Name Stefan Louw | ||
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Funiculi funicula
Stéfan Louw is a South African operatic tenor, regarded as one of South Africa's leading tenors. He has founded opera production companies based in Johannesburg, and writes for The Citizen newspaper.
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Biography
Louw became a member of the Pretoria State Theatre Ad-hoc Opera Chorus in 1995. The next year he received the Chorister of the Year Award. In 1999 he made his debut as Beppe in I Pagliacci, for which he received the FNB Vita Opera Award for Most Promising Newcomer. He became a full-time opera singer in 2000. In 2005 a newspaper opera writer wrote that Louw's voice should be declared a "national treasure". Frequently working with Opera Africa, he has performed throughout South Africa and Namibia, and by 2014 he had appeared in over 30 full-scale opera productions.
In September 2008, he made his international debut as Pollione in Norma at the Vichy Opera in France, followed by Radames in Aïda at the Opéra de Dijon in France in December of the same year. A review of the latter production praised Louw's "clean, strong, effortless style" and one of his duets as "a magical, high point of the evening", while judging that he needed to develop "a richer, more colourful vocal palette".
In February 2011, Louw started a regular column about opera in The Citizen 's entertainment edition called CitiVibe. He writes a column called OperaSmalls, aiming to educate the people of South Africa about opera. Louw also founded a non-profit organisation called Sempre Opera, which produces operas in South Africa. The launch concerts for Sempre Opera took place in March 2012 in Pretoria and Johannesburg. In February 2013 his colleague, Linette van der Merwe, took over as head of the organisation.
Louw has produced a series of concerts called Aria! Opera for Everyone, which ran in 2013 and 2014 at the Roodepoort Theatre in Johannesburg. In 2014 he started the non-profit Big Wig Opera company, also based at the Roodeport.