Raúl Giménez
He was a trained engineer, and chief technical officer at a factory, when he decided to study voice, and enrolled at the opera school of the
Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Already in 1977, he sang small roles at the Colón; his first main roles were Cefalo in Celos aun
del aire matan (baroque opera by Juan Hidalgo) and Ernesto, both in 1980: he was a huge sucess.
He stayed at the Colón, singing Don Ramiro, Almaviva, Ferrando, Idomeneo, Don Ottavio, Nemorino, Rinuccio, Fenton or Altoum. In 1982, he
was a guest in Mexico City. He made his European debut at the 1984 Wexford Festival as Filandro in Le astuzie femminili by Cimarosa. He
went on to sing at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro (a whole lot!), in Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as well as the Opéra in Paris, in Torino, Zürich, Geneva. In 1989, he made his
US debut in Dallas, in 1990 he was at Covent Garden for the first time, at the Liceu in Barcelona and back to the Colón; Los Angeles,
Brussels, Schwetzingen, Houston and Dresden followed. In 1996, he arrived at the New York Met (Almaviva), at the Martina Franca Festival (Appio
in L'ultimo giorno di Pompei by Pacini) and at the Vienna Staatsoper (Lindoro). Into the 2000s, he also sang in Munich, Madrid (Teatro
Real), Las Palmas, A Coruña, Lausanne, Monte Carlo, Palermo or Düsseldorf.
He was almost exclusively a specialist for belcanto, including many ultra-rare operas, and so quite confusingly, he and his (totally unrelated)
contemporary Eduard Giménez sang basically the same repertory at the same time. No confusion
possible, though, once you had heard them: Raúl was the incomparably better singer of the two.
Reference 1: Kutsch & Riemens, reference 2, reference 3
I would like to thank Thomas Silverbörg for the recording. |