“Opera singers Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner were among the 150 people on board the Germanwings plane that crashed on Tuesday in the French Alps,” writes Brian Wise on Tuesday (3/24) at New York radio station WQXR’s website. “The singers were traveling to their homes in Düsseldorf from Barcelona, where they had played Alberich and Erda, respectively, in Wagner’s Siegfried at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. French officials said everyone aboard the Germanwings Airbus A320 died when the plane crashed on its way from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Bryjak, a 54-year-old bass baritone from Kazakhstan, was a member of the ensemble at Deutsche Oper am Rhein since 1996. Radner, 33, was traveling along with her husband and baby, according to the Liceu…. A rising Wagnerian star, Radner sang eight performances in the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of Götterdämmerung in 2012 as one of the three Norns. She had just made her Barcelona debut and was scheduled to debut this August at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany.… Bryjak … was particularly known for his Alberich, a role he played in Vienna, at the BBC Proms and in Chicago, where the Chicago Tribune praised his ‘splendid’ portrayal.”
Posted March 25, 2015
