How did you learn to sing pianissimo?
Just over, and over, and over, and over again. Just singing a note decrescendo-ing. You ask someone, “How did you learn to hit a golf ball?” “How did you learn to do free throws?” Practice, over, and over, and over again. It’s not a natural thing to be able to do perfectly, especially in the tenor voice around the passaggio area, where we always have to do it. We never get to do it in middle C. It’s always got to be F, G, or A. For me it’s just about trial and error, and consistently doing it every day.
How do you deal with the passaggio?
The way I deal with it is that I don’t even think about it. I never even consider it to be anything. It’s not a magical place. It’s just you go up and down—and if you think about it, all of a sudden you start to have this real issue with it. I think that if you just disregard it and say, “Yes, this is naturally where my voice wants to flip into head voice and then my falsetto,” it becomes less of a mental hurdle. So I just try to go up and come down and not let it ever be an issue. A “G” is a “G” and it’s not the passaggio, and “F” is an “F” and not the passaggio. It’s just is what it is.
How do you go about overcoming a bad habit?
That’s a great question. I think I have a lot of mannerisms and things on stage that I have tried to get over and still fall back into, especially when the nerves are more heightened. I think I just remind myself that I have a tendency to do this. I usually have someone close to me watching who says, “Hey, you’re doing the claw again!” [or] “You’re making that thing with your right shoulder.” I just tell myself that I’m aware of it and to never, ever think of myself as other than a work in progress. There’s always going to be tension. If I obsess about it, it usually gets worse. So I know it’s there and I give about 5 percent of my thought to it, and the rest to other things.
What do you do the day of the performance?
[Laughs.] I sleep in. I usually take a long walk. I have kind of a strict diet on the day of the show. I eat a lot of carbs before the show, which I don’t do normally, but I do before the show. But usually I spend the majority of the day quiet. I never exercise on the day of the show. I usually will go to the theater early, probably two hours before. I do a little bit of yoga beforehand. And at least two hours before, I start getting into the mental space for singing and taking on a role. So, really, I don’t do a lot.
How does yoga help you?
For me, breathing is huge, gigantic. I always need postures that open my midsection, like my chest. And usually stretching around the midsection is crucial for me because I’m a big guy. And oftentimes I collapse in on myself. I spend a lot of time trying to be as loose and relaxed as possible before a show, because one of my tendencies on stage is to get bunched up tight. I find that if I go into being on stage loose, usually I stay that way the majority of the night.
In this phase of your career you’ve performed a good number of roles each year that were new to you. How do you manage this breakneck work of learning a number of roles in the course of a year?
Sometimes it has been too many new roles, especially when you’re talking about operas like I puritani, Maria Estuarda, and Roméo et Juliette. It’s very, very difficult music and . . . it’s long. For me, if I’m going to learn parts like that it really can’t be more than three in a year, max. One year it was, like, five.
I think the key to learning new parts is to start early. Start a year and half out if you have to. Just slowly, over time, start putting things into your voice, your ear, and your mind, because cramming parts is disastrous. You see singers who do it all the time. Their next gig might be Don Pasquale and they’re learning it the month before. I could never do something like that. It just simply does not work. I’ll start parts out a year in advance, at least.
