“Excuse me, but I’m looking for a Screaming Diva.”
It’s a sunny early afternoon on the final day of June, outside a popular Upper West Side cafe and I’ve just approached the casually elegant blonde checking in with the maître d’.
“Oh! I never scream,” demurs she (as I picture a theatrical eyelash flutter behind her chic sunglasses), without dismissing the “diva.” It’s Sondra Radvanovsky, one creative half of Screaming Divas, the smart, funny, utterly engaging online video series she hosts with fellow soprano Keri Alkema; and though the title betrays her tongue-in-cheek amusement at the term, a diva she undoubtedly is—at the pinnacle of the soprano heap these days, but without any ostentatious baggage in tow. Launched on YouTube in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, its trailer announces: “2 best friends… who wanted to bring a little love, laughter and support during this difficult time. Join us while we laugh, cry and drink lots of GIN.”
And despite the quotient of levity in that online proclamation, a difficult time it’s certainly been for her. In mid-March of 2020, she was in Brazil for a concert—ominously slated for Friday the thirteenth. An hour before it was to begin, “the world shut down”: she was told to head home, and she and her husband (and then-manager) “got the last two tickets back to Toronto from Rio.” Tagging along with them was an uninvited third party: COVID. Both of them fell ill shortly afterward. She came through it shaken but sound, and by June she was once again on a plane, this time to Europe, pre-vaccine. “You just didn’t know what to expect, but you gotta do what you run at the reopened Met, COVID paid her a return visit. This past January, her much-beloved mother, Ellie, died, and—quite uncharacteristically—she canceled engagements in Barcelona and Munich. (“Just give me a little time to stop crying, and to miss my mom,” she implored her many social-media followers.) And all this time, her two-decade marriage was collapsing. Three weeks after our lunch, she announced, on Instagram, that it was over.
