I spent the afternoon at the Portland District
Metropolitan Opera Trials. It was fun—but I don’t know if I can promise cyberfriend Marion Stein (see her blog Idiots at the Opera) another Met star any time soon. Angela Meade, the songbird of Centralia,
won this competition a few years ago, so Portlanders brag that we discovered her.
However, I’m sure she must have been featured in other singalongs long before she appeared in Portland’s ‘Lincoln Performance Hall’.
The winners this year were Daniel Ross, a young tenor
from Salem, Oregon, who has sung in various venues across the country—and Felicia
Moore, a soprano from New Jersey who is scheduled to sing ‘First Lady’ in Portland
Opera’s production of Magic Flute.
Congratulations to both of them.
I can't argue with the Judges—they were both fine
singers. I’m happy to say that I, too, awarded them winning scores in my own inexpert
ratings system. I allow up to five points for singing, and five more for
presentations that don’t irritate me. The flaws in my system are that I know
almost nothing about singing, and am easily annoyed by overacting. However, the
system is apparently precise enough to recognize winners.
I was less successful judging the four ‘encouragement
awards’. I agreed with two of the four choices, Ksenia Popova, a Seattle
soprano, and Abigail Dock, a Boston mezzo. I also would have ‘encouraged’ the
other tenor, Aaron Short, and another mezzo, Jena Viemeister—both of Portland.
I particularly liked Viemeister who is a student in the Portland
State University opera program. I hope she sticks with it, and I wish her success. She
should do well, particularly at the lighter end of the opera spectrum.
You noticed my phrase, ‘the other tenor’. As usual, there
were six times as many women as men. The three men were ‘the two tenors’
mentioned above and a counter-tenor (the first live one I’ve ever heard.) No
baritones. No basses. I guess all the potential male opera singers have opted for
rock and roll. Who can blame them—learning opera is difficult.
Acoustics is another subject I know little about—but
I wonder if our venue is soprano friendly. Our 'Lincoln Hall' is all hard surfaces and seems
awfully ‘lively’. It’s also a small fraction of the size of New York’s.
All that resonance, combined with high notes at high volume, and it wasn’t long
before I was experiencing soprano overload. Maybe a larger hall, with softer surfaces, would dampen some of
that excess, and give a more accurate reading of how they’d sound at the Met.
Anyway—I generally found the mezzos more pleasing—and
I guess I generally do.
There was a woman sitting just to my right who
tapped her program on her knee, not quite on the
beat. It reminded me of the wonderful opening scene in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, in which Dr.
Maturin (as yet unacquainted with Captain Aubrey) sits next to him at a
concert. Maturin finds Aubrey’s tapping so irritating he challenges
him to a duel. Fortunately, the Captain apologized and they became lifelong
friends.
I thought about this—and resolved not to slap her upside the head.
