I remember first hearing Rachel Willis-Sørensen sing 11 years ago when she was a 19-year-old with a big, if a bit unruly, voice. Her version of “Ah, non giunge” from La sonnambula was powerful and obviously memorable—but there was no hint that the tall, outspoken young soprano would reach the pinnacle of the opera world.
The path has not been fast and smooth, but Willis-Sørensen is quickly garnering accolades, most notably for winning Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition in Los Angeles in August of 2014. She followed this win with her Metropolitan Opera debut as Countess Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, a role in which she also made her Covent Garden debut in 2011. Willis-Sørensen was a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2010 and has sung at the Houston Grand Opera and toured with Bryn Terfel, among many other notable appearances. In the coming season, she will return to sing the Countess at the Met as well as Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at San Francisco Opera, Elsa von Brabant in Lohengrin in Berlin, and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and the Countess with the Vienna State Opera.
Despite an impressive list of accomplishments, Willis-Sørensen is still the unabashed, affable personality I encountered more than 11 years ago. I spoke with her this spring as she relaxed in her Dresden home, where she has been singing on a Fest contract until recently. She and her husband recently welcomed twin boys into their family and will return to the U.S. in the fall.
Unlike many professional opera singers, classical music was not at all a part of Willis-Sørensen’s upbringing. “I started a little bit late, so I didn’t take lessons until I was 17,” she relates. “I had almost no exposure at all to classical music at that point, and certainly not to opera. My family wasn’t into classical music. In fact, my mom would want me to sing in a fake opera voice for entertainment, and I think it took my parents a while to realize that I took singing seriously and that this was my livelihood.
“Because I didn’t have the background in opera when I was younger, I definitely felt at a disadvantage,” she continues. “When I came to college and I knew I wanted to sing, I remember that I checked out Siegfried from the library and I thought as I watched, ‘Why does anyone listen to Wagner?!’ I didn’t get it at first, and it took a lot of exposure, but I eventually became so enthralled with it.”
No Greater Expression of the Human Experience
Willis-Sørensen is very clear about what drew her to opera as an art form. “It feels like real communication, and that’s something I figured out very early on. My first voice teacher in eastern Washington was a tremendous singer, and one day she was singing an aria for me as I was helping her renovate her house. I remember that I was painting the inside of a closet in the next room over and she started singing, ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.’ I just started sobbing as I was painting the closet because it was the most exquisite thing I’d ever heard. It was one of those experiences that you never forget.
“In an opera, when the stars align—the orchestra’s playing well, the conductor is really sensitive, the singers are on their game, and everybody is open hearted—it feels to me like the music is coming out of myself when I’m in the audience,” she continues. “It seems so magical and wonderful when that can happen, so I love the idea of being able to do that for someone else. You can feel it, too, when you are singing and people are receiving it. It’s a two-way street, somehow, even though they’re just watching and you’re doing the singing. For me, there’s no greater expression of the human experience.
“I just always felt like I had something worthwhile to share, something to say, and I loved singing because it is so expressive. I did get such mixed reactions to my singing, but I thought that as long as they were going to let me keep singing, I was going to do it.”
Conquering Coloratura
When Willis-Sørensen arrived at Brigham Young University for her schooling, it didn’t take long for her to get hooked on opera. She related that she would devour any literature that she could get her hands on. She would listen to operas and recordings of singers and then discuss them with anyone who would give her the time. “I also figured out what the Met was and what that meant,” she says. “I had heard about it before, but didn’t really know anything.”
All of her listening led her to idolize the coloratura soprano repertoire. She thought that to sing the screaming high notes and melismatic fireworks would be the most fun. “My teacher at the time was of the belief that the lighter the music you sing, the safer it is,” she remembers. “Also, the way I was doing it, I wasn’t really engaging my body, so I probably wasn’t coming up with my own sound. I guess if you’re going to mess around and not use the body, it’s safer to sing lighter things—but the way I was doing it, just screaming these high Fs, it affected the middle of my voice where I just had these weird holes. I could do all of this really high stuff, but my larynx was so tight.
“I was singing ‘Ah, non giunge’ from Sonnambula and the Jewel Aria from Faust, and my teacher was also telling me to learn ‘O luce di quest’anima,’” she continues. “I learned these pieces and did all of this coloratura stuff and, in a way, now I’m grateful. Somewhere during that time, I learned how to move my voice, which you have to know how to do when you’re singing Mozart.
“It’s just that coloratura is not at all my bread and butter, and I don’t think anyone would hire me to do that now. I imagined myself then as a coloratura, but I don’t think I knew at all what a career would look like. I guess I never really thought about it and lived in the present. I just knew I loved singing.”
Finding Her Rep
When she was cast as Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro at BYU, Willis-Sørensen thought, as she started learning the role, “Oh, this is so boring! There’s no coloratura and it’s just in the middle of my voice!” The role became a game changer for her, though, and it pointed her in a new direction. “The arias sound so simple, but they are both actually really difficult. Besides the breath, they contain some legitimate vocal challenges.”
Willis-Sørensen spent that whole first semester with her new teacher, Darrell Babidge, working on nothing but ‘Dove sono’ and ‘Porgi amor.’ “That’s all we did,” she says. “It was refreshing for me, though, because in my previous paradigm, there were so many repertoire learning requirements. I was pumping out a lot of unfinished repertoire, but none of the pieces that I was singing was in my body. Learning to sing the Countess arias, I first had to patch up the holes in the middle of my voice that were the result of screaming high notes all the time. I had to figure out how to sing from the top down and find where everything fits. I realized as soon as I sang the role that it was much more suited to me than the coloratura. I also began to realize that the more of my body that I use in my singing, the richer the repertoire that I sing.
“The magic really happens when you figure out what rep is yours and what rep you ought to be singing. If I’m able to use the message of the song, the text, and it moves me, I can then relax and sing better. Luckily, I’ve been able to sing a ton of Mozart since coming out of Young Artist Programs. It’s been almost exclusively Mozart with a few exceptions, and that’s been really healthy.
“I think if I could only do one role, it would be the Countess. She is so good and does the right things. She is able to forgive the Count despite everything. I think the way Mozart wrote her, he intended her to be grandiose and noble, a good person. The audience obviously feels terrible for you because your husband is a jerk, and you get to be the victor in the end.”
While Mozart has been the staple of her early career, Willis-Sørensen has been increasingly singing Wagner, a composer who has helped show her vocal prowess in competition. “Next season, I’ll take my first really big forays into Wagner, first singing Eva in Meistersinger von Nürnberg at San Francisco Opera as a role debut, and I’m also singing Elsa in Lohengrin in Berlin,” she says. “That will be two of the three E’s, or the lyrical roles in Wagner, the other one being Elisabeth in Tannhäuser. So, that’s exciting, but I’m really not going to push it too much. In fact, overlapping with my Berlin performances, I will be returning to the Met to sing the Countess again in the same Marriage of Figaro production that I sang this year. All of these roles have very similar tessituras, I would say.”
Competitive Singing
In speaking of his Operalia competition, Plácido Domingo said that the principal reason for the competition was the discovery of young singers and helping them launch their careers. While not all singers need competition wins to make their name in the opera world, these wins have most certainly propelled the career of Willis-Sørensen. She describes, however, a learning curve and the increased exposure that brought greater success.
“Going to the Metropolitan Opera auditions was actually a very daunting experience,” she says. “The first time I competed, I made it all the way to the semifinals, but then I just choked. I was so overwhelmed by the space. I stood on the Met stage and as I sang, all I could think was ‘Pavarotti stood here! Birgit Nilsson stood here! I can’t stand here! What am I doing?’ I was overwhelmed and embarrassed that whatever sounds I put out there wouldn’t be worthy of that stage. So, they told me to come back in a couple of years and maybe I would be ready. Luckily, a couple of years later, I made it all the way to the end and got to win, which was so cool.”
One of the judges for her Met win was also a casting director for Covent Garden, and her singing prompted an offer to sing the Countess in 2011. This was an enormous leap, going from a young artist with Houston Grand Opera straight to the stage of Covent Garden, but her debut was labeled by critics as “triumphant.” She followed with a win at the Belvedere competition and eventually entered Domingo’s Operalia in 2014.
“I did Operalia in the fall because I realized that I was still young enough,” she laughs. “Oh, and I really wanted to meet Plácido Domingo so badly, so I needed to do this competition! I had tried to enter the competition before and didn’t get an acceptance or rejection. I just wouldn’t hear from them. But this time they let me in and I thought, ‘I don’t have to win or anything. It’s just great to be here.’
“I sang the first round and I thought I did horribly because I was thinking about how I was singing for Plácido Domingo, who to me is the best tenor in recorded history,” she remembers. “I didn’t realize how much it would freak me out to sing in front of him. Usually, when I get nervous, I turn up this loud version of myself that’s semi-charming, but this time I actually became timid. I had already made my debut at Covent Garden and had my contract for the Vienna State Opera, an established singer—but there I was, singing in front of Plácido Domingo, and I was first up during the day. There were so many judges in the audience, and I was suddenly paralyzed with fear. He said, ‘Good afternoon, Ms. Swenson’ (mispronouncing my name), and I timidly answered, ‘Hi . . . .’
“All of the training where you say your name loudly and clearly and do all the right things—I don’t even know what happened to all of that. He asked me what I wanted to sing, and I was like, ‘Fiordiligi.’ I didn’t even say the name of the aria!
“I had also signed up to do the Zarzuela portion of the competition, which I strangely ended up winning! I had never spoken to anyone from Spain and couldn’t get a coach to help me with Zarzuela because I was in Germany. I listened to recordings and tried to re-create what Castilian Spanish must sound like. I was definitely not as prepared as I should have been. So, Plácido said to me, ‘I see that you would like to sing for the Zarzuela portion of the competition,’ and I said, ‘I’d like to try.’” Willis-Sørensen laughs. “Somehow, I guess I pulled myself together enough that they let me on to the next round.”
After the first round of the competition, Domingo held a press conference in the middle of the week to talk about the competition, LA Opera, and other projects he was working on. They invited the singers to come and listen to what he had to say during this. “I am so glad I went,” Willis-Sørensen says, “because somebody asked him what the secret was to the longevity in his singing career. He said, ‘As long as I can still do it and the public wants me to do it and I still really like doing it, I will probably continue to do it.’ It seems so simple, but it occurred to me, ‘What are we doing? Why do we take the fun out of it? Why do we forget that we sing because we love it?’ It was remarkable for some reason that he just performs because he likes it. I thought to myself, ‘Not ever again am I going to let a performance go by without really feeling how much I love doing this.’ The struggle to please people is so big, and I realized it gets in my way.
“After the press conference, I resolved to not worry about making people like me and to just share my natural gift. For singers, you have to figure out what your message is and openly share that message in spite of criticism. In the next round, I sang the ‘Czàrdàs’ (from Fledermaus), and then they asked me to sing ‘Dich, teure Halle.’ I just decided I was going to have a really great time and approached it with a liberated attitude.
“Life is too short and too valuable to do things in a way that makes you unhappy. I want my daughter to pursue her dreams in a wild, open-hearted way in spite of the outcome. It is the event itself that is the reward. The ironic thing was that as soon as I started to do this, the criticism quieted. There’s such a different response from people. I got to actually win the whole thing and then got my Met debut out of it. It was such a rewarding, overwhelmingly good experience because I just enjoyed it as it happened.”
Character versus Technique
In some of Willis-Sørensen’s first performances, critics mentioned that her acting was not impassioned enough. She has grown as an actress in the past few years and shares what has changed and how she thinks about character while she is performing.
“I used to be of the belief that you have to throw yourself into it 100 percent for the audience to enjoy the performance,” she says. “The more vulnerable you are able to make yourself, the more it will read to the audience. I believed that you actually had to make yourself feel the things the character was feeling. Then, I had a couple of experiences where I realized that I was actually going too far. Someone told me, ‘You have to be as neutral as you can be because the audience will project onto you what they want to see.’ I thought, ‘That’s horrible advice! I’m an actress!’
“Obviously, you have to be really dedicated and know everything the character is thinking. You should experience it at least somewhat, but if you want to do it all the time . . . well, you can’t scream a high C because your character is in pain. You have to be a singer. Unfortunately, this is going to be a slightly less emotionally rewarding experience for the singer. Someone once told me that if I’m actually crying on stage, the audience won’t be crying. However, if you bring yourself to the point that you’re almost crying, the audience really feels it. If you go too far, it almost becomes a spectacle to the audience. I used to resent people who said things like that, but I believe it now.”
Willis-Sørensen has also learned to be very clear in her intention. “I experienced this in my Met debut as the Countess,” she relates. “‘Porgi amor’ is a rough way to make a Met debut because it’s the first thing you sing and it’s so exposed. The curtain would open and I was supposed to get up in this bed, be very sad, and begin singing really quietly and in tune. Every night, I felt a little bit panicked with the first few notes, but it turned out fine. The other issue with that piece is that your character is feeling sad and vulnerable. I’ve had reviews talking about how nervous I was in that aria and, yes, it was my Met debut, so I was a little nervous—but on the other hand, I was just trying to communicate the character in this vulnerable position.”
A Deepening Connection to Her Art
“You have so much training as a singer,” says Willis-Sørensen. “I think sometimes there is so much training that they train out of you the thing that you need to be successful. You have to be careful and hold onto the individuality that you brought in the first place. If you lose the passion that you had in the beginning, there’s no reason to do it anymore. You can’t lose yourself in the process and become a perfect technician with no message.”
In these early years of a rising career, Willis-Sørensen and her husband decided they weren’t going to wait to have children. When she stepped out on stage as the Countess at the Met last December, she was at the time very much pregnant with twins, boys who were born on June 2. She and her husband are also the parents of a beautiful little girl, and their decision to have children as she is making her debuts in the biggest houses has prompted some interesting reactions. She points out, though, that her new role as a parent has improved her performance.
“There were certainly a lot of prejudices voiced before I had my daughter,” she relates. “I remember telling a coach that having a family was something in which I was really interested, and he said, ‘You don’t need children. Your career is your child and that’s how you have to see it.’ I think what’s weird is that there’s this bizarre notion that if you’re given the gift of a career, you owe it to people to not have a sense of a personal life. That’s absolutely ludicrous because you would never become the artist you could be. When you open your heart to giving new life—I guess everybody’s different—but without that, I couldn’t tell some of these stories in the same way. So many stories in opera are about families! I mean, think about Suor Angelica. The idea of that kind of grief seems overwhelming now after having a baby.
“I tend to overthink the way people hear and see me—which is, I think, a common problem among singers,” Willis-Sørensen admits. “Once I had my daughter, though, I think I found the world was so much different than I had previously believed. My values had changed, and I actually began valuing the art form itself more than I had before. Before, I just wanted the audience to like me and like what I was doing—but after a child, I realized what a gift it was to perform.”
