Note to Artists: OWN IT!

Every so often COMMANDOpera receives mail from emerging artists around the globe requesting opinions on approach to style within specific airs. To this end, one writes this related article. If an artist has moved to a professional career, accepting roles regardless of the venue, the key to becoming noticed is to own the work you are interpreting. Understand you will never be a Callas, or a Pavarotti, or a Ramey, or the next Cossotto. Why would you want to attempt to be a pale image of someone else whom you could never possibly measure up to? Ask Miss Sass. Nevertheless, what you DO want to do is find what it is that makes your vocal instrument particularly unique. Miss Caballe enjoyed a towering career built on her unique use of pianissimo. If there was ever a lesson to be learnt, it is through this artist. Miss Caballe not often spent her resources above C, however she could spin out notes in piano for hours on end: hooking audiences with this spellbinding feat. Miss Sutherland and Miss Nilsson had stadium size volume. Miss Callas and Mr. Pavarotti emoted like no other. Beyond having brilliant recognisable instruments, they nailed the audiences with one particular special effect, above the global excellence expected from professional artists

Determine what prescisley is unique about your instrument. Is it an ability to colour? A specific technical feat? Agility? There can be no question the vocal instrument is of significant stature, otherwise you would not find yourself where you are today. But what can you do which is so personally yours that will draw audiences towards you? Once this single point is resolved, utilize it within everything you touch at some point in a work: it must critically become a signature.

As an example COMMANDOpera will use an air which is not operatic written by one Mr. Vernon Duke. Mr. Duke AKA Vladimir Dukelsky, Russian composer and friend of Prokofiev, wrote ballet scores for Balanchine and Diaghilev’s Ballet de Monte Carlo. In the United States, his music was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony. The work is titled ‘April In Paris’ and five versions by different artists are given, so that one may appreciate more clearly how to identify an air as ‘belonging’ to an artist.

Miss Fitzgerald.

Miss Day

Mr. Sinatra

Miss Vaughan

Miss Pons