This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 24, 2012 - Opera lovers thirsty for Verdi’s big and beautiful melodies can drink deeply the next two weekends as several gifted singers in their 30s make their St. Louis debuts in his “Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball)."
It opens Friday June 29 at Union Avenue Opera and continues Saturday and July 6 and7, all at 8 p.m.
The soprano
“Un Ballo" is a homecoming for Courtney A. Mills, who sings the woman in the center of a love triangle. Her parents, teachers, childhood friends and supporters from Springfield, Ill., will be on the edge of their seats in the audience.
Her family saw her make her 2007 Metropolitan Opera debut as the priestess in Verdi’s “Aida” while she was apprenticed for two years in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Program. But many of her big musical triumphs have happened abroad.
Among those landmarks are 18 months at the Welsh Cardiff International Academy of Voice, a solo recital at Paris’ Louvre, placing second in the 2011 Gerda Lissner Competition and, earlier this year, winning Master Singer of the Year at the Nico Castel International Master Singer Competition.
From early childhood, St. Louis was Mills’ playground. Her father, a paper salesman for Shaughnessy-Kniep-Hawe-Paper Co. in St. Louis, brought his family on some of his regular visits to its home office. She went to Cardinals games, the Zoo, the Muny, The Fox, and later the St. Louis Symphony. Lambert is her home airport, and she knows her way around St. Louis neighborhoods. As a preteen her idea of bliss was shopping at The St. Louis Galleria with her best friends, while her hawk-eyed mother politely hovered behind pillars.
“She was always there but really good about it,” Mills said.
Now with her family and friends in the UAO audience, Mills will sing her first opera lead. “Everything snapped into place when I turned 30,” she said.
This weekend she aims to hit a high D. Though Verdi’s score only called for a high C, Maria Callas hit the D in her recording of “Un Ballo.”
“I’m going to do it,” she said.
By working hard with the English translation of the opera, which will be sung in Italian, she delves for the deeper meaning behind the words so she can convey the true emotion. French cabaret singer Edith Piaf is one of Mill’s favorite singers. “She sang from her heart,” Mills said.
About the production
“Un Ballo” is the second production of the UAO company’s 18th season that began in late April and will conclude with Jonathan Dove’s tightened version of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold August 17, 18, 24 and 25.
A New York Times reviewer said she can sing from the heart, too: “Then came Verdi’s version [of the Willow song], as sung by Courtney Mills, a wonderful talent, with a voice of size and beauty, as well as a dramatic commitment that made this excerpt a genuinely moving performance.”
Mills, who was adopted, knows that she’s of Norwegian and Irish descent. At 30, her big voice is developing that strong, powerful, clear Scandinavian sound. We can hear what might develop into the forceful style of such great singers Kirsten Flagstaff, Birgit Nilsson, or Christine Brewer (who’s part Danish).
From the time Mills was a toddler her parents recognized her interest in music, she said.
“They were only interested in music because they loved me and I loved music,” she said. They gave her music lessons, sent her to music camp, then boarding high school at the renowned Interlochen Arts Academy near Traverse City, Mich. She studied at Indiana University and The Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.
“When I left Indiana U, I wanted to get to the Met and I did,” she said.
No one knew how high or big her voice would develop. At Interlochen she was given the deeper coloratura role of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Magic Flute.” Which she now knows is all wrong for her.
“If I’d miss a note I’d go sharp not flat,” she recalled. During the 18 months she apprenticed in Wales, she spent several days in master classes with Australian conductor and pianist Richard Bonynge, widower of the late diva Joan Sutherland. He encouraged her to work on Verdi.
“He especially liked my Desdemona (from Verdi’s “Otello”). Imagine coming from him, it was such a compliment, so flattering.” Desdemona was one of Sutherland’s greatest roles.
“Verdi feels perfect for my voice now, and so does the verismo style,” (realistic not overblown dramatics) Mills said.
Mills, a big Christine Brewer fan, admires that Brewer, now world renown for singing Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, turned down early offers for big roles that might have hurt her then maturing voice. Mills is trying to do the same.
“People keep talking to me about singing Wagner, and that’s very flattering,” Mills said. “In 20 years, I’d love to sing Wagner, unless before I could do it with a very caring, supportive company. Now I’d prefer to sing Verdi and the Russians.”
One reason they may ask her is that she won her Lissner prize New York a year ago singing Wagner’s “Dich Teure Halle” from “Tannhauser.”
Waiting for the right roles while turning down others is challenging. Based in New York until June, she was working 10 to 12 hours a day as a caretaker/companion for a “brave, inspiring” 25-year-old New York woman who uses a wheelchair.
“She kept me grounded,” she said. “I sang to her sometimes.” Mills is grateful to have had steady work, but at $10 an hour she just paid her rent leaving nothing for voice lessons and coaching classes. Rather than pay New York rent all summer she’s stored her possessions at her parents’ Springfield house and is considering where to make her base in the fall.
Her love of singing is evident. During a rehearsal break she amused the cast with a couple minutes of “Oklahoma” and a spot-on imitation of Broadway-belting mezzo Ethel Merman singing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” There are sure to be roses for Mills the next two weekends.
The production
Union Avenue’s reason for presenting this Verdi opera is simple.
“We’ve never done it,” UAO founder and director Scott Schoonover said just before he raised his baton to begin a recent rehearsal. Now in UAO’s 18th season, he knows that many St. Louisans are passionate about Verdi’s music. The company has already presented “Traviata,” “Falstaff,” “Otello” and “Il Trovatore.”
Schoonover also said that, while many Verdi operas focus on one aria after another, “Un Ballo” is more of an ensemble opera with trios, quartets, duets and opportunities for the whole company.
The tenor
Still, the opera spreads around several splendid arias for the major singers. The tenor who sings Riccardo, the Earl of Warwick serving as British colonial governor of Massachusetts, tops the list.
“I count four arias, depends how you count in the first act,” tenor Emanuel-Cristian Caraman, the UAO production’s Riccardo said. Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingoand Jose Carreras sang and recorded the show-stopping tenor arias from “Un Ballo”
Fourteen summers ago, almost on a whim after his graduation from a Romanian arts high school, Caraman applied to the music department of Bethal College in South Bend, Ind. Now, after years of teaching at Bethel, Caraman laughs that he was so naïve to apply for college in July and expect to start weeks later. Still it worked and he enrolled that August on a full scholarship.
During an interview, he grinned about his good luck. He went on to get his master’s at Indiana U. and except for some course work for his Ph.D. in his homeland he has lived in South Bend ever since. He’s supported his American wife and daughter, and, as so many opera singers do, fits his singing engagements with smaller U.S. companies and orchestras around his Bethal teaching. This coming fall, he has so many singing roles, he has taken a leave from teaching. Up next, he’ll sing title role in Rossini's “Otello” at Houston’s Opera in the Heights.
Even with the heavy lifting of all the tenor arias in “Un Ballo” he loves the role and is especially pleased that South Bend is close enough to St. Louis that his wife can visit him.
The baritone
Andrew Cummings, who is based in New York, sings the jealous Renato. Now in his late 30s, he is being cast in several of Verdi’s rich baritone roles by smaller U.S. companies. Earlier he sang Conte di Luna in “Il Trovatore” at Opera in the Heights in Houston.
He also has sung difficult contemporary American operas here and in Hungary and adamantly says it is important to keep the opera form relevant and the box office happy with new work.
“It’s hard to stay relevant in this age where marketing committees have so much influence,” Cummings said. “We must create new music. Create opera. Create theater that is relevant.” He sang in the world premieres of Benjamin C. S. Boyle’s To One in Paradise, Gary Papach’s The Last Leaf and Michael Dellaira's The Secret Agent.
“Singing new operas helps me find the relevance in the great operas of the past,” he said. As living composers adjust their new work to suit singers’ voices, he considers how Verdi and other great composers did the same.
He’s delighted to find that UAO lives up to his reputation for treating singers respectfully. Stage director Mark James Meier understand a singer’s breathing and moves them on stage so they can sing their best, Cummings said.
“He’s a singer, he understands singers,” said Cummings. The cast gets along and is friendly. He spent some time updating Mills inactive home page for her. “Was nothing to it,” he said. “Fun.”
The story
The plot focuses on a romantic triangle, but not a particularly tempestuous one. Amelia, a proper Boston wife is loved by two men. She is married to Renato, but struggles (and even consults a Salem witch for an herbal remedy) to quell her obsession with the flirtatious Governor Riccardo. He’s her husband’s boss.
The witch, Ulrica, is an important role in the history of U.S. opera. In 1955, very late in her career, the great mezzo Marion Anderson, an African-American broke the Met’s color barrier singing that role. At UAO, Kansas City mezzo and voice teacher Denise Knowlton sings it .
When Renato finds his wife has met Riccardo, he assumes that she has been unfaithful.
“Renato is not a bad man but when he sees the town knows about Riccardo and wife – though he assumes that they are having an affair when they’ve done nothing wrong - he does what he thinks he has to do to save his honor,” Baritone Cummings said.
While a Verdi opera usually ends with tragedy “Un Ballo” has an uplifting ending. A dying victim urges forgiveness.
“You don’t get a lot of operas ending with forgiveness,” stage director Mark James Meier said. He also said he is trying to point up the universal themes found in a love triangle rather than get too entangled in placing it exactly on the right date in Colonial Boston.
“We set the opera in Boston as it moves into the industrial revolution” said Meier. “But the place does not matter, the story does.”