he accepts proposals, but also makes observations and gives advice, taking care of every detail as if it were an opera performance. He then starts the conversation, somewhat cold at first, with regular questions. But by the time her cuts arrive (hers with almond milk), the exchange is already more fluid. In the end, this singer, today a cultural ambassador of our region, admired by a very specific but global audience, is simply Virginia talking about her passion for music and for life itself.

The first topic is the concert that, on April 26, he performed at the Provincial Cultural Center together with the Uruguayan tenor Nazareth Aufe, the Santa Fe Provincial Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Fe Provincial Polyphonic Choir, dedicated to the best-known operas of Puccini, such as “Manon Lescaut”, “La Bohème”, “Tosca”, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot”. In this regard, Tola tells us: “it was a beautiful concert, since Puccini is, in my opinion, the most theatrical of the composers. Furthermore, it was a great surprise to corroborate once again that both the orchestra and the choir are of international level, Therefore, it was a pleasure to share with them. I want to highlight without a doubt the wonderful performance of the Principal Conductor of the Provincial Symphony Orchestra Silvio Viegas, who with great skill and musicality knew how to take advantage of each musical passage with enormous lyricism and the necessary rigor. that this composer requires, as well as the spectacular actions of the Polyphonic Choir of the Province directed by my dear and distinguished Virginia Bono, which had its climax at the closing of the concert accompanying the tenor from the cazuela of the cultural center, impressing with their extraordinary voices ( choir formed by solo singers for the most part) a movie ending.

“For my part – Tola tells us – as I said before, this concert gave me the opportunity to use my theatrical vein a lot. Puccini writes everything just the way he wants it, each word has a meaning, each part of the orchestra has a specific color for what what he wants to convey at that moment. For me that was spectacular.

For the singer, the fact that the tickets were sold out in two hours on the same Monday that they were made available to the public, resulted in “an extra nerve and adrenaline” that helped her give it her all, as she does every time she performs. is planted on a stage. At this point, the question arises: What is the Santa Fe public like in relation to others in the world? The answer has an unusual delivery. “Evidently it is not just any audience, at first, as in each presentation I try to get rid of a little of the ego that the same exhibition generates in me, so that my own expectations do not paralyze me, given the enormous fear that every time I go out on stage I feel Then I try to remember who I sing for, and there I offer all my art to God, to the universe or whatever each one wants to call it. In the end my work is a service if you will, and as Adriana Lecouvreur says in her opera of the same name, ” I am the humble servant of the creative genius, he offers me the word and I extend it to the hearts (excerpt from Adriana’s first aria)”. But at the same time it is forceful: “In this case, what I feel is that It’s about an audience that has known me since I was very young and saw the evolution of the person, the artist and the singer. The Santa Fe public knew me when I was 19 years old. Today more than 25 years of career have passed and they can see the difference. This, I think, is the characteristic of Santa Fe that has no other audience for me. It’s the part that I like and that I never want to disappoint.”

Virginia’s beginnings in lyrical singing are related to a space in which she shaped her voice, which would later open the doors of the great theaters of the world: the Santo Tomé Municipal Choir, led at that time by Malena Boero. “That place was very important because it gave me the opportunity to experience singing as a team, a place where sharing successes and failures with others was a common cause and from which I have learned the sense of belonging like nowhere else, something that later when I started my career as a soloist, the paradigms changed completely and everything depended purely and exclusively on personal effort and sacrifice,” he mentions. Virginia was a choreographer for eleven years, from the ages of 8 to 19, which left lasting marks. “It was an incredible experience and one that I recommend to both children and adults, it being very useful, even for therapeutic purposes, a unique way to connect with your interior and the interior of other people,” says the singer.

After this experience, she arrived at the Higher Institute of Singing at the Teatro Colón, where she began her more specific training as a lyrical singer, where she received an Honorary Diploma given her high performance since a few months before finishing this training she won first prize. in the Queen Sonja of Norway’s International Singing Competition at the age of 23, the following year she also won the prestigious Operalia Singing Competition, of which the famous tenor Plácido Domingo is a mentor.

Her training was continued later by several figures in the operatic field who, in different contexts and countries, helped Virginia train her vocal cords with the required precision. “In reality, everything marks you, you learn from each experience. Not only from the teacher who gives you his knowledge, but from the experience of traveling and meeting other colleagues. Life has taught me and continues to teach me. Now I also teach of singing and I continue to learn a lot,” he admits. Quite a statement of principles for someone who has achieved so much with such brilliance.

Tola has plenty of credentials to be a Santa Fe and Argentine cultural ambassador in the world: she performs periodically at the prestigious Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and on other large stages in the main capitals of the world, she worked on several occasions alongside the tenor Plácido Domingo with the which continues to collaborate today. Together with the Spanish singer, she performed the historic concert at the Obelisk in Buenos Aires, before an audience of more than 300,000 people. A milestone, given that it was the first concert that Plácido Domingo broadcast online, a little over a decade ago. But that doesn’t dazzle her, quite the opposite. She is very clear about the driving force that keeps her going: her vocation for telling stories. “Being specific, putting myself in the character’s shoes to tell their story honestly. Understanding what happens to them at that moment, in that place, in that context. That is very interesting to me, that’s why in my personal life I do various therapies to get to know myself and know each character. We all have within us a lover, a jilted man, a murderer, a leader, a beggar, and all the characters that exist, it is enough for life to put you in that right place, at that right moment and with that pressure that It is necessary so that you can get that role out of your gut. Going through the dramas that the character goes through is what amuses me the most about singing opera,” he says.

-“What stories would you like to tell from now on?” The question obviously moves something in her. And the answer is longer than the rest. “Obviously, I love the works I did. But I always vibrated with female characters who not only feel love for their partner, for the love stories that usually trigger dramas, but who have another way of transcending life. Women which today it has become fashionable to call Empowered Women, although for me that is pigeonholing and abhorring people in certain terms, which today I consider vintage. If a woman is honest with herself, she does what she feels and what she wants. with her life, obviously without harming anyone, today she would be an Empowered Woman, you understand? But for me it is not like that, she is someone who is doing what she wants, for what she came into the world,” expresses the singer and “that was it. what I always did since I was little, follow my instinct. At this point I can’t help but thank my family and my parents infinitely for believing and supporting my enormous desire to follow this vocation, putting all the necessary means to make it happen, even. If at times they put their property or their work lives at risk, and the fact that we were three female sisters, I think that also marked me a lot, we did not have a protective brother, or someone who was above us, the three of us were always very different, very personal and each one faithfully followed their own path without conditions or impositions”.

In a crossover, in a certain intertextual way, between those women she likes to interpret and her own life, Virginia talks about her choice to be an opera singer. “When I was a girl, they could have told me ‘you are an empowered young woman because you are going to do what you want’. But at that time the term was not used. So, I don’t like to use fashionable terms. Because I feel that everyone uses them and they are emptied of meaning. Less than half of the people know the real meaning. I like to be specific with the words I say and when I put together my speech. This is linked to the characters: each word has a meaning, a power. in which we must believe, I am a faithful believer that we decree with words, that is why I demand that I be very neat with them. “What is said is created,” he points out.

At that point in the talk there is no longer any vestige of the formality of the beginning. While she takes the cut from her, Virginia is already in the same register, with the same ease as on stage. And when she talks about how she is at a different level of consciousness today than she was a few years ago, it is clear that she managed to become the renowned artist she is today thanks to her honesty. “I think that is what I search tirelessly like a river in its channel. When I won the contests, it was because I managed to convince the public through the honesty of true feeling, to tell exactly what that character was experiencing, to which today You can also call it Intensity, another fashionable term for a person who feels and feels free to express it, nothing is simpler than that in a world where we were made to believe that he who loves and makes it known loses and he who shows himself. selfless wins. When and how did they convince us of that, I wonder? What’s my secret? There’s no formula,” he says.

The conversation continues in other directions, but it never regains the strength of that passage. Tola says goodbye, thanks again and leaves. Without stridency. Beyond the stages, the lights, the theaters, the applause, she is a girl who loves what she does.