Disella Larusdottir in the semifinals of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions last weekend in New York. She advanced to the finals, which are Sunday.
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BEYOND the elegant wood-paneled foyer, in the slightly dingy auditorium of the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, opera singers took the small stage, one after another. A young soprano in gothlike attire earnestly bleated out Bellini. A radiant mezzo-soprano lighted the stage with a warm, vivid sound, but her top notes were consistently flat. A baritone spread his arms and bellowed as if his life depended on it. The Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions are open to all comers.
Michael Fabiano in the semifinals.
“If you can type your application, you can sing for us,” said Darren Keith Woods, the general director of the Fort Worth Opera and, on Feb. 3, one of three judges at the Philadelphia district round of an event that has been called the “American Idol” of the opera world. The Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions offer tremendous exposure and, for up to five winners, prizes of $15,000.
Philadelphia is one of 45 districts that feed winners, from 20 to 30 years old, to 15 regional finals. The next stop is the semifinals on the Metropolitan Opera stage. Last weekend 22 semifinalists — some of the larger regions like New York advance more singers — were winnowed to 11 finalists, who will sing with full orchestra at the National Grand Finals concert on Sunday afternoon. For most singers it is a lifelong dreamjust to sing on the Met stage. The one prize the Met auditions do not offer is an actual Met contract.
In Philadelphia the three judges — Mr. Woods; the baritone Mark Oswald, himself a winner in the 1989 competition and now a respected voice teacher; and the accompanist Craig Rutenberg, the Met’s director of music administration — sat at a table from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., listening to 52 singers. Each started with an aria of the singer’s choice; the judges decided whether to ask for a second. Rachel Sliker, a 27-year-old soprano, began with a moving performance of “Ain’t It a Pretty Night” from Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah,” showing her expressive range.
For her second aria the judges asked for “Come scoglio” from Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” a faster-moving, more virtuosic piece. For a young professional like Ms. Sliker auditioning is all in a day’s work; she has done about 30 auditions this season. For a judge it is a day’s work.
“People ask how I can sit for six days listening to auditions,” said Paul Kilmer, the director of artistic administration of the Opera Theater of St. Louis, who often judges the Met auditions. “But when a wonderful voice comes along, it recharges the battery.”
The singers represent all levels of experience. Eric Dubin, a 25-year-old baritone, was on home turf at the Academy of Vocal Arts; he is a student there. He has been singing since he was 15, when he signed up for choir because a friend told him that it was “a blow-off class.” He fell in love with opera the next day, when the teacher, hearing his voice, played him a recording of Robert Merrill.
“If I could do this, it would be terrific,” Mr. Dubin remembered thinking. But, he added, “I didn’t know it was going to be so hard.”
By contrast Disella Larusdottir, 30, is a relative latecomer to opera. An Icelandic soprano, she started studying trumpet with her father, an orchestral trumpeter, when she was 8 and added piano at 15. But she began singing only at 22, after she had completed a degree in psychology and found herself working in a supermarket. At first her main interest was pop of the Eurovision variety; a Christmas album she made with her sisters hit Iceland’s top-40 charts.
But when Laura Brooks Rice, a voice teacher at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., gave a master class in Iceland, Ms. Larusdottir was inspired to follow her and begin serious opera training in 2003. It seems to have worked. Now a teacher at Westminster herself, Ms. Larusdottir opened her Philadelphia audition with “O quante volte” from “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” Bellini’s setting of “Romeo and Juliet,” sung with beauty, ease and artistry.
Theoretically the judges are not looking for finished products. A stated purpose of the auditions is to identify the singers with the greatest potential for a career, rather than those who are most polished and professional. But a singer who seems a diamond in the rough to one listener may sound just plain bad to another. The three judges in Philadelphia, faced with many singers and limited time, stuck to the basics.
“I don’t think about how do we fix this,” Mr. Rutenberg said. “I go in listening for decent rhythm, singing in tune, starting a phrase with intention and ending it with intention. If we’re lucky enough to get a performance on top of it, so much the better.”
The opera world is rife with tales of the whims and wiles of Met competition judges, in part because such a large competition is doomed to disappoint many people. But Gayletha Nichols, who has directed the program since 2000, has worked hard to make the process transparent. Certainly the judges in Philadelphia seemed grounded and were in accord with one another. In the end they found that eight singers had received their unanimous approval — Mr. Dubin, Ms. Sliker and Ms. Larusdottir among them — to advance to the regional finals at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Feb. 24.
TRYING to establish uniform standards of judging may be the trickiest thing about managing the far-flung National Council Auditions. The program is run entirely by volunteers. The auditions have existed in something like their present form since 1954, when they were established to succeed the Auditions of the Air, which began in 1935. (Winners received $1,000 and a Met contract.)
Idol’ for the Operatically Inclined
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Ms. Nichols, who said she never saw the point of doing the auditions when she was a singer, is trying to get the point across to the next generation, adding features like feedback from the judges for any participant who wants it and a new stipulation that singers can audition in any district they choose. But it is the volunteers in each region who run the operation, who raise money for expenses and prizes and who select the judges from lists provided by the Met.
Michael Fabiano rehearsing with his coach, John Churchwell.
Angela Meade, a soprano, in the semifinals of the National Council Auditions; she was among the 11 singers to advance to the finals, which are Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitan Opera.
There are considerable discrepancies from one district to another, not just in standards but also in prize money. In the Wisconsin district a winner may receive $5,000; in the Philadelphia district winners get $300. Singers have started traveling to the districts and regions that offer the most money — to the displeasure of donors who would prefer to see their money go to local singers.
“In some regions you’re competing with other arts groups,” Eleanor M. Forrer, the chairwoman of the mid-Atlantic region, said of fund-raising efforts. “And in some you’re the main event in town, and you get 500 people in the audience.”
The regional event in the small hall of the Kennedy Center on Feb. 24 was more formal than the Philadelphia district competition: less an audition, more a concert. The new surroundings affected singers’ performances. Some seemed more constrained; others appeared to have learned from their Philadelphia experience.
Ms. Larusdottir, who had replaced two arias from her Philadelphia list, was working with an extra handicap: lack of sleep. She had sung a recital in Delaware on the Thursday; rushed back to Philadelphia to sing in the finals of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Competition on Friday; and without even staying to find out whether she had won (she had), left with her husband, Teddy Kernizan, a pianist and conductor, to drive to Washington, arriving at 1 a.m. Saturday for auditions 12 hours later. But her voice showed no sign of fatigue, and she sang her second aria, from Weber’s “Freischütz,” with evident enjoyment, down to a little bounce on her toes at the end of the piece, in time to the music.
“The No. 1 singer seems to emerge fairly quickly,” said Mr. Kilmer, who was one of the judges here with Ms. Nichols and Carol Rausch, the chorus master of the New Orleans and Chautauqua operas. “Then it becomes a question of who is 2 or 3.” Ms. Larusdottir advanced to the semifinals. Mr. Dubin took third place. Ms. Sliker came up short.
The second-place winner was a soprano Mr. Kilmer and Ms. Nichols already knew. They felt that her audition had not showed what she was fully capable of in a complete performance.
There is such a network of auditions and competitions in the United States that it is not unusual for judges to recognize some of the singers. Buzz grows around a few. The name of Michael Fabiano, 22, a tenor who won in the New England region and who also studies at the vocal academy in Philadelphia, came up so often before the semifinals that he started to seem a shoo-in before even opening his mouth.
Ms. Larusdottir, by contrast, came out of left field. The week before the semifinals she was in Vermont singing Zerlina in a semi-amateur production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Since she was doing so well in competitions, it seemed odd for her to do a modest role in a modest production.
“You apply for programs, and they all say the same thing,” Ms. Larusdottir said. “ ‘You need experience before we can hire you.’ ” So she is doing what she can to get some.
The Met auditions are only one among many competitions. On March 1, after three days of semifinals, the George London competition held its finals in the new hall of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, choosing from a field of some 90 singers, many of whom — like Mr. Fabiano and Christopher Bolduc, a baritone and another Academy of Vocal Arts student — were also competing in the Met auditions. The finals of Operalia, Plácido Domingo’s international competition, will take place in Paris in June, and the finals of the venerable Belvedere competition in Vienna are held in July. All are prestigious, but for American singers the Met auditions remain the ones everyone love to hate — not least for the status of the name.
PRE-EMINENCE was not necessarily to the good at the semifinals of the Met auditions. The 22 singers arrived a few days early for a backstage tour of the Met, a panel discussion with former Met audition winners and private coaching with their accompanists. It all led up to the moment of performance (with piano) on the singer’s holy of holies, the Met stage. The moment was at once terrifying and a career highlight.
Ms. Larusdottir stopped the show with “O quante volte.” Mr. Fabiano lit into his big aria (from “Le Villi,” by Puccini) with passionate intensity. Angela Meade, the third student in the semifinals from the Philadelphia academy, powered out a “Casta Diva,” from Bellini’s “Norma,” that left everyone breathless. But however thrilling it was for the singers, for a listener the variations in quality from region to region were painfully evident.
Auditions are not a clear ticket to success, within or outside the Met. But the Met does try to keep in touch with past winners, making education grants, for example, available to anyone who has made the semifinals.
“I went from having no work to having full-time work as a singer,” said Elizabeth Batton, a mezzo-soprano, who won the Met auditions in 2000.
A majority of past winners have had active careers as singers. But for every Deborah Voigt or Renée Fleming there are two singers who have been steadily employed without finding the limelight.
Still, it’s hard not to be drawn into the excitement of the process. After the semifinals the small audience gathered on the Met’s Grand Tier for the judges’ announcement. The singers stood in a group with fixed, nervous smiles, waiting for Ms. Nichols to read off the 11 names of those selected to advance. Ms. Meade, Mr. Fabiano and Ms. Larusdottir were among them.
Making it to the finals is its own victory. And if the system that got them there is, as one opera insider put it, “incredibly, wonderfully flawed,” it does manage to cast a net to involve the whole country in the excitement of discovering opera.
And for the singers it remains a watershed. “After I won, I went for a walk with my mother,” said Esther Heideman, a 2000 winner. “She said, ‘What do you do next?’ I said, ‘I have to come up with a new dream.’ ”
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