L’udovit Ludha

Slovak tenor Ludovít Ludha, who studied with Vlasta Hudecová in Bratislava, won the Voice Competition of the Czechoslovakian Music Academies in 1987; immediately thereafter he was invited to become a member of the Bratislava National Theater Ensemble. In 1987 and 1988 he appeared in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s staging of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Salzburg Festival under the baton of James Levine. Ludha’s repertoire includes such lyrical roles as Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Fenton in Verdi’s Falstaff, and Elvino in Bellini’s La sonnambula but also extends to such spinto tenor parts as Rodolfo in La Bohème, the title role in Verdi’s Don Carlo, and Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly; credits also include young heldentenor assignments, such as Paul in Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, and of course masterworks of the Slavic repertoire by Bedrich Smetana, Antonín Dvorák, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Leoš Janácek. Ludha has performed these and other roles on stages throughout Europe and Japan. For example, credits in the last two years have included appearances in Janácek’s From the House of the Dead at Basel Opera, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District in Amsterdam, Paris, and Madrid, and Dvorák’s Rusalka at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. Ludha is a sought-after concert singer who performs repertoire from the classical era to the 20th century, from Masses by Haydn and Mozart to the masterpieces of early modernism, working with such conductors as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Jirí Belohlávek, Charles Dutoit, Michael Gielen, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Neville Marriner, and Zoltán Peskó.

March 2012