Who would want to sing at 9 a.m.? Mercifully, that wasn’t on the agenda as Houston Grand Opera’s Young Artists Vocal Academy started its day. Decked out in shorts or yoga outfits, the program’s nine participants gathered in a rehearsal studio in the Wortham Theater Center, HGO’s home, for a movement class.
Instructor Adam Noble led the budding artists, all of them college or conservatory students, through a yoga-inspired warm-up. He moved on to a skill that could serve them well in opera: falling to the stage without hurting themselves. From a standing position, Noble bent his knees until he sat on his heels, with knees pointing forward. He lowered his knees to the floor without making a thunk, then leaned sideways and back, rolling his back along the fleshy side part. The group, starting gingerly, tried it themselves. If they ever need to portray a woman fainting or a man struck by a sword, this would do the trick.
The session led up to what Noble, a University of Houston instructor, called “the evocative gesture.” Setting the group free for a few moments, he asked each to come up with physical motions to evoke beckoning a person nearer and driving someone away. After the next assignment—for a full-body motion saying, “destroy”—the group cut loose with lunges, punches, and slashing arms. In sessions to come, Noble told the group, they’d learn to distill these movements and others. His goal was to help them “get out of stock-gesture land and figure out how to create fully realized characters.”
“You’ve spent all this time developing a glorious vocal instrument,” Noble says. “Your body is also an instrument.”
The Young Artists Vocal Academy embraces much more than singing. Launched in 2011, the program brings in 16 aspiring performers—divided between two weeklong sessions—to glimpse the professional opera world and discern the skills that would propel their careers. For the 2017 program, which took place in May, 180 budding performers submitted video applications. The 16 who got in had to travel to Houston on their own. But HGO provided everything else—the program, lodging, and meals—for free.
“It can be difficult for young singers to get a picture of what the profession really looks like and what the requirements are at the professional level,” says Brian Speck, director of the HGO Studio, one of the nation’s top training programs. “They come here and spend a week getting to see and understand what the professional singer’s life looks like, what’s expected of a singer at that level, how a major company runs.
“If you look at that movement class, he’s [Noble’s] teaching a lot of specific ideas that are really useful to them about how to use their bodies onstage,” Speck continues. “If they leave this week thinking, ‘I’ve got a lot to learn about movement,’ we’ve accomplished something. . . . They can begin to set goals and cultivate what they need to succeed as a singer.”
Each singer has a daily voice lesson with Stephen King, HGO’s director of vocal instruction and professor of voice at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Each day also brings individual acting sessions with a stage director and vocal coachings with HGO’s music staff. Aspiring coach-pianists, added to the mix in 2017, huddle with the music staff even more.
Speck and other HGO staffers lead group sessions on topics from career building to rehearsal etiquette to judging one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Over dinner, the company’s leaders—including artistic director Patrick Summers and managing director Perryn Leech—hold roundtable discussions about a real-life opera house’s workings and demands. Attending an HGO performance helps remind everyone what they’re aiming for.
“Everything we do is meant to be eye opening,” Speck says. “It’s meant to show them things that motivate them and help them understand what information they need to continue to find. So much of a singer’s success is about their own curiosity.”
Baritone Ben Edquist, who recently finished his second season in the HGO Studio—a training program whose alumni include mezzo-soprano fireball Joyce DiDonato—got his first close-up look at the opera world through the Young Artists Vocal Academy. He had just graduated from Vanderbilt University, and seeing performances was all he knew about opera companies.
“I can’t imagine a more professionally advancing experience,” Edquist says. The program opened his eyes to “professional stuff—what my résumé had to look like, what people are looking for when you’re auditioning, a professional company’s mindset. That was information I hadn’t had before. . . . We’d sit down with the head honchos and we’d talk about what we had to do with our careers. We’d get the coachings and training we needed. It was unbelievable.”
After the movement class ended, members of the HGO Studio offered an entry-level view of the professional world. Performing in HGO productions alongside internationally known artists, bass Fernando DeMichelis says, gives a young professional validation. “You know that you can do it too.” And it is possible to make a living, the group told the young guests. But with roles to learn and languages to master, on top of rehearsals and performances, opera demands focus and discipline.
“Keep learning. Never get complacent,” coach/accompanist Geoffrey Loff says. “As long as your below-average day is better than someone else’s above-average day, you’ll be fine.”
The time for singing arrived after lunch, as voice teacher King—whose students include Richard Tucker Award winners Jamie Barton and Tamara Wilson, both HGO Studio alumni—and other instructors went to work. For King’s first lesson of the day, soprano Michelle Ravitsky from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music brought in arias from Handel’s Serse and Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
King wanted a sweeter, less metallic sound. That called for more space in the rear of the mouth and throat, so King took a series of steps to pursue it. He had Ravitsky inhale through a straw, then try to keep the same shape in her throat when she sang. He gave her another straw that she put crossways in her mouth as she sang, touching it with her tongue to keep from blocking the throat. He told her to skip the original text and sing “flo” on every syllable. In “Batti, batti” from Don Giovanni, Ravitsky began delivering the tone King wanted—a sound that suited Zerlina’s song to her sweetheart.
“That way sounds better—beautiful, caressing, loving,” King says.
Ravitsky’s next stop was an acting lesson with Tara Faircloth, a stage director for HGO and other companies. They devoted the session to an aria from Massenet’s Cendrillon: “Enfin, je suis ici,” in which the heroine describes fleeing the ball and losing a glass slipper. Faircloth suggested that Ravitsky carry herself as if she’s recalling the events—that the danger is past—rather than reliving the original terror.
“When you tell a story to someone, you can gesture toward them. You can indicate this imaginary world,” Faircloth says, demonstrating with a sweep of her right arm. As they worked through the scene, Ravitsky’s portrayal gained life and immediacy.
Next on Ravitsky’s agenda was a coaching with Bradley Moore, head of HGO’s music staff, who accompanied her in Susanna’s “Deh vieni non tardar” from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. “Beautiful,” Moore says when they finished. “We hear this sung all the time, but not this beautifully.”
Nevertheless, Moore spent more than a half hour working through the recitative and aria: linking phrases in the recitative to help it flow; using the recitative’s conclusion to establish the aria’s tempo; cleaning up diction, such as “r”s that were “a little American”; taking advantage of moments that suggest Susanna is imitating the Countess’ deeper voice; coloring key words, such as the airy scherza.
“You could be a big-house Susanna at 35,” Moore says. He added that he’d pay money to hear her.
Baritone Schyler Vargas, who starts graduate school this fall at the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music, worked with King on “Ah! per sempre” from Bellini’s I puritani. King thought Vargas’ voice sounded piercing in vowels such as the “i” in “Elvira,” so they went to work on keeping Vargas’ throat free of squeezing. As with Ravitsky, King brought several methods to bear. He had Vargas sing a given phrase’s first note an octave down, where an open throat comes more naturally, then slide up to the right pitch, trying to preserve the feeling. King told Vargas to start with a vocal fry, then bring in his full voice as he slid up to an actual phrase’s range, again aiming for the relaxed throat. As King began to hear the fuller sound he wanted, he asked Vargas how the aria felt now.
“It feels good,” Vargas says. “Like all of it is coming from the same spot.”
Vargas’ session with acting coach Faircloth focused on “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen” from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. After singing it, Vargas says a contest judge had told him that his face was blank during the orchestral passages. So they went to work. What is the aria about? What is the character feeling?
They zeroed in on the idea that Paul, in the guise of the comedian Pierrot, is sharing a bittersweet memory of a past love. “Any time you start to go into singer-land, as I call it, remind yourself that you’re a person telling a story to someone else,” Faircloth says. As Vargas repeated the aria, his wistful half-smiles helped the feelings come across.
“It does look better,” Faircloth says and she asks what Vargas thought. “I feel more connected to a real person,” he says.
Vargas began his vocal coaching with Moore by singing “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. “It suits you,” Moore says. “I was skeptical when you put it in front of me.” Then, as with Ravitsky, Moore worked through the music in detail: making parts of the song sound conversational, touching up fine points of German enunciation, picking up on the tempo established by the harp, gauging where to sing softly and where to open up a bit.
As the stopping time approached, Moore declared his love for the Tote Stadt aria and says, “Let’s have a five-minute speed coaching.” But the session ended up running overtime as he helped Vargas shape Korngold’s music. Saying, “It’s a good one for you,” Moore ended by urging Vargas to pay attention to the crescendos in the vocal line. “Not everybody does it,” Moore says. “You’ll set yourself apart if you sing it the way he marks it—expressively.”
At dinnertime, everyone carried their plates into a conference room for a session with Diane Zola, HGO’s director of artistic administration and an opera-world veteran. As they ate, she gave them a lot to think about and work on.
“First of all, you need to really assess if you’re learning what you need to learn from your singing teacher,” Zola says. “Your singing teacher is probably, at this stage in your career—in your life—the most important person to help you. If you’re not getting that help, you have to think of going somewhere else. Someone a while back said to me, ‘I know I should change teachers, but I’m afraid it will rock the boat.’ You know what? It’s your career. You have to take responsibility for that.”
For more than an hour, Zola gave them the plain truth about the imperatives of an opera career: judging their abilities clearly, cultivating musical skills and languages, caring for their bodies and minds, taking pride in themselves without being cocky, and developing thick skins. “Maybe you’ll be the youngest person in the cast, and all of a sudden the conductor is really frustrated with someone else,” she says. “But he doesn’t dare take it out on that person. So it’s gonna be you.”
Zola also turned their eyes toward their goals. “None of you is going to walk the same path,” she says. “Every single one of you is going to have a different route. That makes it so exciting—so exciting.”
