Sarah,
Good topic. I haven't competed in them yet, but I
have gone to the Regional finals in San Francisco a
couple of times.
Could you share what you've observed about your
friends who have won? I'm very curious to hear what
happens to these winners afterward.
I have a friend who won the Finals and became a Met
apprentice (he was, I believe, 24). He received
excellent training, mainstage performance
opportunities (small parts), and is now in the process
of building a career. It didn't rocket him to
stardom, but it gave him polishing and a boost, so now
he is singing large parts in small cities.
The competition I observed this year in SF was
strange. There were six or seven singers, most of
whom were sopranos, and they were mostly in their
mid-twenties, polished although not perfect vocally,
and boring, boring, boring to listen to. There was
only one voice there that had an exciting bite to it,
an edge -- and she was a 22-year-old soprano, singing
two fachs too big for her, with what sounded like not
enough technical training or physical stage presence.
She won. The judges, who took a LONG time to decide,
included Runnicles (maestro for SFO) and Jonathan
Friend (stage director for the Met), and someone else.
The singer chooses an aria, and then the panel
requests one. They almost always asked for a Mozart.
Every single person was asked to sing something that
showed agility.
The rumor is that the Met apprenticeships take only
the youngest, most precocious superstars. Early
twenties is good; naturally big, early-maturing voices
are good. Although I think this serves a small,
promising segment of the singing population well, it
unfortunately overlooks the dramatic voices, the
spinto voices, the voices who fully mature in the late
twenties and early thirties... in other words, the Met
competition have the reputation of favoring the babies
in the field. Which is great if you're a 23-year-old
Violetta, but not very realistic in terms of the
singing population as a whole.
Just my observations. I look forward to hearing what
Sarah's friends' experiences with the program were.
Isabelle B.
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Isabelle Bracamonte
San Francisco, CA
ibracamonte@y...
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