At press time, word went out that the show would go on, as shows must, with Soula Parassidis assuming the title role for an injured colleague….Here’s hoping a new star’s been born.

Soula Parassidis is OUTSTANDING - I would gladly go to the theater again for this woman.

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Greek-Canadian soprano Soula Parassidis was befittingly glamorous, richly swathed in silks and veil, and glossily toned of voice. Combining a gleaming timbre with lightness and flexibility, Parassidis dispatched the French coloratura effortlessly, and with technical precision and assurance. Throughout she used her voice expressively, powerfully communicating character and feeling.

Star of the show is Greek-Canadian soprano Soula Parassidis...her voice is limpid and ringing, her acting nuanced and she holds the stage with authority.

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Soula Parassidis has the requisite physical glamour for the mysterious and alluring role, and when she opens up in her big recitative she reveals a gleaming fullness of tone.

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There's only one true pearl here: Greek-Canadian soprano Soula Parassidis.

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Greek-Canadian soprano Soula Parassidis brings the sensitive and dramatic element to the conclusion of the work... With a timbre that is richer and more resonant than usual, Soula Parassidis beautifully embodies this celestial voice that gradually leads to the silence of the spheres...

Within just a few lines, Soula Parassidis impresses and catches our attention as Fedra.

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...Soula Parassidis’s “Hojotoho's" slice the air with a blade of white hot intensity

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The Greek-Canadian soprano Soula Parassidis, endowed with a voluptuous timbre and a wide register, drew an Iphigénie of great dramatic caliber.

Soula Parassidis, absolutely dominated in the title role with tremendous intensity as an actor-singer, wielding a dramatic instrument that powerfully transcended all the busy goings-on. Something of a collector of title roles, she certainly triumphed in this one on short notice. And as a hyphenated Greek herself, she evoked the great actress Irene Pappas in how she inhabited her role. Even when silently reacting, her vivid facial expressions projected her character’s powerful rages and intense suffering. She also executed the gestural language imposed on her by this production. Her vocal armament also included a floated pianissimo used to great effect.

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As Iphigénie, Soula Parassidis, palpably expressed the crushing anxieties of a woman who appeared to have lost everything. Salvation through death was a constant theme. Her dark soprano was complimented by subtle vocal shakes that intensified the character’s death-obsessed intensity, summed up by Iphigénie’s yearning for release from earthly tribulation in “O toi qui prolongeas mes jours.”

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The production’s casting was supremely satisfying. Soula Parassidis brought creamy warmth and pearly tone to the title role, conveying Iphigenie’s desperate, unhappy situation with a focus that was intense and affecting but never out of control.

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Boston Baroque ended up hiring Soula Parassidis into the role, fresh off a different production in Athens. I do rather like Miss Harmer, so I was bracing myself for disappointment.

What I got ended up blowing me away, and for all the right reasons: Parassidis gave what is perhaps one of the most electrifying performances I have ever seen at the opera house, and considering the amount of opera I have seen that is no small feat. There was literally not a single thing wrong with her performance in any way that I could see, and that is an exceptionally rare thing to see. As an actress, she sold the role: her facial expressions engaged with where she was in the story every step of the way, there was not a single hand gesture out of place (even when trembling as they were during the fourth act), and her breaths came at just the right cadence every time.

Vocally, however, she was a powerhouse. Her voice had a very lovely tone, but it was almost shocking to me that her voice was able to cut through the orchestra even at the half-whisper she adopted on a few notes. And man, was it an amazing half-whisper: she was always purposeful when employing this half-whisper, and this even more than the times that Gluck asks the singer to sing loudly showed the distress of Iphigénie as a character. She also engaged with the text she was singing in ways I have never heard an opera singer connect with such text. Honestly, it was one of those performances where absolutely every note was right, from the fear she displays upon her entrance in the storm scene in the opening act, to the desperation she feels at having to sacrifice a Greek at the whims of the Scythian chief to the joy at being united with her brother Oreste. Parassidis did more than just embody Iphigénie in this performance: she made us believe in the character’s internal world through sheer force of will alone. It brings to mind something mentioned in the program about Gluck requiring extreme sensitivity and activation in performance. Something about this feels completely correct: Gluck’s music in Iphigénie en Tauride tends towards the simple, and while he has a very good sense of text painting and an unusually good sense of pace for pre-1800’s opera there is still a lot the singer needs to fill in. Parassidis met the challenge head-on: every aspect of her performance injected life into the music, and even the less dramatically interesting moments felt like the most important thing in the world.
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In my estimation, Parassidis gave what has to be one of my top five great opera performances that I have seen live. I do not state this lightly: this is an Iphigénie for the ages, and whenever she was off-stage I longed to see her on the stage again.

"Lightning never strikes twice,” so the saying goes. Or does it? Meteorologically speaking, definitely. Metaphorically speaking even more so, as Boston Baroque’s revisiting  Iphigénie en Tauride  proves. Nearly 25 years ago Martin Pearlman and his period instrument group gave a landmark performance of Gluck’s opera which helped cement Christine Goerke’s reputation as a singer to reckon with. Now, in its fiftieth season, they may have given a similar boost to soprano/opera entrepreneur,  Soula Parassidis.

Parassidis gave a fierce dramatic and vocal performance, perfectly in tune with Pearlman and the orchestra. Though Parassidis identifies as a soprano, her voice has the rich mahogany quality and robust lower range of a mezzo. The color and heft remain constant as the voice rises as does its flexibility and clarity, both crucial to painting the text with the appropriate emotion.

It always seems to happen in these mythological operas. Everything seems like it’s settled, the characters’ fates are sealed, and suddenly a deus ex machina shows up to save the day. In this case, the machina was an airplane from Greece, and the deus in it was Greek-Canadian dramatic soprano Soula Parassidis.

The result was an unambiguous triumph for Boston Baroque. Dramatically, Parassidis clicked with her fellow principals so gracefully that it was impossible to tell she had had only one day of rehearsals. Vocally, she was incandescent. A regal but subtle thread of steel anchored her voice throughout all the torments the title character endured...