Excellent prescreening recordings are a one-way ticket to feeling confident about a Young Artist Program application. If they are not so excellent, you can feel hopeless—or maybe something in between those extremes. And as the technology to record audio and video selections has become more and more accessible, there is that much more pressure to lay down a permanent record of just how talented you really are.
But the pressure doesn’t come from everyone in the industry. It may come from opera companies, oratorio societies, your teacher, your coach—even from yourself. Regardless of the source of the pressure, you need to inform yourself as well as you can about the process of recording and what the industry really expects from those final takes.
Determine the Audience and Expectations
Ash Lawn Opera, which produces an opera and a musical every summer, lists specific requests for recordings submitted in consideration of the young artist division of its season. Young artists perform comprimario roles and cover lead roles in the mainstage productions.
“CD, DVD, MP3, YouTube link, or link to an audio file of at least two arias (one aria from an opera and one from a stylistically appropriate musical) and, if applicable, your dialogue selection. [Include] an aria that is stylistically similar to the role you would like to cover.”
With such clear instructions available on the website, Michelle Krisel, general and artistic director of Ash Lawn Opera, feels it’s important that an artist does not glaze over them. “If they just send their five hit tunes, it shows they haven’t read what we wrote,” she says.
That said, if a soprano sends an aria in the appropriate style and Krisel is really impressed, she may write her to request a recording of Cio-Cio-San’s “Un bel dì vedremo” or Eliza Doolittle’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” later on in the process.
Ash Lawn Opera casts the young artists and apprentice artists from recordings and does not hold any live auditions, so the prescreenings double as casting recordings. She may also cast the winter and spring productions using some of the summer young artists.
Krisel may listen to a recording one to four times—only once if the singer has technique issues such as pitch problems or poor breath support, because the first round of listening is dedicated to weeding out those she knows she doesn’t want to consider. “I’m just looking in the first 30 seconds if they stay in the running. If there’s an absence of bad things, they get to stay in the running.”
Those first 30 to 60 seconds are so important, she says. “You can really tell in the first minute if the person is of the caliber you’re looking for. The first 30 seconds of the piece should be particularly good.”
If the aria is good enough, she’ll listen to 30 seconds of the song from a musical, because “we need people who can excel in both arenas.”
Bradley Moore, Houston Grand Opera’s head of music staff and HGO Studio music director, also says the beginning of a recording is very important. “The most important minute of your clip is the first minute.”
He and HGO Studio director Laura Canning review applications, for which one aria recording is requested, together. They turn on the recording for “two to four minutes during the first pass through to decide who’s going to get a live audition.” So they may not get to that fabulous high note at the end of a seven-minute aria—but do hope to hear the quality, movement, and color of the voice.
They review the résumé, education, full roles, and scenes performed and finish by reading the recommendations, and Moore says by that point they have “heard enough of an audio clip that we have a very good sense of that singer.”
Krisel turns on a more critical ear the second, third, and fourth rounds of listening to a recording since she’s working toward casting productions. “Is it accurate? Is the language decent?” she says. “On top of that, you’d love a little interpretive skill, whether it’s musical or dramatic.”
By the third or fourth time she’s hearing a recording, she’s listening for more specific passages that might show how well the singer could perform Butterfly or “how well they do dialogue” if being considered for a role in the musical.
In the end, even if the applicant is a very talented singer, there is nothing she can do if the singer does not fit into one of the roles she’s casting.
“When I put together the group of 15 or 20, it’s less about individual talent and [more about] who is the right person for the role they’ll be doing,” Krisel says. “I just feel sad for someone who’s really good, because I don’t need them, and then I tell them to audition again . . . . We’re specifically casting the young artist performance and then small roles within the mainstage.”
HGO’s Moore says in these recordings he and Canning are ultimately listening for the “quality of the voice and the development of the artistry in a general sense.” For example, a couple of mistakes with closed versus open “e” will not disqualify someone, but an unrecognizable language would be an indication that a singer is not right for a live HGO Studio audition.
Recording Quality and Location
Recording quality can be quite the stressor: Is a recording made on your phone good enough? Or do you have to spring for a high-quality studio recording?
Companies can tell if you have recorded in a state-of-the-art studio—and while the quality is appreciated, it can also be a red flag that the voice quality may have been tinkered with to make it sound rounder or larger, for instance.
Krisel believes in evening the playing field by keeping it simple. “You shouldn’t send it to a sound engineer to doctor. It’s really better to just do an informal recording for me,” she says. “Every once in a while I’ll take a singer based on recording and be really disappointed, and I’ll realize in retrospect that I was listening to something that had reverb added to it or had been doctored.
“In a young artist, we’re not looking for perfection,” she adds.
Conversely, recordings made using a phone that result in distortion or ones made from the back of a very live hall simply won’t work.
“I know people like sending live recordings of performances, and that’s very honorable,” Krisel says. “But if the recording is so bad that you can’t hear the singer well, I’d rather have an audition recorded in your living room with a piano than a performance with orchestra in which I can’t hear you.”
You can submit a less clear recording, but make sure you also include one of a better quality, she says.
For Moore, do-it-yourself recital hall recordings aren’t inherently unacceptable, but microphone placement can immediately change that. “If [the mic isn’t] placed advantageously for the singer, it makes it difficult to hear the voice,” he says. “Sometimes we hear the piano overpowering the singing voice on the recording, [but] we really do need to be able to focus on the voice.”
Whether the microphone is close to the mouth or in the back of the room doesn’t matter to Moore’s tastes. He stresses that as long as the voice can be heard clearly over the piano, he is usually content with the quality.
“Some people send overly produced recordings, and I would say that if the reverb is noticeable to us, it’s very annoying,” he says. “We know that it’s expensive to be a young singer, and we’re not asking that you make a studio recording and then spend hundreds of dollars in post-production.”
Videos
Krisel will accept audio recordings for the first round, but she emphasizes that to be cast, she almost always requires a video. If a singer passes from the first round to the second or third, she may write him or her to request a video.
“What I say is do it on your iPhone, informally. It’s important. I need to see how they act, how they move, what they look like, how expressive they are,” she says. “[I need to see that a singer doesn’t] just stand there like you’re standing in a choir. You don’t have to stage it around the room, but show in your face and your body that you understand what you’re singing about.”
Moore says HGO Studio does not ask for nor does it accept video recordings with applications for an audition because the panel does not need to see the singer perform until the live audition—at which point they would take other factors such as acting and expressiveness into consideration.
Accompaniment
Krisel stresses that though the pianist is not the focal point of the recording “wrong tempi and not knowing what to do with fermatas” show that a singer may be too inexperienced to hire a decent pianist. A few wrong notes in the piano shouldn’t mean you need to rerecord, she says, but “mistakes all over” and playing that doesn’t allow the singer to shine indicate a lack of collaborative understanding from the singer.
For Moore, the quality of pianist is less important, but he says the accompaniment should not be distracting. He emphasizes that he does not want to hear a recording with orchestra. “I think that for my own taste, whether it’s done in the studio or recital hall is of less importance; it’s just that it be a recording with piano and not orchestra,” he says.
Moore and Krisel agree that introductions and postludes should be shortened for recordings, because they are not auditioning the pianist. “You want it to have a nice introduction so we know what tempo you’re going to sing in, and then you want to start singing in that tempo,” Moore says. “We get a lot of applications where the recommender says, ‘This person is a great musician,’ but then they don’t sing at all in the same tempo that the pianist played in—and presumably they’ve practiced with this pianist before.”
Houston Grand Opera Studio does train conductors and pianists, Moore says. But in the case of singer recordings, whether the piano is a bit quiet or if the pianist’s playing is poor “is of no consequence.”
“I’m a pianist myself,” Moore says, “and I love to hear a good pianist play, but there’s no reason for a young artist to pay $35 for their pianist to audition for me,” he says. “Let them fill out their own application.”
