When the Metropolitan Opera competition was opened to young Mexican singers in 2018, San Miguel was selected as the audition site. Since then, apart from pandemic interruption, there has been a...

When the Metropolitan Opera competition was opened to young Mexican singers in 2018, San Miguel was selected as the audition site. Since then, apart from pandemic interruption, there has been a special concert in San Miguel every March to feature the previous year’s winners, outstanding young singers with star potential.

This year, two competition winners, both sopranos, will perform at the San Miguel Playhouse, on Sunday, March 19, at 5pm and Monday, March 20, at 2pm (added show due to demand). The singers are Cristina Nakad, 27, from Puebla City, and Dulce Guadarrama, 28, from Estado de México. Pianist Andres Sarré will accompany them.

This is no ordinary program. Instead of the usual assortment of arias, each soprano will perform what is known in opera as a monodrama, a work for one singer, fully staged with costumes and stage props, directed by theater veteran Ragnar Conde.

Nakad will sing a masterwork of the monodrama form, Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (the Human Voice), with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, the French writer and filmmaker, based on his play, about a woman in a last, desperate phone conversation with her lover, who is leaving her to marry someone else. Nakad, who so impressed the MetOpera judges, has a lot of stage experience for her young years, having enacted roles such as Pamina in Mozart’s Magic Flute and the female lead in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The other monodrama on the program is an excerpt from a longer opera, Zerbinetta’s bravura monologue from Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The performer, Dulce Guadarrama, was recently one of the stars of the opera gala given annually at the Teatro Macedonio Alcalá in Oaxaca, with the Oaxaca Symphony Orchestra.