Nurturing the Singers of Tomorrow

Who are they? Who will replace the generations of singers who thrilled us and brought us to tears when we first fell in love with opera and art song? Who will ensure that young, emerging singers are equipped to face the unique challenges of 21st-century operatic stardom without declining prematurely, as did Maria Callas, Elena Souliotis, Josè Carreras, Anna Moffo, Beverly Sills, Luba Welitsch, and Titta Ruffo (to name a few of the celebrated names of the 20th century)? These are questions that every vocal aficionado asks. Some singers are destined to rise to the top. Who are they, and what training programs are responsible for their success? Take one of our "local" success stories, South African soprano Elza van den Heever. As one of many Merola Program participants and Adler Fellows who continue a long tradition of rising to national stardom, van den Heever has achieved a success that underscores the quality of San Francisco Opera Center's programs.

Van den Heever was perhaps all of 23 when her large, surprisingly mature sound stunned those who heard her in Elly Ameling's master class at the old San Francisco Conservatory of Music building on 19th Avenue. Five-and-a-half years later, on August 16 of this year, her three years as an Opera Center Adler Fellow culminated in her winning both the judge's and Audience Favorite awards at Seattle Opera's Second International Wagner Competition. Van den Heever's current season includes performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony in Mahler's Eighth Symphony; Frankfurt Opera as Elisabetta in Verdi's Don Carlo, and Elsa in Lohengrin; and Arizona Opera and Santa Fe Opera as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. With San Francisco Opera, Frankfurt Opera, Munich's Bayerische Staastoper (Bavarian State Opera), Opéra National de Paris, Theater an der Wien (Vienna), the Dallas Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Vienna Symphony also on the books for coming seasons, you would imagine she's got it made.

Photo by Andrew Cloud

San Francisco's center is one of four programs — the others being the Lindemann Young Artists Program at New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Houston Grand Opera Studio, and the Ryan Center of Chicago Lyric Opera — that have an enviable track record of nurturing future greats. In this two-part article, I discuss three of these programs, and point to a number of singers to look out for. Many of these singers have their own Web sites, complete with audio and video clips; although mp3 sound is greatly compressed, the clips unfailingly give indication of their promise.

What It Takes

Sheri Greenawald, who has served as director of the San Francisco Opera Center since 2002, was in a particularly adamant mood when she picked up the phone. Between deep coughs prompted by lingering bronchitis, she let loose about some of the trends in today's opera world that she finds most troubling. "Someone recently sent me a YouTube link to [Franco] Corelli in 1958," she declared. "He was singing like a god in front of this silly backdrop. Yet right now, given the emphasis on visual media, it's all about the little black dress syndrome. That's one of the things that distress me. Are we going to exclude some glorious voices because they don't fit into a size 8?" [Greenawald is referring to a trend that came to public attention in 2004, when controversy erupted because the Royal Opera, Covent Garden replaced soprano Deborah Voight in a production of Richard Strauss' Ariadne of Naxos because she was too heavy to fit into a costume.]

"I know the visual is important. I always encourage my girls and boys to take the best care of themselves they can; it's that beefcake baritone standard, even for countertenors. But I feel that our medium should be different than film. I'm not into Milli Vanilli opera or splicing in a few high Cs to achieve a bizarre standard of perfection. That is not what I'm training my singers to do. I don't particularly want to hear light lyric [sopranos] sing Brunnhilde just because you can amplify them. Otherwise, we should all play Callas records and go onstage and lip-synch." Greenawald believes that people who love opera really enjoy the visceral experience of feeling a voice when it hits their ears and their body in the theater. To that end, she gears her programs to ensure that singers are technically proficient, can move onstage without tripping over their feet, act enough to be believable, and are able to connect through words into the music. "First and foremost," she declares, "you have to have a quality instrument. Then it's that ability to connect through the music emotionally. If music isn't about expression, what are we doing? There's an intelligence that has to be inherent in how a singer sings. "[Vocally] it comes down to being able to connect the breath to the sound, so that you create a resonance that hits the human ear. It's so dependent upon this hook-up in the body. That's what will make someone a star or not a star."

On Training Singers

Greenawald notes that in the old days, singers virtually lived with their teachers. Now, if someone can afford to see their teacher once every two weeks, they're lucky. One of the most technically proficient and expressive singers on today's scene, Cecilia Bartoli, is extremely fortunate to have her mother as a teacher.

Photo by Andreas Praefcke

"Right now at Opera America conferences," Greenawald says, "we say that young singers need more than one voice lesson a week. But the people who decide training criteria at universities are usually band instructors. Students don't count on daily lessons because it's not mandated by national accreditation regulations. "Many conservatories are no better. When I attended Boston Conservatory, I had only one lesson a week. Sometimes teachers would split it into twice a week for a half hour. The same holds true at San Francisco Conservatory. When I teach privately, I give two-hour lessons. The first hour is for warm-up and vowel production, the second for application. I know I'm weird, but I don't see how you make progress any other way. Some students will warm up quickly, but first-time and young students take a long time. You can't skip over issues like not being able to produce an E vowel correctly." The changes Greenawald has instituted at the Opera Center's Merola and Adler Fellows programs will come as no surprise. Both programs now offer more opportunities for live performance. "I'm very grateful that [San Francisco Opera General Director] David [Gockley] is getting my kids onstage a lot here," she says. Greenawald also insists on addressing technical issues rather than letting her singers flounder. Participants in both programs work with a breath specialist. While she insists that she hasn't reinvented the recipe, she does mix the salad differently. "If you're not comfortable technically," she exclaims, "you cannot do anything else onstage well. That's the thing I've been able to enhance the most. It's about recognizing problems, and figuring out how to deal with them." Greenawald also insists on live auditions for all Opera Center applicants. "We don't do CDs," she says, "because people splice like crazy. It's like Wall Street: If you can cheat, you cheat. If the technology is out there to make it perfect, they'll make it perfect. I can't blame singers who do, because I'd do the same thing. But you can't tell if someone will get to the end of the aria in real life unless you hear them. "I don't really know why some people choose San Francisco's programs over the others," she says in summation. "The differences come in the personnel you have at your disposal. As a colleague of mine, Matthew Epstein, said, we should not be vying with each other; we should be trying to complement each other. We all have the same goal — to turn out good singers. We should be altruistic about preserving this art form and giving the kids all that we've got."

Singers to Watch For, S.F. Opera Center

When pressed to name a few of her most promising singers, Greenawald refused to take sides. I thus had no choice but to throw out some favorites of mine and solicit commentary.

"Tenor David Lomelí, whether or not he's the most graceful creature on stage or not, has something that hits the ear and makes you want to hear more," she acknowledged. "He gives you what we all want out of a voice. He started out as an engineering major, then began singing with a mariachi band. "The same holds true for Leah Crocetto and Amanda Majeski; they make me want to hear more. Leah was studying at the Moody Bible College when we auditioned her. I practically fell off my chair when I heard her high notes. Amanda has gone on to the Chicago program, where her family is based, She's in a great program, and she'll have a lot of success. It's about singers having a home and having the luxury of not making cappuccinos at Starbucks to have to pay for voice lessons. All the kids who are coming in as Adlers have voices like Amanda's. They strike you and you want to hear more. It's thrills and chills."

Reviewing her in a recent Don Giovanni, I wrote, "Majeski [as Donna Anna] has Salzburg written all over her. Remarkably assured, with a powerful, expressive voice equipped for the role's coloratura demands, the American soprano managed to express potent anger, shock, and pain while maintaining consistent beauty of tone." Majeski's soaring, ravishing high notes in her Merola Grand Finale appearances underscored her potential for major success. Greenawald points to other successful recent Adler Fellows. Sean Panikkar recently had a great success at the Met doing Arturo in Lucia di Lammermoor, and Thomas Glenn made his debut there in John Adams' Doctor Atomic. Karen Slack is in Detroit singing in the local premiere of Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner. Jane Archibald, who was an Adler Fellow the same time as van den Heever, is having a huge success in Europe doing the Queen of the Night, Sophie, Zerbinetta, and Cleopatra. "I think my whole current crop is great," says Greenawald, ignoring my direction. "When we did Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride, Daveda Karanas' voice made people's heads snap around. Ji Young Yang has a vulnerability and sheer beauty that I wanted to hear a lot more of from the moment she first auditioned. Heidi Melton is extremely gifted. Kenneth Kellogg is coming on strong as a young bass, and is growing by leaps and bounds. Daniella Mack, Tamara Wapinsky, Alec Shrader, and Andrew Bidlack are also growing like crazy." When it comes to soprano Ji Young Yang, I heartily concur. Her Giannetta in SFO's current production of L'Elisir d'Amore lights up the stage. In addition to her unique, silvery sweet timbre, which brings to mind the voices of Toti dal Monte and several other inter-war sopranos, Young's inner radiance, outward beauty, and riveting presence proclaim stardom.

Photo by Heidi Schumann

"I've known Elza the longest." Greenawald said in summation. "She flew back from South Africa on Friday, and was in the practice room the next day. Elza was the person who knew how early the building opened and how late it stayed open. It is that kind of drive — getting into that practice room to make sure you're warmed up and prepared before rehearsal, and coming back after dinner to examine how you're doing things — that pays off. She has incredible diligence about getting things learned properly. There's no substitute for working." Next Week: The news from New York and Houston