Tenor Frederick Ballentine opens up about his early operatic education, the surgery that saved his voice, and how he stays grounded amid an international performing career.
Frederick Balentine
Many aspiring professional singers audition for summer festivals and young artist programs once they have completed university studies. Those programs often bridge the gap between school and a career, offering experiences designed to lead to performing contracts.
That stage of tenor Frederick Ballentine’s professional development was rife with opportunity. Not only did he secure performances with Wolf Trap Opera, Aspen Music Opera Center, and Opera Theatre of St. Louis, but he also joined the Cafritz Young Artists of Washington National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program. Some of the most crucial training he received, however, came years earlier.
At the encouragement of a choir teacher and a church choir director, Ballentine auditioned for the Governor’s School for the Arts, a performing arts high school in Norfolk, Virginia. When he was accepted, his operatic education began in earnest. “It was straight-up every day, one to two o’clock, we were in our survey class, listening to opera, listening to every genre, listening to every old-school diva you could think of,” he remembers. “Looking back on it, I’m so grateful for that. I went into college knowing more about that art form than any of my college schoolmates at that time.”
Besides the coursework, Ballentine credits the outstanding faculty with providing formative lessons. “There were two teachers there that I really attribute my love of opera to. Alan Fischer [who taught the survey course] is one of them. He gave as full of a grounding in what opera is as anybody at any level could get,” he says.
The other teacher was Robert Brown. As Ballentine says, “Fischer gave me the information, Brown gave me the heart and the passion.” This influence extended beyond music and singing. “[Brown] was a very out-and-proud gay man when, at that time, I had nobody else that was an out-and-proud gay man that I could recognize,” he says. “I saw so much of myself in him. To this day, I say that I gained a lot of my personality from Mr. Brown.”
The other lasting influence that came from the Governor’s School for the Arts was the cohort of classmates he interacted with every day. “There were a lot of great young talents coming out of that school who are actually very successful,” he says.
Classmates Speedo Green, Will Liverman, Courtney Johnson, and Chrystal Williams are all active opera singers with an impressive combined list of performance credits in major opera houses. “All of us were competing against each other. And it wasn’t negative competition. We were always supporting each other,” he says. “Knowing that I had those friends there, killing the game, always gave me a boost.” He still sees these friends on the performance circuit and frequently works with them on stage. “We’re still in it. We’re still doing it,” he says.
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Ballentine as Sam Polk in Opera Theatre Saint Louis’s production of Susannah, 2023.
Performer First
In a field that prioritizes “the voice,” Ballentine is regularly hailed in the press for other attributes. Frequently recognized for his energy, charisma, presence, and charm, his performances are often noted for being vibrant and compelling. The reason? “I fell in love with performing before I fell in love with singing,” he says.
He recalls a time in his mid-20s when he confronted the “performer” versus “singer” identity in his life. “I was singing an aria for Renée Fleming while I was doing the Young Artist Program at Washington National Opera, and she said, ‘Freddie, you’re so impressive. [Your voice] is very present. Why is it not pretty?’ And I said, ‘It’s not who I am. My voice simply isn’t pretty.’ And she said, ‘Well, if your voice isn’t beautiful, that is a choice that you have made.’
“And I thought, ‘Oh, that makes a lot of sense.’ I chose to not make it pretty. I chose to not really explore that side of my voice. Instead of making it pretty, I decided to make everything else impressive. So up to that point in my vocal career, I thought of myself as a performer…now I know I have a beautiful voice. I’ve made my voice beautiful. It took 10 years. I thank Renée for giving me the heads-up on that.”
Although he knew he was a solid singer, he worked more on the performance elements in order to make up for what he perceived to be certain vocal shortcomings. “Now I’m happy that, over time, I figured out a happy medium between the two,” he says. “I don’t think I have a natural instrument. I think I have a very learned instrument. My technique is how I built what I have, but that means that I have to spend a little extra time with a score, figuring out how I’m going to navigate it.”
This has been especially important as he has taken on roles with increasing vocal demands, compared to some of the repertoire he was singing earlier in his career. “There was a time when, any role that I was doing, I could roll out of bed and sing,” he says. “I don’t take for granted my ability to sing anything at this point in my life.”
Working through Vocal Distress
Ballentine as Valcour in Atlanta Opera’s production of The Anonymous Lover, 2023.
Ballentine’s attitude of not taking any opportunities for granted hit home in an especially personal way during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like professional performers worldwide at that time, he endured a long list of canceled performances and uncertainty about when he could resume his career. Complicating matters, however, was an issue of vocal health. “I haven’t told many people about this, but I got a cyst around my [vocal] cords,” he says. “Thank God it wasn’t on the cords, but it was right below the cords.”
Regardless, the cyst had grown so large that it was interfering with the ability of the vocal folds to completely close. His doctors were able to surgically remove the cyst and he received a negative biopsy result when the mass was tested, which was a relief. Still, the process took a toll.
“Mentally, I was kind of just wrecked,” he says. “It was extremely difficult. I got through it slowly.”
As he worked through the recovery process, performance opportunities started to return. Although he felt vocally ready to jump back in, he knew he had not mentally or emotionally recovered from all that had occurred. “So many of us were not there mentally and had to get back to work. We had no way to deal with that. We kind of just had to do it,” he says.
He considers himself lucky to have had a close group of friends who supported each other through the pandemic by holding online studio classes so they could all sing for each other. “I was lucky to have that studio group that really was there for me. I was lucky to have amazing friends and a team that really, really, really had my back as I was going through all that,” he says. “And I also had to go to some therapy. I had to see a therapist. It was all so much to handle, and I’m very grateful that I was able to have the team to rely on.”
Ballentine as Sportin’ Life in Glimmerglass Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess, 2017.
Though he is thankful for how his situation turned out, Ballentine also recognizes an ongoing stigma that is still present all too frequently in performance culture when it comes to vocal health. “I honestly think it’s unfortunate that we as singers are so afraid to talk about vocal trauma,” he says. “I didn’t tell anybody other than my voice teacher. I kept it entirely to myself.” He admits that he was terrified that people would assume he made some mistake vocally or that he would not be able to return to high-level singing. “I had one of the best doctors in the game helping me out—and he said, ‘This has nothing to do with anything you have done. This is just something your body did.’”
After a month of recovery, he was given a clean bill of health. He did, however, continue to notice differences when he was singing, which caused him some mental anguish as he wondered if his voice had been altered. “After about a year, I finally started to accept that it’s just a little thing. From what I understand, they don’t hear [a difference] out there,” he says. “You have to just start to work through it. And you might not feel like yourself for a period of time, but you have to keep going.”
The entire experience has caused Ballentine to advocate for singers in similar situations, encouraging them to speak up, be gentle with themselves, and rely on their support systems. “It’s important for people to recognize that these two little pieces of string, it’s so easy for something to happen to them,” he says. “We shouldn’t attack ourselves for it. We should reach out. We should get the help we need. We should lean on our friends, trust the process, and trust that we’ll make our way through it. I think one of the most important things for me to recognize was that [the voice] might not be the same afterward, but that doesn’t mean that I still can’t make it just as good.”
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Finding Himself
Frederick Ballentine
Now back to a full schedule of performing, Ballentine still looks for ways to escape the busyness and bustle of the industry and reconnect to his creative and artistic self. One of the best ways he has found to do this is to perform recitals. “I feel so much more in tune with myself after I do a recital,” he says. “The recital feels almost like a reset for me, if that makes sense. I’m getting back to my baseline.”
The inherently collaborative nature of opera and the sheer number of people involved in productions mean that creative and interpretive decisions are often handed down from others. “You are trusting other people to help you build something up,” he says. “Along the way, you can forget who you are, sometimes—and then hopefully there’s a recital scheduled, or I’ll go back into a practice room and sing through my entire recital just to find myself and my grounding again.”
Another way he can rely more on his unique artistic voice is to perform new works. In recent years, he has appeared in Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s It’s a Wonderful Life, in Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s new opera Grounded, and in the world premiere of Gregory Spears and Tracey K. Smith’s Castor and Patience. Although many elements of these performances are attractive to Ballentine, one reason rises to the top: “There’s so much less baggage,” he says. “One of the most frustrating things for me as an artist is walking into a production or jumping into a role and knowing that everybody’s ear is tuned to somebody who died. It’s almost defeating. People have assumptions of how something should be done.”
Ballentine takes pride in being able to make each role his own, ideally erasing preconceived notions of how a character “should” be performed based on previous interpretations. “That’s harder to do if you’re singing Rodolfo or Don José,” he admits. “When it comes to a new role, nobody has an idea of how it should go. It’s really your own. You are going in there, and you have spoken to the composer, and you’ve spoken to the librettist, and you’ve spoken to the director, and you can really create something that you all can be proud of—something that is your own, our own, and its own. You can truly have that only with new works, so I always jump at the opportunity to do new music.”
Ballentine as Sportin’ Life in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess, 2019
Encouraging Exploration
When considering his early exposure to opera and the steady progression of performance opportunities he has found in the genre, Ballentine recognizes his good fortune as well as the uniqueness of his path. However, he does not necessarily believe that singers currently working to build a career should follow his example. “The world of opera is just a small facet of performance,” he says. “We’re seeing what other types of performance there are out there…[singers] should check them out.”
He has no regrets that his career has been exclusively in the Western classical realm, though he does admit to some “cravings.” “I have a deep craving to try straight theater. I have a really strong craving for musical theatre. I would love to try voiceover work,” he says. “There are so many other types of performance that I think I could excel at and I think I could find quite fun. Now I’m at the point in my career where I’m a little too busy to be trying other things, and I’m very grateful—really grateful—to be busy. I’m so, so blessed and grateful to be busy. But, when I was younger…I wonder what else I could have excelled at.”
For today’s young artists, Ballentine encourages them to cast a wide net to see where their interests and abilities may lead them. He says, “There’s nothing wrong with going out there and seeing what else one could master.”
