When Karita Mattila won the very first Cardiff Singer of the World in 1983, the competition could hardly have hoped for a better start; Mattila has proved herself over the last two decades to be one of the greatest dramatic sopranos of our time.
Since then the prestige of the biennial competition has been defined most of all by the sopranos and baritones that have been thrust into the international limelight with success in Cardiff - for singers such as Lisa Gasteen, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Bryn Terfel it was a crucial step on the career ladder.
It was sopranos and baritones who predominated in the final this year too, in what is now the BBC Singer of the World in Cardiff, with two of each on the shortlist last night, and one of them, the Finnish baritone Tommi Hakala, going away with the main prize. The song prize, awarded for recitals earlier in the week, went to the Irish soprano Ailish Tynan.
Hakala was the first finalist to sing, and with his nicely judged dramatic presence and carefully modulated tone certainly set a standard the others worked hard to reach; he was also the oldest of the five. Though he is not perhaps one of nature's most natural Mozartians, he sang one of the count's arias from The Marriage of Figaro, before moving on to surer ground with Wagner (Wolfram's monologue from Tannhäuser) delivered with enviable security of line, and then raising the roof with Ford's explosion of jealous rage from Verdi's Falstaff.
The choice could not have been clear cut. Both the Canadian soprano Erin Wall, stylish, silvery toned and fine-grained in Massenet, Mozart and Richard Strauss, and the Chilean Angela Marambio, who very much presented herself as the conventional operatic diva in Bizet, Puccini and Mozart, and who went away with the audience prize, must have run Hakala close.
The other finalists - the larger-than-life, yet dramatically one-dimensional Russian mezzo Elena Manistina and the suave but slightly under-characterised Austrian baritone Markus Werba - were not quite finished articles in the same way. At 32, though, Tommi Hakala certainly seems to be just that.
