WARNING: The following is an unrestrained rant. If you're not into reading other people's gripes, I suggest you just skip it.
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...you sing what you know was your best audition ever, but you somehow get the impression that the auditors aren't interested? I did an audition this weekend, and after I finished "knocking 'em dead" (I had hoped) with the best "O don fatale" I've ever sung, I could overhear them chatting...about the NEXT singer they were going to hear.
And you know what? After acknowledging that they might not be interested in MY voice in particular, I began analysing the possible larger problem (and kicking myself [figuratively] for not asking whether ALL the operas in their season were being cast BEFORE driving to Baltimore to discover that they were only casting *two* of the operas, LE VILLI and LA FINTA GIARDINIERA - neither of which is exactly an opera overloaded with roles in my _fach_) - and here's what I came up with: the problem is not just this opera company, it's this entire REGION. There just doesn't seem to be anything for an "emerging professional" dramatic mezzo to do in the Mid-Atlantic region. This is an area with a rapidly dwindling number of opera companies, and those that remain all seem to be exclusively Mozart-Rossini-Puccini oriented. Well, among the collective operatic output of those three composers, I don't think it's inaccurate to say one can count the total number of dramatic mezzo roles on the fingers of one (perhaps one and a half) hand. And that handful of operas seems to be the handful the companies in this region actively AVOID ever producing.
If it's not the Mozart/Rossini/Puccini disease that keeps us big-voiced mezzos from working in this area, it's "agenda fever". For example, there's an opera company in DC, whose artistic director has an explicit mission of casting her leading roles with only singers of a particular ethnic background. The fact that there are few or no dramatic mezzos around with the appropriate ethnic credentials matters not: it's quite easy to simply avoid doing operas that require dramatic mezzo voices. There are, after all, so many good operas by Mozart, Rossini, and Puccini (and Donizetti...) that don't need dramatic mezzos at all. If you thought there were laws against this kind of ethnic discrimination in hiring, let me set the record straight: those laws would apply only if the ethnic group in question were Caucasian.
Granted, there is a small groundswell of interest in Wagnerian singers. Well, there's one Wagnerian operatic competition sponsored by the Wagner Society of Washington. The competition got its start last year. There have also been rumours that the Wagner Society has inspired one or both of the impresarios of two local (and apparently cryogenically suspended) opera companies that were devoted to presenting, respectively, new and obscure works and obscure Bel Canto operas, are going to join forces and start producing Wagnerian operas, quite likely in English translation (AUGH!). But I've seen little evidence of this Wagnerian project getting any further than the rumour/drawing board stage. But then, the Wagnerian competition that I imagine was supposed to surface all the dramatic-voiced singers that had been lurking in dark studios all up and down the East Coast just waiting for exactly this chance to emerge to create a kind of Bayreuth-on-the-Potomac...well my suspicion is that the number of such singers who *did* surface may, perhaps, have fallen slightly short of the veritable army needed to cast the D.C. area's first English-language Ring Cycle. I, for one, will be watching for further developments - including whether there's actually a *second* annual Wagnerian competition in this town.
I am curious whether this is just a generic Loca/Regional opera problem: i.e., smaller companies EVERYWHERE avoid doing anything but the lighter opera rep that can take advantage of the overabundance of just-out-of-school lyric and coloratura sopranos and lyric baritones, and to hell with the other _fachs_. Or is it a peculiarity of this region which also, coincidentally, is VERY big on choral music, especially of the Baroque. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that a region where the vocal music scene is predominated by Baroque choral music should have its tastes in other vocal genres somewhat influenced by that predominance; or maybe I'm off-base here? By the way, there's also a lot of operetta (G&S mainly) around here. But if you want any local Verdi, you have to wait until the Washington Opera or Baltimore Opera get around to it. No smaller company wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole, apparently.
So, is anyone out there up for co-producing IL TROVATORE here in the land of George Washington, Tom Jefferson, James Madison, and Marion Barry?
Karen Mercedes http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html *************************************** What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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