Interview, Lisette Oropesa on French bel canto

Featuring arias from Rossini's Guillaume Tell, Le Comte d'Ory & Le Siège de Corinth and Donizetti's Les Martyrs, La fille du régiment & Lucie de Lammermoor, Lisette Oropesa's French Bel Canto Arias on Pentatone was one of last month's stand-out releases for me, thanks to the Cuban-American soprano's lightly-worn virtuosity and ability to inhabit such a range of different characters even in a studio setting.

After a day of staging-rehearsals for Richard Jones's new production of Handel's Alcina at Covent Garden (in which she makes her debut in the title-role tomorrow night), Lisette met up with me for drinks opposite the opera-house to discuss the particular pleasures and challenges of French bel canto roles, how Renata Scotto pointed her towards this repertoire as a Young Artist on the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Development Program, retaining the joy of singing when it becomes a career rather than a purely personal passion, and the process of bringing Jones's intriguing vision of Alcina to life...

How did you hit on the concept for this programme? Did the experience of singing a particular role send you in this direction?

It was actually something that we dreamed up in a restaurant in Paris! My husband and I were talking about what I might do for my next album, and I remember saying that if it was going to be a recital of opera arias I’d naturally gravitate towards bel canto…but pretty much every woman of my voice-type has done an Italian bel canto disc, so we thought it would be interesting to focus on French-language operas by Italian composers.

We did our research and found a lot of Rossini and Donizetti, but sadly nothing by Bellini: I was really hoping there might be a French version of La Straniera or Puritani, but all we unearthed was song repertoire. Of course there’s tonnes of French Verdi, but most of it isn’t my for voice-type: I could maybe get away with the aria from Les vêpres siciliennes, and that’s about it! But there’s plenty of Rossini and Donizetti that’s a perfect fit, so I was happy to stick with that.

On the couple of occasions when I’ve had to rework an aria into French after learning it Italian I’ve found the process quite challenging! Did that pose any issues for you here?

Thankfully it was all repertoire that I’d only ever done in French, or that was entirely new to me. I’d never sung Le comte Ory, Guillaume Tell or Le siège de Corinthe, and Lucie de Lammermoor has a different aria altogether from Lucia - if I’d had to rework that from the Italian it would have been a little weird. I understand why you feel that way, because there are more vowels in French and they try to get a little more text into the line than you have in Italian - an Italian line would be four words to a sentence, whereas French would be twelve or thirteen! That was one of the main challenges for me with these arias: not just getting all the words in, but making sure that they really made sense as poetry.

In general it seems to me the text is much more important to the French ear than the musical line – at least that’s the impression I get having sung a lot of French song repertoire as well as French opera. There’s a very specific style of declamation in French drama, and I think it’s significant that a lot of the works written for the Opéra Comique have spoken dialogue rather than the recitatives you get in Italian opera. It isn’t that Italian audiences don’t care about diction, but I feel like they’re more invested in the voice itself and its colour, whereas a French audience expects you to sound like a native speaker. And I respect that, because I’m a total Francophile: I grew up loving French, and it means the world to me to sing in that language.

There’s a lot of florid music on the album, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about how to make all those melismas work in service of the characters and the drama: if you just approach them as a bunch of scales then you might as well forget it! The sort of sparkly coloratura you get in a comic opera is totally different from what you see in a tragedy or more heroic work, and of course Rossini and Donizetti wrote both.

Having said that, some of the arias don’t have that many runs at all! My husband Steven and I did a short video interview introducing the album, and our conductor Corrado Rovaris makes a great point there: people tend to think bel canto is synonymous with virtuosity, but sometimes bel canto can be a simple line. And my response was that a simple line is often much harder to sing: keeping the line supported and giving it shape and direction can be incredibly difficult!

When did you first realise that you had a special affinity with bel canto repertoire?

Rosina was my first operatic role when I was in college, and I loved it: we did Barber of Seville in my sophomore year, and they double-cast it with two light sopranos. The other girl did ‘Una voce poco fa’ in F but I sang it in E, and I never had a problem: one of the great things about bel canto is that you can do what works for you, so I just added variations to take things higher. I had the recording of Kathleen Battle doing it with Plácido Domingo singing Figaro – back when he was singing as a baritone the first time around!

My mom was a huge fan of Anna Moffo and Renata Scotto, and when I went into the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program after university Scotto was one of our coaches. (When I gave my mom that bit of news she just about lost her mind – I’ll never forget her squealing down the phone at me!). Scotto was the first major coach that I ever had, and right from the beginning she told me ‘You need to learn Sonnambula, Puritani, Lucia - this is your repertoire’.

That repertoire is not easy to sing and I did endless auditions with it but never got any USA offers for those roles, because the operas just don’t get done so much in the States except as star vehicles. And as a Young Artist at the Met, there was no way I was going to be given a big bel canto role there until the time was right. I sang tiny little parts like the Cretan Woman in Idomeneo and the Woodbird in Siegfried, and it continued that way for many years until I finally got to the point where I was capable of Gilda and Gretel and Manon.

You did have a big early success there in 2007 as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, though - how did that come about?

I was still a member of the LYADP program so what happened there was a truly exceptional circumstance. I was the second cover for Susanna and went on at the last minute because of various reasons. I was still rehearsing during the final dress rehearsal when the overture was playing! But I had sung the role in college and coached it, so I just did my best and it turned out ok!

Speaking of your time in college, am I right in thinking you started out as first-study instrumentalist?

Yes - I kind of had that door closed on me when I went university. I played the flute all through high school and middle school, and that was what I wanted to do with my life – I went to an Episcopal church and enjoyed singing hymns in high keys and all of that, but I wasn’t remotely interested in pursuing it further. My mother was a great natural singer, and I could imitate her pretty accurately but I didn’t think that was anything special: I thought everyone’s mum could sing like that, and I was just having fun mimicking those sounds!

But when I got to college my mum sat me down and said ‘Lisette, I honestly think you’d be happier as a singer – heck, you just are a singer! Trust me, you’ll love it!’. Music was always the main thing that drove me but I loved languages and poetry and literature too, and she sensed that if I went into the pit as a flute-player I would lose myself. She suggested I learn ‘O mio babbino caro’, sing it for the voice staff at college, and see what they had to say. Just to make her happy I went along and auditioned for them, and their reaction was ‘Where have you been?! You have to sing!’.

I basically fought them for a year, still very much focusing on flute and taking voice-lessons on the side, but then things really started accelerating singing-wise. Eventually the careers-counsellor dragged me into her office and said ‘You can’t have two music degrees, Lisette, so you need to pick one!’. Because singing was taking off I knew it was the flute that had to go, but it was a horrible day for me; I still remember my heart sinking as I watched her deleting my file from the computer!

And from that point on I just put everything into singing – first I made it my commitment, and then it became my passion. It was an odd feeling when something I used to do on the side for fun started to become my primary way of making a living. In my flautist days I sang purely for my own pleasure: going to karaoke, belting out Disney with my sister, singing along to the radio…sure, it was nice when people told me my voice was fabulous, but my stock response was to laugh and say ‘Thanks, nobody’s paying me!’.

But suddenly people were paying me, and as recognition and pressure began to come my way I occasionally felt it would be all too easy to lose the joy in singing. Being a professional singer at a certain level takes immense discipline, and every once in a while it hits me that I can’t just let loose and have fun whenever I like. I love doing it, and I know I would be miserable if I didn’t sing - but at the same time it’s almost like you sacrifice the voice being your thing when you give it to the public.

Looking to the future, do you have plans to sing any of those new roles from the album on stage?

It’s a No to Comtesse Adele [in Le comte Ory], I’m afraid! I’ve been offered it three times now, but I’m just not that type of Rossini singer: when you look at the score you see nothing but thousands of black notes! Matilde di Shabran is another one that’s absolutely stuffed with coloratura, and for some singers that’s their bread and butter – I’m happy to leave them to it and focus on things that I think suit me better. People have been so complimentary about Adele’s aria on the album, but it took so much work!

I do have Guillaume Tell on the calendar for a few years down the line, though. It’s much closer to French grand opera, and Mathilde is a beautiful dramatic character, so I don’t have to deal with eight thousand notes!

You have another big role-debut coming up next month in the form of Handel’s Alcina – what can you tell us about Richard Jones’s production at this stage in rehearsals?

Richard’s concept is that the people who’ve most recently landed on Alcina’s enchanted island are an extremely conservative religious group, kind of like the Puritans, and Alcina represents everything that’s sensual, chaotic, and witchy - it’s very The Crucible! Alcina doesn’t understand all this anti-sex rhetoric at all, and in the end she manages to convince them that sexuality isn’t inherently bad, that you can be a good person without being celibate.

But Alcina of course has her own journey in parallel to all of that. A big part of it is that she’s experiencing heartbreak for the first time: because she’s this mythical magical character, she’s never felt disappointment until Ruggiero begins to reject her, and that dents the confidence which is her power. Alcina is all instinct – and instinct can be cruelty, can’t it? So she has to learn that you can’t be that way, and to understand justice, consequences and compassion. It’s a fabulous idea, and we’ve worked on the background and psychology in such painstaking detail to bring it all to life – I think you’re going to love it!

Lisette Oropesa makes her role-debut as Handel's Alcina at The Royal Opera House Covent Garden tomorrow evening; the cast also includes Emily D'Angelo as Ruggiero, Mary Bevan as Morgana, and Varduhi Abrahamyan as Bradamante. Tickets and further performance-dates available here.