HGO’s 37th Eleanor McCollum Competition for Young Artists Concert of Arias will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, January 17, at the Wortham Theater Center’s Cullen Theater. Tickets are just $25! Find more information here.
Concert of Arias is among the most thrilling nights of the Houston Grand Opera season. And why not? Tonight is filled with the hope and joy of emerging brilliance, the voices of opera’s future. Following Concert of Arias, the judges often hear various versions of this question:
“What are you looking and listening for?”
Like all great questions, its answer is both simple and complex. Simply: we are looking for great singers. Beyond that you have to ask an additional question: “What is great singing?”
One thing has already been sought and found or the singers wouldn’t have made it this far: great voices have a sonic personality every bit as unique as a fingerprint, and it is so unmistakable that after hearing one phrase from a gifted singer you never forget them.
There is honesty embedded in a talented singer’s sound, and manipulation, artifice, or strain will battle with it. Great voices radiate unamplified around a hall, but they don’t do this with mere volume. Healthy, radiant singing requires tonal quality, breath support that is unique to each person, and the ability to acquire the technique that allows a voice to naturally mature. Sounding effortless actually takes a great deal of effort: performance technique is all in service of ultimately making that technique invisible, allowing the artist access to the heart of a composer’s creation, and the most vital ability of all: to take you along with them.
While it is true that great singers are often handed great natural gifts, it is only practice and hard work that make an artist. Artists don’t stand around waiting for inspiration, and they don’t rest on what they can already do well. They set to work with discipline and tenacity. To be an artist means committing to a lifetime of study, and you can only do it if you can’t imagine life without it. Singers must lose the clichéd idea that perfection is the goal. It isn’t.
True artists don’t strive to be perfect; they must want only to be deeper today than they were yesterday. I’m reminded of a Christmas card I received from the legendary soprano Dame Joan Sutherland when she was about 80, a few years before she died, and nearly 20 years after she’d sung a note in public. She wrote that her retirement days were happy and contented, but she confessed that if she was alone in the house she sang through her vocal exercises, “to see my old friend again.” That is artistry.
Obviously, opera isn’t solely a vocal art. Singing and acting are inseparable in opera. Acting at its finest is not an act at all, but an ability to emanate truthfulness by being pristinely present, so available to yourself that you can temporarily become someone else. Contrary to popular belief, almost no one is a “natural” actor. To really master the stage, whether spoken or sung, requires discipline, preparation, and dedication, as well as a safe place to make mistakes. A handsome or conventionally beautiful person is not automatically more gifted for the stage than someone who happens to be larger or smaller, no matter how persistently the culture judges the surfaces of people. We don’t ignore a singer’s looks in evaluation or selection for the Butler Studio, but if a gifted young artist possesses an important sound and inner artistic fire, even if they don’t happen to align with the current floating conceptions of beauty, we will invest in that artist while encouraging a positive and healthy physical life.
Singers must find an artistic kinship with the music they choose to sing, which makes it imperative that they search for music they love. This means that the arias chosen tonight are chosen solely to give each singer their best opportunity, and this may not result in a concert consisting of the most famous operatic music. As a singer performs, the judges ask themselves many questions. First, there are the basic considerations without which one can’t look deeper: Do they have good internal rhythm? Are they accurately singing all of the composer’s notes, and are they in tune? Quickly, though, the questions must deepen: Are the artists conveying the meaning of the text? Are they able to find the meanings beneath the meanings? Are they truly portraying a complex, nuanced characters or essentially an enlarged version of themselves? How idiomatic are their languages? Do they mumble as they sing, or are their words clear? Do they have the vocal stamina for a long role? Do they love their own voices enough to give them the care they will need? Am I moved?
For audiences, remember that tonight is as much about 2029 as it is about this year. That’s the poetry of Concert of Arias: what avenues might each of these artists travel? What might they be singing in a decade? There is a vast repertoire of the rare and the undiscovered: are there talents among these young artists who perhaps have the potential to revive it? Do they possess the myriad musical skills for contemporary operas? Is HGO the best place for them at this moment? What can we help them dream about? Aida? Wotan? Tosca? Something emerging from the ether of a brilliant composer’s mind?
Ultimately, what a young singer needs most is a capacity for joy. If one can be fulfilled by something elemental in the music, and buoyed by the unique camaraderie of great fellow artists, a rewarding artistic life awaits. It was said so perfectly by the brilliant poet, musician, and artist Rabindranath Tagore, in words always to be remembered on this night: “True poets seek to express the universe in terms of music…The singer has everything within him. The notes come out of his very life. They are not materials gathered from the outside.”
This piece was first published in 2019.