Viktoria Vizin

Mezzo Soprano

Viktoria Vizin has displayed the elocution and musicianship to lift her very first entrance to the top. While she has devoted a significant portion of her concert schedule to the great works of song literature, and has performed this repertoire to international acclaim, she is perhaps best known for her work with major orchestras and opera companies in the worlds foremost music center's such as London, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland among others.

Regarded by many leading critics as an ideal interpreter of the Mezzo Soprano vocal style, Viktoria Vizin is one of the few mezzo-sopranos to have performed to international acclaim. The scope of the vocal colors elicited by the diverse nature of her repertoire has produced an equally varied perception of her vocal range. 

Viktoria Vizin is highly regarded for her ease of creating an atmosphere through melody and texts of many languages, she has established a reputation as an artist of exceptional communicative ability.

Her dedication to the heritage of the art song prompted The London Times John Allison to remark: "Mezzo-Sopranos of star potential include the Hungarian Viktoria Vizin". He also remarked: " Tall, elegant, beautiful and possessed of a rich-toned Mezzo, she is worth watching"

​Viktoria Vizin as Judit Bluebeards Castle.

Financial Times

Bluebeard’s Castle, Hungarian State Opera, Budapest

By Shirley Apthorp

Published: October 20 2009 

Is Duke Bluebeard a misogynistic murderer, or merely a misunderstood man? As the lawyers say: it all depends. Hungary’s State Opera solves the problem by performing Bartók’s one-act opera twice, once before and once after the interval, in a staging that offers two different standpoints. The solution is not quite as novel as it seems. Budapest follows a trend already set in Brussels and Frankfurt, removing the question of which opera to pair with Bluebeard and giving listeners the chance to delve deeper into Bartók’s flinty, dark score.Director Hartmut Schörghofer presents the first half as symbolic reading, the second as psychological account, with Bluebeard respectively strong and weak. The concept, ostensibly viewing the work from the different perspectives of male and female, is neither legible nor revelatory enough quite to justify this double take – at the end of the evening, we are still not quite sure why we’ve been shown the work twice.

Still, Schörghofer and his video artist associates from the ubiquitous FettFilm come up with occasionally strong images, and both readings keep the momentum going well. The second half, where Judit is a vampish bitch asking too many questions of her anguished businessman lover, works better than the first, in which she is a pale victim. But both extremes lose the ambiguity that makes the piece so fascinating.

The main joy is that of hearing this work in this place. Conductor Adám Fischer’s take on the score is everything that Schörghofer’s staging is not – gripping, radical, raw and packed with profound insights. Fischer pares back and opens out the orchestral sound, with fine control and spectacularly gaudy effects. And in Bálint Szabó and Viktória Vizin, he has a strong and articulate cast. Vizin has charisma and animal power as the ill-fated Judit. Though Szabó cannot match her vocal power in a part that sits slightly too high for his voice, he brings a rich expressive power to his role.

This season marks the Hungarian State Opera’s 125th anniversary, an occasion celebrated by the company with a good sense of balance between pride in the history of one of Europe’s most sumptuously beautiful historic houses and solid understanding of the need to look forward. 

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