Critical ears have been impressed by Lawrence Brownlee’s extraordinary voice ever since he sang an aria in a recital during his senior year of high school in Youngstown, Ohio. Afterwards, a voice teacher came up to him and said, “I think you really have a voice for opera. You really have something special. Did you ever consider studying classical singing?” As Brownlee recalls, “My father and I, we were sitting there looking at each other thinking, ‘He can’t be serious! I was just kidding around. I wasn’t serious about this. I don’t even like opera; I don’t know anything about it.’”
But he began to consider the possibility. Brownlee went to see his first opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe; and afterwards, as he puts it, “I was hooked.” High school music teachers Mark Halls and Carol Baird were the first in a series of important mentors who would help craft a gifted voice to perfection. They were followed by David Starkey, the voice teacher who had approached him after the high school recital, and the late Virginia Botkin.
But Fritz Robertson—at Anderson University, where Brownlee studied as an undergrad—was the most influential, says Brownlee. Bad training had irreparably harmed Robertson’s voice, and he made sure the same thing would not happen to Brownlee. Among the things he taught Brownlee was how to bring his head voice down, rather than vice versa, and to blend it into his voice to create one sound without breaks. At Indiana University, where Brownlee obtained a master’s in music, Costanza Cuccaro rounded out his voice, helping him open up the notes above the staff.
“It’s all about finding the right teachers,” Brownlee maintains, “ones who understand your instrument, and guide you in the right direction—which can be a matter of luck,” then adds, “I’ve been very lucky.”
Two transcendent events set Brownlee on the fast track to international renown: his triumphs in 2001 in the Metropolitan Opera Competition and at La Scala, the Holy of Holies of the operatic world.
But the seeming ease of Brownlee’s rise to the summits of opera is deceptive. He reached them despite formidable obstacles posed by his race and short stature. Some cognoscenti had let their critical eyes get in the way of their critical ears. As one agent in the audience at the Met Competition put it, “He did a great job; but unfortunately, he won’t have a career, because he’s short and black.” But the blinding brilliance of Brownlee’s voice blasted through the obstacles of racial and physical stereotypes. His self-possessed carriage and presence on stage completed the demolition. Added to the undisputed asset of his voice, he has a charisma that invokes, in audiences and critics alike, the willing suspension of disbelief required in all great theatrical productions. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, demonstrating that critical ears have won the field over critical eyes.
The first important published accolade after a critical hearing came from New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini, who reviewed the Metropolitan Opera Competition that Brownlee won in the spring of 2001. Tommasini wrote that the 28-year-old Brownlee had “a bright, clear focused voice and an engaging stage personality,” and that he had “won huge ovations for musically crisp, vocally confident accounts of arias by Rossini and Donizetti.” Barely five years later, Brownlee is internationally recognized as a specialist in Bel Canto roles turning down more offers to perform than he is able to accept.
Mounting critical acclaim has continued in the same vein as Brownlee debuted or repeated performances in some of the major opera venues of Europe and the United States. The Washington Post said of his performance in the Donna del Lago in May of 2004, “His pitch sense is spot-on, his coloratura flourishes are immaculately calibrated … and he combines it all with stage presence of considerable electricity.”
Reviewing his appearance in L’italiana in Algieri, the Boston Globe said, “His is a ringing, beautifully focused tenor sound, with ample flexibility to negotiate the composer’s virtuoso demands; and he sang with such freedom and assurance, one was made unaware of just how treacherous the music really is. He soared into the stratosphere with ease, and his phrasing was superlative. Hearing him alone was worth the price of admission.”
The crescendo of critical acclaim reached an even higher level of intensity at the beginning of this year. In a Washington Post review of a Kennedy Center solo recital, Tim Paige wrote that listening to Brownlee sing was, “like falling into a time warp,” but that the time travel led far beyond even Caruso, back to the beginnings of recorded sound. Paige cited the Italian tenors Fernando de Lucia and Alessandro Bonci, “with their Old World suavity, their dazzling and cultivated vocal agility, their caressing emphasis on unbroken lyrical sweetness,” and said that, “at his best sounds as though he has escaped from the hiss of an old Victrola—a real live coloratura tenor in the all-but-forgotten grand manner.” Commenting on his renditions of arias by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi, Page wrote that Brownlee “effectively repealed the law of gravity, sounding increasingly comfortable as his voice soared higher and higher.”
Pam Kragen added her enthusiastic kudos when she wrote in The San Diego Chronicle about Brownlee’s performance in “Barbiere” in early February: “I’ve been attending San Diego Opera productions for more than 30 years, and hearing Brownlee last weekend gave me the same goose bumps and heart-thumping electricity that I recall when I saw Beverly Sills perform her coloratura theatrics in a 1973 San Diego Opera production of The Daughter of the Regiment.”
Another critic in the audience of the San Diego Opera’s “Barbiere” noted the tenor’s masterful self-possession. Pat Launer wrote that during the music lesson scene in Act II, the ornate, gilded piano bench lost a leg and collapsed under Brownlee. But the tenor “maintained his charm and composure and deftly moved the offending furnishing out of the way, while at the same time singing, wooing and deceiving—commendable and consummate professionalism.”
Brownlee’s charisma can be felt in an interview. His unassuming modesty, personal charm—and sometimes street-wise syntax—are refreshing, and his responses reveal some of the secrets behind the vocal virtuosity praised by the critics.
How did you learn to sing pianissimo?
I had a coach at Indiana who told me that in the big leagues, the big boys, they learn how to sing pianissimo, and they have to learn how to sing with variation in color and dynamics, and he said, “This is what separates the men from the boys.”
Me and my teacher … we worked on this quite a bit. We did a few exercises to be able to learn to do this, to incorporate this in the singing—because oftentimes, if a person sings the same color, the same dynamic, it can get boring. And you have to hold the attention of the audience for two hours sometimes … with your singing. And this is just another tactic, or another thing that you put in your singing that takes you to a different level.
And how did you overcome the passaggio?
I guess the passaggio is the thing that all singers struggle with. It’s the break from your head voice to your chest voice, and mixing the two. Since beginning my studies, I’ve had four voice teachers, and all of them have been very helpful in this. I had a teacher who told me that you always have to unify the voice, and to bring the head voice down, which will help you work over the break in the voice, which is the passaggio. And so, that was something we worked on quite a bit with exercises specifically for that. And everyone has a different place where their voice breaks, so I had to figure out where my voice breaks, the place where the voice separates, and you have to mix the two. So, these exercises we work on even now to make the voice one voice from bottom to top.
How do you go about overcoming a bad habit?
[Laughs.] Ah, we all have our Achilles’ heels. You know, we have these things that really just come up and kind of rear their ugly heads all the time. You have to be conscious of it. A lot of times I have to go back and see my voice teacher, because there are certain things I am prone to as a singer, and she knows it. My coach knows it [too], and when I go back to them, that’s what they are looking for.
I have this attitude when I step on the stage. There’s a checklist that I go through before I start to sing. Certain things that I know that I do bad, I want to make sure I don’t do them. I go through my list, and then I try to go out and sing in that way.
I guess the main thing is to be conscious of it. I have this piece of laminated paper that I carry around with me … [it has] my voice exercises that I go through quite a bit. When I warm up, I warm up in a way that my teacher went through with me to hopefully insure that I won’t revert back to these old habits that can … make my singing [less than] the best it can be.
How do your coach and teacher work together?
My coach is one who deals with things pertaining to the artistic side of singing. My teacher is more technical: breathing, posture of your body, the position of your tongue, where your sound resonates. The coach deals more with singing pianissimo, and singing the rhythms right, and singing different dynamics, and stuff like that. They both have their separate jobs to do, but both of them work in cooperation with the other.
How do you go about making yourself practice?
I have a very high standard for myself. I always want to arrive prepared. I remember, very early on, my first experience of when I sang in an opera with an orchestra. I was in my first year at Indiana University, and I remember one girl in this opera, and she didn’t know her part—and the conductor pretty much told her not to come back until she knew it. It was the most embarrassing thing. And I thought, … [laughs] “That is never going to happen to me.” So I always set a standard to be very prepared, because it’s easier to perform when you think: “I’ve done all the work. I’m prepared. I know what I’m doing. I’m not here by accident. Just go out and enjoy it.”
Do you have little tricks to memorize your part?
I’ve talked to tons of my colleagues, and everyone has a different way of going about memorizing their things. I am always with the piano, and … sitting down with the score, and beating out the rhythms [with] my hand on the table, to basically get it inside myself. Sometimes I write it down, because I’ve been told before that if it’s in my brain, it can be in my mouth.
So I guess those are the tricks: I write it down sometimes, and I try to have it in the background where it’s just always around me. So, I just really learn it, I guess, by osmosis.
How about the staging?
I come early to walk on the set, sometimes. I never write it down, because I think you can begin to use it as a crutch—but if I force myself to remember it. If I force myself to always have to call upon it in my mind, not on a piece of paper, then it’ll force me to learn it quicker.
Fortunately, I did a lot of dance when I was young, and that gave me, I guess, a little bit of a carriage to be able to walk tall, because I am a very short person, and [it helps] give me a little bit of stature on stage. So, I guess that’s what I do to memorize the staging. I just try to do it as often as I can on the set so it can become very natural.
How has discrimination helped or hurt your career?
I’m sure there are jobs I didn’t get because I’m short. There are probably more jobs I didn’t get because I’m black, African-American. But I’ve been lucky that there have been a few people who have gone before me. George Shirley and Vincent Cole were two of the first successful, international African-American opera singers. I know both of them well. I talk to both of them on occasion. Both have given me wonderful advice.
As far as discrimination, yes, I’m sure that there has been discrimination towards me. But I guess I’ve got a manager and people who have kept that discrimination far away from me. I don’t know too much about it. When I look at my schedule and the things I have coming up, I can smile, because I have a lot of work, so much work that we turn down more than we can take.
This is the dream of many people to be able to do this. You know, in the beginning, people told me, “He’s not going to work because he’s black.” And I remember when I won the Met audition, and one story I always share with people. A friend of mine was talking to an agent at a cocktail party, and this agent, who shall remain nameless, was saying to him, “I just went to the Met auditions and I saw these singers there, and then there was this short, black tenor on stage. … Initially I thought, ‘What is this guy doing here?’ And then he opened his mouth—and he blew us away. He did a great job—but unfortunately, he won’t have a career, because he’s short and black. Or maybe he will, in Europe, because they don’t discriminate as much.”
Now, I can look on it and laugh. Like when I look at the things I’ll be doing in the future. I’ll be going to Tokyo, to the Vienna Staatsoper, Hamburg, Dresden, and the Metropolitan, the Houston Grand Opera, San Diego, Detroit, Madrid, Bologna, Calgary, New York Phil, Berlin Philharmonic—all these places where I’m not supposed to have a career. I’m not supposed to be singing, not supposed to be enjoying these wonderful experiences that people would give their left arm to be able to do. I would have to say that these things that people say, the discrimination, is fuel sometimes for me.
But fortunately, I can say that I haven’t been where other people have been before. Maybe Vincent Cole or George Shirley had to fight harder against it. I am thankful that they endured those things, that now they opened doors for me. And George Shirley, he said a wonderful thing, you know: “Everyone has to kick the door down for themselves.” They have to fight their own battles. It has to be their own talent that does it, which is a great compliment to me, because he’s talking about the talent he thinks I have. After two people like Vincent Cole or George Shirley, who I admire so much, it’s great to be able to be the person who is carrying the torch.
But I always say to people too: “My father would always tell me there’s a passage from the Bible which says, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’” So, if you have the talent, there’s a lot that you have to do with it. They’re just not going to give it to you because you’re a black person that has some talent. You have to work. And so those things force me, drive me to work. And to say, “You know what? I have this talent inside of me, and I gotta work hard to perfect it. I’ve got to be better in order to be equal. I’ve got to really work, so when people see me they’ll say, ‘That’s the reason. Not because he’s black and we’re going to give a black person the chance … The reason he’s excelling and succeeding is because he’s doing this special. And it obviously took some work to get to that position.’”
Frankly, I’m inspired with what you just said. Do you consider yourself a role model for other singers?
Sure … I’m a huge sports fan. I remember listening to Charles Barkley, retired basketball player from the NBA. And he said, “I never set out to be a role model. I never did. But by what you do sometimes, your successes, you will be a role model, whether you like it or not.” A lot of people have told me, “You are a role model because you are an African-American person.”
