My recital program was Maurice Ravel, Joseph Marx, Xavier Montsalvatge, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, William Bolcom. At the end of the recital, the hometown crowd draped a New Brunswick flag over the first balcony of Weill Hall.
Fan-bloody-tastic.
I sang three encores, and afterwards a reception was held for me at a nearby restaurant, hosted by Pamela Wallin. Lorna MacDonald, head of voice studies at U of T and a fellow Maritimer, was there. I sometimes picture them all gathered together: Lorna, along with Edith Wiens, Wendy Nielsen, Dianne Wilkins and Mabel Doak. My life’s Royal Family. With Mary, of course, as the Queen Mother.
This is the monarchy that has governed my craft.
When I look back at my career during the first decade and a half of the 2000s, it’s a haze of significant firsts and golden opportunities for which I worked extremely hard: repeated recitalist and soloist in London’s Wigmore and Royal Albert Halls, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Spivey Hall in Atlanta, the Kennedy Center, Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, as well as halls in Oslo, Helsinki and Reykjavik, all over Europe, and eventually all the halls in Carnegie. I sang the major festivals of Edinburgh, Bergen, Tuscany and Verbier.
I would share the stage with Bill and Melinda Gates during the 2006 opening ceremonies of the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, and in March 2006 an invitation to appear on Bravo TV’s award-winning Live at the Rehearsal Hall allowed me to create a musical partnership with Aaron Davis, who would become the lynchpin in my non-classical career. For the televised collaboration, I split the program into a classical half, in which I collaborated with Jacques Israelievitch on violin (may he rest in peace) and Cameron Stowe on piano, followed by a non-classical half of hymns, jazz standards and selections from the Canadian Songbook, with Aaron Davis on piano, Marc Rogers on bass and John Johnson on woodwinds. For our live-to-tape performance before a studio audience, I wore a gorgeous black-and-white, all-feather bolero by Canadian designer Wayne Clarke and jewellery by Myles Mindham.
Aaron and I worked together once again, for the 2008 Junos, when I sang his arrangement of the Oscar Peterson–Elvis Costello song “When Summer Comes.” The band was stacked. Through my musical relationship with Aaron, I have met and worked with so many of the gigging, studio-recording, go-to living legends because he knows them all and they love working with him. In addition to Johnny Johnson and Marc Rogers, I’ve breathed musical air with Rob Piltch, George Koller, Kevin Turcotte, Davide Direnzo, Carlos del Junco, Marty Melanson and Dave Burton, to name but a few. I love them all and I have Aaron to thank for meeting them all.
I have had what could best be described as an obsession with Aaron Davis since high school, when Geoff Cook and I would carpool home from the Sunday-evening service at Brunswick Street United Baptist Church, blasting the Holly Cole Trio’s album Don’t Smoke in Bed, with Aaron’s solo on “I Can See Clearly Now” on repeat. That Aaron and I would go on to work together for over a decade is nothing short of a dream come true for me.
I wouldn’t have explored to the artistic depths I have if I hadn’t had Aaron underwriting my choices and taking for granted that I was simply qualified and deserving of these opportunities to expand myself vocally and compositionally. I honestly don’t think my career would have even led me to writing this book if I hadn’t first set my sights on making him like and respect me. I have revered his gentle genius since I was a teenager, and his uniquely warm but funky aesthetic has grown to inform so many of my own musical choices. Quite simply put, he gave me wings to dare to define myself as Artist, instead of caving to tradition and confining myself to Soprano.
Not long after starting to work with Aaron, I rang in New Year’s 2007 by singing “Auld Lang Syne” for a crowd of forty thousand in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. At the composer’s request, I sang Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” as one in a group of three artists invited to induct her songs into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame that year. I’d always admired Joni’s passion and was deeply honoured to have been tasked with interpreting “Both Sides Now” for the televised CBC broadcast. I won my first Gemini for that performance. During the private hang afterwards in Joni’s suite at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel, I found myself sandwiched between Joni and Chaka Khan, who, along with James Taylor, had also been summoned to Toronto to sing for Joni’s induction. Chaka had been accompanied by Herbie Hancock (this was where we met for the first time). I recall him sitting at the end of the suite’s luxuriously long couch on which we all found ourselves laughing, drinking (except for Herbie, who is a Buddhist) and reminiscing. I did not contribute much in the way of conversation because I wanted to be sure to remember every millisecond of this privileged, fly-on-the-wall evening. Chaka was reciting lines from Joni’s songs, and Joni was chain-smoking and laughing her lusty, smoky laugh. Herbie was grinning like he’d been given all the punchlines beforehand, and I remember thinking, I hope I never think this is normal . . .
In July of that year, I made my debut at the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, singing “Con te partirò,” the duet made famous by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman. The snobs among you might wrongfully judge this plebeian, but you sing anything with three full brass bands, hundreds of bagpipes and a full chorus to a sold-out arena and get back to me with how powerful that feels.
Later that July I debuted with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park. Sir Andrew Davis conducted. After pouring crazy amounts of rain, the sky cleared and sixty-five thousand people turned up. I remember being preoccupied about how to address my conductor: Sir Andrew? Sir Davis? Sir Andrew Davis? I settled on “Maestro.” He could not have been kinder to me. I wore a hopeful purple-and-green dress (designed for me by Canadian designer Rosemarie Umetsu) and sang arias by Catalani, Massenet and Weber, along with “Summertime.” My photo would be published in The New York Times with the newly announced chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, the successor to Lorin Maazel, and an old buddy from our times at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.
Despite its international context, the classical world is pretty teensy. For my debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, I performed a program of songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn conducted by Jaap van Zweden, who would succeed Alan Gilbert as chief conductor at the New York Philharmonic.
The crowd in Central Park was breathtaking, but I think the most eyes had to have been on me when I sang the “Olympic Hymn” in the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games to a stadium of sixty thousand people, plus a TV audience of 3.2 billion, I remember every second, every syllable, every emotion.
At almost forty, I feel blessed to be able to look backward and forward. I have had incredibly fond experiences singing Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi with Daniel Harding, on tour with the London Symphony Orchestra, and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, also with the LSO, with Michael Tilson Thomas—a loyal collaborator, visionary, maverick and pioneer; and a force I am privileged to call Friend, along with his beautiful husband, Joshua. With Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra, I sang and recorded Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and, later, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, which would be nominated for a Grammy, which I would lose to Cecilia Bartoli (not that anyone “loses” to Cecilia Bartoli). I didn’t go to the actual Grammys because I was giving a recital in Spivey Hall in Atlanta on the same day. I found out at the intermission that I didn’t win but was grateful for the singular experience of being nominated—I simply hadn’t expected to win.
When he exploded onto the international classical music scene, Gustavo Dudamel, whose conducting genius was groomed and nurtured by the incomparable El Sistema program in Venezuela, and I made our respective conducting and singing debuts with the Israel Philharmonic performing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Gustavo and I would go on to collaborate at the Hollywood Bowl for his inaugural concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Here, I would be reunited with Herbie Hancock, who was also on the program!
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nbsp; I sang Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal and Yannick Nézet-Séguin the night Barack Obama won his second term as POTUS, and I did an international tour with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, singing his Snatches of a Conversation and Luciano Berio’s Recital I for Cathy, with Jeff Cohen on piano.
That’s a bit of a highlight reel, and I’m grateful that on and on it continues to go.
During all my travels, I’ve learned to allow twenty-four hours to recover from jet lag, thanks to the in-flight air that is usually several decades old. It’s honestly my Achilles’ heel. I’ve lived with the knowledge of my singing voice from age seven, and I used to take its resilience for granted. When cigarettes were banned from bars, I honestly did a little jig because it meant I could finally spend time in them without fear of damaging my voice. Other kinds of vocal kryptonite for me include screaming (no theme-park roller coasters or overly outraged parenting), cold air (no long winter walks for me, thank you) and boisterous sex (a massive sacrifice).
Dryness for any voice is death. The voice loves to be wet, so a humidifier is essential. When none is available, I run the shower. An apple, orange, grapes or any juicy kind of fruit or plain salted chips are what I snack on while warming up because they activate the saliva and lube everything up. Some singers can’t eat before they sing. I am not one of them. Nothing annoys me more than going onstage hungry. If I could eat and sing, I’d honestly have it made. Praise the Lord that I’m not cursed with acid reflux! I know opera singers whose careers have ended because of it, and others who are forced to sleep in an upright position to avoid it.
But let’s be honest. No one would ever describe me as the Queen of Healthy Living. My attention to those details has fluctuated during my career. I’ve gone through periods where I’ve been resentful of the sacrifices I’ve had to make for the health of my instrument, and thus have let the pendulum swing a little too much in the other direction. This rebellion increases my pre-stage anxiety but expands my quality of life and keeps me connected to my humanity by helping me stay connected to things I really enjoy, like swimming in a public pool, drinking coffee, talking in a loud place, boisterous sex (because who wants to live without that) and the occasional smoke—a pretty common practice among opera singers, believe it or not.
I love singing, and I love making my living as a singer, but sometimes I feel like I spend so much time working against my baser inclinations, which are to procrastinate, drink lots of wine and smoke weed all day. I know I can’t be the only human—let alone classical singer, woman, parent or Christian—who feels this way. My desire to make my life all about my job has ebbed and flowed throughout the years, and as I get older, I understand that the strength of character that fuels the artistry is just as crucial as the art itself. You can’t possibly hope for the audience to believe your humanity if you don’t in fact live as a bona fide human. There is a kind of exchange of empathy between me and my audience that has come to influence me more than anything the so-called music industry has to say. It might have something to do with being on the brink of forty, having thirty-three singing years under my belt—and very few f***s left to give.
Part of the magic of feeling free in this job is making sure you have the right representation. I get asked a lot about how to secure artistic management. The answer isn’t easy, because a classical singer should be looking for a general manager with whom he or she can envision clear long-term goals. You are to audition them as much as they are to court you. Never pay a retainer, under any circumstances, and take your time until you find someone who gets you. I’ve switched agencies once in my whole career and I wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t been forced to. The larger agencies offer name recognition to get your foot in the door, while the boutique agencies have the strength of personally pounding the pavement for you and building customized brands. I went from the first one to the second one, and after a brief period of panic at the prospect of being adrift with no one to represent my professional interests, I found the glorious Alan Coates of Keynote Artist Management in London to spearhead my classical music interests worldwide.
To tell it from the beginning, my journey to management started in 2003. Shortly before I left Germany, I auditioned and was accepted into the Steans Music Institute, the Ravinia Festival’s summer young-artist program. For three weeks we received masterclasses by musical luminaries and private coaching from an internationally renowned faculty. I chose to feel excited rather than threatened that I was in a group of peers who forced me to raise my own game. Such a choice required almost daily reinforcement.
Ravinia—a young-adult summer camp for the exceptionally talented—proved to be a crucial touchstone in my career. Most notably, Bill Palant, then working for IMG Artists—one of the largest agencies—heard all of Ravinia’s young artists and chose me and one other Canadian, Joseph Kaiser, as potential artists for his roster. Bill and I courted each other for about a year before he heard me sing Liù in Puccini’s Turandot with Cincinnati Opera. After that he became my loyal agent for all things classical, someone invested in proactively building a career rather than expecting it to just happen. The preceding professional hit parade was brought to you courtesy of Bill Palant’s belief in my artistry.
Bill Palant also connected me to Deutsche Grammophon, the Holy Grail of classical recording companies. In 2007 I released my first DG album, Surprise!, featuring cabaret songs by William Bolcom, Arnold Schoenberg and Erik Satie, sung in English, German and French, respectively. I preferred this personality-driven overture to the international classical recording scene over the more traditional debut album of “opera hits.” Surprise! won more than a few awards, but I have a soft spot for it winning the 2008 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year.
Bill would eventually leave IMG and start his own boutique agency. Despite many conversations and the hope that what we’d built together would be enough to sustain his transition to a smaller collection of artists, he chose to not take me with him. I was shocked and devastated. I am fiercely loyal and had expected the same in return. But sometimes our destiny is presented to us through a process of elimination. As it turned out, Bill’s dropping me from his roster forced me to reacquaint myself with an industry with which I’d had to have very limited contact on a managerial level because I’d always believed where I was had roots deep enough to weather the storm of a changing industry. In fending for myself, I became aware of the remodelling of the classical landscape. Plus, it was a little over ten years since I’d been “on the market,” and big agencies were taking on more artists but not more managers. It had gotten to the point where people who had been interns for less than a year were suddenly in charge of entire artists’ calendars and careers. Cost-saving measures were overriding the traditional, impresario-like priorities of the old-school classical agent. I know more than a few managers who left their large conglomerates to start up outfits that allowed them to add the personal touch that had attracted them to classical management in the first place but that had all but disappeared from their workplaces. This shift in the industry has provided a bastion for the reputably unique, nonconformist classical artist or ensemble. It has also forced some pretty big fish into smaller, more personalized, pools where, believe it or not, they’re able to actually swim more freely. I am one such artist.
My agent Alan Coates and his colleagues at Keynote Artist Management could be the poster children for the wave to quench the thirst in the industry for managers who will cultivate a roster of artists from various disciplines at various points in their careers, invest in their long- and short-term goals and stick by them to facilitate their artistic objectives. Alan came along right when I needed him, and I pray that if someone picks up this book twenty years from now, that person will read this, smile and say, “Aha, so that’s how their story started.”
The same can be said of my non-classical management. Evan Newman of Outside Music, Steve Zsirai of Zed Music I
nc., and Tom Kemp of The Feldman Agency handle all my intangibles: the “dream projects” that I try to keep off the radar of the super-judgy subsection of the classical world—lest I muddy the waters for the purists. Well, the cat’s out of the bag, because these guys are too good at their job! All the folks in my camp, classical or otherwise, are ready and enthusiastic about working together. They understand that the unclassifiability of my output IS my brand. That the career I want isn’t one that exists yet. Meaning, I’m hoping to break the mould and empower other artists to do the same. I can’t be the only opera singer who wants to do chamber music on tour in non-traditional venues at different times of day in order to attract a new audience or just shake things up. I can’t be the only soprano who is influenced and inspired by non-classical music and is willing to work just as hard to be as stylistically correct in other genres as I am in French mélodie or German Lieder or Spanish canción. For all my touting of nonconformist liberalism, it really all comes down to using the appropriate voice at the appropriate time in the appropriate place with the appropriate instrumentalists and singers. I am deeply grateful that the management I have now understands and celebrates that.
Beyond having a team who understand me well enough to facilitate my professional designs, I have to give them something to work with. The quality of my singing works in tandem with the strength of my appearance, with the ultimate goal of creating a complete package. Thankfully, I was raised to be a bit of a clothes horse. I come by it honestly, because my parents have always taken pride in their appearance. To this day I’ve never seen my father anything but clean-shaven. He is always immaculately dressed and presents himself to the world with self-respect, dignity and good posture. Additionally, my mother is my sole icon of beauty. She has a closet full of clothes that she presses, hems and tailor-fits to her petite frame. She also has flawless skin (“the best accessory,” as makeup artist Jackie Shawn once told me) and knows to never throw anything out because it will always come back in style. She made all my gowns in my early career. The truth may have been that we didn’t have the money to buy new, but the consequence was I looked better and stood taller than anyone next to me, because I was the pride of my parents.
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