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Hi. We are here at Classic Talk with Bing and Dennis, speaking with Sondra
Radvanovsky today.
Good. So at what point do you think,
well, I'm going to be an
opera singer?
You know, I’ve told the story many times. I don't know if you read about it.
But I saw Placido Domingo on TV
when I was…oh, gosh,
twelve…eleven, twelve years old.
And right before I started taking voice lessons.
And he was singing “Tosca”
live on TV. I don't know how we landed on it
but I said, Mom, wait, wait, wait, I want to see, I want to see this.
And I watched the whole thing and I was entranced. And I pointed to the TV and I said,
I want to do that.
My mom said, yeah, honey, okay.
But I did, and I started…
when I took voice lessons I only sang
opera, classical music. I never
ever was like a teenage kid wanting to sing, you know,
the songs of Journey or Pat Benatar. You know, all the singers that were when
I was growing up.
I only sang opera. Why is that?
I had passion for it. I really did. I was
entranced in
not just the music, but that you could go and become someone else.
Onstage.
And that I could act,
and pretend to be someone else. Because I always play dress-up as a kid. You know,
as we do as kids. And
I don’t know, I just felt like
in my gut,
I loved it. It's something I wanted to do.
And I stayed with it.
I think because
the way you
wanted something so badly.
We were just talking about being a mortgage broker. Yes, that’s my secret. You’re probably
the best in the field. Belong on one of those TV shows from Los Angeles, selling the
multimillion-dollar houses. You know, I did actually. I sold a lot of, well,
mortgages to a lot of Hollywood people.
Uh...
and I did, I won the best mortgage broker of the year when I was…
my last year there. I don't know how, because I was sneaking out all the time
to go take voice lessons. But…
and I won a trip to New York the year before I came to New York to win
the National Council auditions at the Metropolitan Opera. So
there was a premonition there you’ll get ready to go to New York, but…
So you stayed with the program for what? Three Years. Three years, yes. Immediately after
winning the National Council they brought you into….
Yeah. Yeah, the following fall. So I think we won it, it was April.
Because it was right after my birthday.
And uh... I think I came back in July or August to start with the program.
And uh... had to pack up my whole life in Southern California
and move here to New York.
And the three years really
made a lot of difference?
Well, another little secret I will tell you. Um...
I was…When I won the National Council auditions I sang probably
arias and repertoire that was a little bit too big for me at the time.
I don't know if Dennis remembers this: I came in singing Ritorna Vincitor
from “Aida”
at twenty-five. Well, twenty-four when I sang the first auditions. And uh...
and I really thought, that's what I should be doing.
Because my teacher in L.A. said,
you know, you’re a spinto soprano. You’re a Verdi soprano.
At twenty-four.
And luckily, thank God, you know, they chose me as a winner. But Maestro Levine
really had reservations, as
a few other people did, too.
Gail Robinson, who was
in charge of the National Young Artist program at the time.
And
my voice was very dark and heavy, unnaturally.
And they really wanted me to lighten it up. So I had a
new teacher here in New York. Unnaturally. What do you mean by it was dark unnaturally? You
were making…you were making it dark. I was making it dark. Artificially dark. Maybe that's a
better way to do it. I was producing a sound instead of letting, I
think, my true sound come out.
And so I changed teachers when I moved here to New York and started studying
with Ruth Falcon, who is a
wonderful technician,
a great voice teacher, and she changed my life and changed my voice.
But they weren't sure if they wanted to keep me in the Young Artist program for
all three years. I was taken on a trial basis for the first year.
And if I didn't
change my voice from this artificially darkened
color…because my voice is naturally dark anyway,
and I was making it even darker…
uh...
then I think they were going to let me go. But
thank God,
they believed in me enough, and Ruth Falcon worked hard enough with me and really
changed my voice. So then after this happens, and you’re no longer singing
Ritorna Vincitor
what does a twenty five-year-old
spinto, or spinto to be …Yeah, Baby spinto I called it.
What do you sing? So you’ve matured and are ready to sing the big roles. Well, that was the million-dollar question. That
really was the million-dollar question. Nobody knew exactly where to put me,
what I should sing.
There was thrown around that I should sing only Mozart, so I tried singing
Mozart, and I felt like I had this straightjacket on
vocally. I just couldn't
express what I was
wanting to express. And I was getting tight in my body and tight in my throat.
So Ruth said,
listen, it's a long shot.
How about we give her “Trovatore”?
Just to work on the arias.
Everything snapped. And
we worked on the whole role.
It wasn't
straitjacketing like Mozart was, but it was still in the Bel Canto kind of
feel.
And I did my first “Trovatore” at the Met when I was twenty-seven years old.
Yeah. Boy, if I had known now…whew…
I would have talked to that twenty- seven-year-old and said, nnnn.
But, so we did that, and you and I did “The Tales of Hoffman”. I did
Antonia in “The Tales of Hoffman”. You beat it into me.
Thank God.
And
things like that. Like full lyric soprano roles, but
no Mozart. No Mozart. No. It just wasn't for me. Really.
So you went in the direction of Verdi. Yes. Which has been…you sing more Verdi than anything else. Is that
true? Absolutely. Absolutely. And what is your favorite Verdi? Or what
evening is the most gratifying of your Verdi… all your ladies?
I think that’d have to be Aida”. “Aida”.
Yeah. Which is still a new role for me too. Yeah. Well, speaking of “Aida”, we have a clip to watch.
Can you tell us
what it’s going to be? Sure. This is
from Barcelona, a production that I just did. It’s a very old production.
A very traditional, beautiful…
painted backdrops,
uh... that I just did in July
of this year. And it was the first production I did back after having the
virus in my throat.
It was a very emotional night. And this clip is the O Patria Mia
from opening night. And if you look closely
you'll see a few tears in my eyes.
It was a magical, magical night. Let's take a listen.
Well, it’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s incredibly beautiful. Thank you. Of course, of course.
So “Aida”.
How many Verdi roles do you sing?
Uh...
“Il Trovatore”,”
“La Traviata”,
uh... “Ballo in Maschera”, “Aida”,
“Don Carlo”,
Simon Boccanegra,
did I say Louisa Miller?
Uh...I've not done “Otello”.
Uh…
gosh, there’s more, I know there’s more.
Vespri Siciliani and the French version of Vêpres Siciliennes. “Carlo”? “Don Carlo”.
Uh... and I'm moving on. In the next few years I will be doing my first Forza del Destino.
What about Nabucco? You go that far or…Not yet.
I call those the angry women.
And I’m staying away from angry women while I’m still doing the
Donizetti three queens, coming up in the future.
Why is “Aida” your favorite? Or the most gratifying?
I love the music.
I love, love the…the uh...
O Patria and the story of it all.
Um...
I don’t know, she just really vibrates in me. Like
the whole character of her.
And a woman really torn between
two separate things. And I feel that oftentimes.
Living in Canada, being an American. You know, you feel torn between the two
countries. And…
and also I feel torn a lot between
your friends and your work, and your personal life and your work. It's really
always a struggle. And I really can relate to that.
Isn’t Canada
and United States
uh... somehow they are very close, isn’t it?
So close, but so far away. And so many… I mean there's… there's a lot of
similarities, but there's so many differences too, there really are. And
having
lived now in both countries
uh... the political system is
completely
different in both countries. And…
and politics and…
Also
I find Canada a bit more European
in…in its uh...
day-to-day life.
You live in Toronto. Yeah, we live outside of Toronto, yeah.
Well,
as I say, my husband and I say we have an expensive storage unit outside of Toronto.
All of our furniture is there, but we’re never there.
But, you know what? It’s lovely. We live on twenty acres, just quiet,
secluded,
trees, little pond,
in the middle of nowhere. And wherever we travel around the world we’re always
right in downtown. We’re downtown New York, you know, downtown Paris, downtown London.
And so the last thing we want when we go home is that hustle and bustle again.
So just, you know, you know you can walk around in your pajamas. Nobody sees you. And
to sleep without earplugs and…and all of that is…it's a joy.
It really is. It’s peaceful.
Oh, absolutely. And I think it's… it's so important to really ground
ourselves and to
rejuvenate and regenerate.
Because it's difficult, what we do.
And this day and age, too, with the flying and
going through airports and all of that, it's… it's crazy.
Your future operatically has a lot of Donizetti queens in it, is that correct?
Yes, it does. Now tell us about the switch. You will not give up Verdi, of course, but
what is it like to go from so much Verdi to…
we're not talking about “Adina” and small roles in Donizetti, we’re talking
about the Maria Stuardas and the…the hefty women. The hefty
women. What…what's that like?
You know, I wasn’t sure.
Uh... I just did my very first “Anna Bolena”. Before that I’d only done
“Lucretia Borgia”
and I did my very first “Norma” last November.
With Dolore Zajick, which was amazing.
Uh...
so I was still kind of dipping my toes into this Bel Canto.
And the coach…and I guess I would call him my teacher now, Tony
Minolli, the gentleman that I’ve worked with
sixteen years now,
brought it up. And he said, you know, Sondra,
I really think you have something to say with these Bel Canto roles.
I said, really? You know all this…
I call them black notes on the page, You know, coloratura and all this
fioritura
moving the voice quickly.
I said, really? You think so? And he said yeah, come on, let's take a look at it and um...
we looked at the
Al dolce guidami from “Anna Bolena”.
And he said, yep,
this is for you.
And I said okay. I'm not convinced, but we started working on it. And the
more and more I worked on it
the more I really find that Verdi
comes out of this.
And it's…and it has helped
my Verdi singing.
Because I've been working on these three queens.
Because it really is the foundation. Some… for some people it’s Mozart that they call,
you know, their medicine for the voice.
But for me it's really this Bel Canto, the Donizetti, the Bellini
that really teaches you
technique.
Because you can’t sing them without a technique.
So I did “Anna Bolena”. In March and April I go to Bilbao, Spain to do my
first Maria Stuarda.
And then a year later I do my first “Roberto Devereux”.
Then I come to the Met and do the new production of “Roberto Devereux” with
David McVicker’s production. He's doing all three of them. He did the
“Anna Bolena,” “Stuarda” is opening soon, and then “Devereux”.
And then in the ’15-‘16 season
um... I will probably need to be shot after this, but I'm doing
all three of them
simultaneously. You’re kidding. Wow. Where’s that?
At the Metropolitan. At the Met. Is that amazing.
I think after that I will need a very long vacation.
I’m
either crazy or it's gonna be a success. And I hope it’s a success. It’s not
too far from your home.
Yeah, exactly. I can just run home. That’s right. When the queens get too much. According to what you just said,
it seems to me that
you are always in control
with your voice, what you want to sing. Do you have anything that you, oh,
I really want to sing that, but you know
it's not the right time, the right moment?
Yeah. A lot of people cannot control that. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, you can ‘t wait. I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I bet you know what it’s going to be. No, I don’t. “Turandot.”
Yeah,
and also the Scottish play. Can we say it here? Yeah, “Macbeth”.
I would love, love, love, to sing that. I really would. And also there's one
that is a huge undertaking, but I really want to do it,
and that is “Pique Dame”.
The problem is I don't speak Russian.
And that is a very big opera
to…it's a lot of words and it’s a lot of Russian.
But
Turandot is really the one that's kind of looming right back here, going hello,
hello. It’s not scheduled yet. You haven’t…? Not yet, no. I said after I turn fifty.
So
we're starting to schedule into that year now so
maybe we'll think about it.
But none of the Wagner.
No, really, I have no desire to do that.
Why? Uh... I don’t speak German.
Truly that is…
the biggest problem for me is that
Wagner is so talky.
You know, there's a lot of dialogue back and forth.
And really think you have to have an understanding of the language
to do it. To do it justice. Excuse me, you have people trying to push in that direction? Yes. Quite a few
people.
Because I think the size of my voice…
and I…I say to my husband so many times, gosh, the one and only thing I wish
in my lifetime is that
I could be standing on stage and actually sitting out in the audience listening to
myself sing. Because everybody says, oh, you have such a large voice.
You know, to my ears.
Exactly. To your ears.
Can you put into words and describe your voice? Absolutely. It's…it's funny, because
I’ve started teaching voice.
And to teach voice you really have to be able to communicate
what you hear, what you feel,
and how you sing. And I’ve really been honing that. And, yes I sound like a gnat.
A what? A gnat.
Uh... a little mosquito. To you when you’re singing. To my ears.
My goodness. When it's in the right place.
When it's in the wrong place it sounds really dark and full and rich. Because
I'm listening to myself.
But you, as audience members, won't hear that. You'll just hear this dark woofy
sound.
But when it's right, when it's in the right placement, and we call it the
Chiaro Scuro
to me it sounds like a little mosquito. It sounds very nnnnnyyyynnn.
And
it's very unfulfilling to me.
How long did it take you to figure out that that’s the right sound? Well, I’m forty-
three now, and I probably just figured this out about last year or two years ago. So
quite a few years.
I did my first opera when I was twenty- one. So twenty-some years, yeah.
Anybody compare you
to Maria Callas?
Often. Very often. Yes. Because of your acting ability or the color of your voice or…?
I think it's more the color of my voice.
I would like to say it's my acting ability, but she truly was amazing. She
had that…
that stillness,
and that's what I think really makes a great actress on stage,
is finding the stillness.
And something that I always aimed for,
especially in this new production of Ballo with all the…
the stuff going on around us. And there's a lot of stuff in this production
for me to really find that stillness. And Callas was just the queen of that.
But yes, I think it's…it's more my color
of my voice uh...
that people compare.
and the vibrato of it I think is similar to Callas. But
I never tried to duplicate. I just try to use my own voice. And…
I admire what Callas did. Absolutely she's one of my favorites. Leontyne Price.
Uh... Claudia Mozio. I like,
you know, the older
generation of singers.
Uh... on a free evening are you home sitting, listening to some opera? Are
you watching a movie or something? What do you on a free night?
Sleep. I will tell you another secret. Here, you guys are getting all the secrets out of me.
The one thing I never do is listen to music.
I really don’t. Any kind of music? Nothing. Nothing. Because for me the silence…you like silence.
I think, you know, I feel a little bit like a schizophrenic person, because
there’s
always music in my ears, and playing in my head.
Uh...
I’ll be sitting in a movie theater, you know, and
start humming, and not even realize that I'm humming. And my husband will go, Sondra,
shhh.
What? What?
You’re humming again. Oh, sorry.
Because the music
is always going in my head.
And…and
you know how you memorize, and if you're not memorizing you’re working on another one
or….
or, God forbid, you're working on new music while you're singing something.
It's…it's always difficult.
So, silence at home. When you go to bed and you try to sleep do you have
tunes going around
that you say, please, leave me alone, after you’ve sung a performance?
Oh, absolutely. But unfortunately, once it starts, you can't jump off the train, as I say.
You have to go from the beginning of the opera to the end. It's true, it’s true. But I do the
condensed version of it.
It’s like…okay, and then I can fall asleep. But until I get to the last note
I can’t fall asleep.
It’s better than going on a circle that you can’t get out of.
No. No, I'm not on the endless loop, thank God. I’m just on the play it through once and then
you go to sleep, you know?
It's…you know.
It is what it is. It’s what we do.
After the performance, do you
often say, wow, I should have done something like this, like that? Do you….
Beat myself up? Yes.
Like I said, I used to. I used to. And I still do think I…
I'm a big perfectionist.
Uh... I always want to do better, I always want to do more.
Uh….I always feel there is more.
But it's live theatre,
and we really have to be
kind and gentle to ourselves. Because we could beat ourselves up about, you know,
a stage movement, or one note.
But the excitement is that it is live theatre,
and that there is… there's always errors and things that happen onstage,
whether it be costumes that don’t
function properly, or oh, well, I blew that note tonight.
But, you know,
I think a lot of the
audiences,
the audience members,
they don't hear it. And a lot of the mistakes we make
don’t really make it over the orchestra.
We think we really messed up but,
you know, I just do my best. And every….before every show,
you know, I say a little prayer to my father who passed away,
wherever he is, and just say, just allow me to do the very best I can tonight.
That's all I ask for. I don't want perfection.
I just want to be able to do the best I can do.
Was he a great fan, of course. How long ago did he die?
My dad died very young. I was seventeen when my dad died. And uh...
only got to hear me sing
one voice competition.
Never heard me sing with orchestra.
He was very young. He was fifty-four when he passed away. And I…I found him dead, unfortunately. So
he never really got to experience what I do.
And, you know. But you knew he wanted…both of your parents support what you were doing.
Absolutely. My dad, very early on, made a lot of sacrifices. Both my parents did.
As I think any parent does of a child that has a talent, and you really want to
pursue that.
You know, my mom would
go without
buying extra-special groceries for weeks just so she could pay for my voice
lessons. Because we weren't an affluent family
at all. Uh…...
the sacrifices she made time-wise too.
Unbelievable. Does she travel? Is she able to travel to hear you today? Yeah. Yeah.
She doesn’t want to come to this, she wants to
see it in the movie theaters. Because she really enjoys
watching the Met Live in the cinemas.
Because the backstage experience and all of that, she really enjoys it. See?
I know. My mom. Plus
she's gonna be seventy five, so it has to be a special trip for her
uh... to come and see it. But….
Actually I think this it’s some very, very good projects.
And uh... the programs, you know, people actually can see you
much more closer.
Absolutely. They can see everything, every aspect of it.
And I think it's really taken the mysteriousness out of it. You know, in
some ways the mystique of it. Like, oh, what's going on backstage behind it?
And I…I think it’s good. I think it's gonna bring more people to
the opera, for sure.
And uh... to show them, now look, we’re only human.
What we’re doing, you know, it's all
pretend and make believe.
But the singing is real, and the orchestra is real,
and our intentions are real. But all of that, you know, it's
to transport and touch as many people as we can, that’s my goal in life, really.
And thanks to Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met, he’s
made that possible for a lot of people.
When that time comes, hopefully many years from now, that you
decide to stop singing, do you think you'll teach or just
walk away from opera, or what do you want to do at that point? Or do you have any idea?
You know, I'm forty-three now, and this they call the prime years of our
career.
I would like to say that I would teach, because I really have a passion for
young artists and keeping opera alive.
But, you know, hopefully I'll be doing this for another ten, fifteen years.
Or even longer.
Well,
touch wood, right?
Um...
But who knows at the end of that? It's… it's
tiring.
It is a tiring career, traveling around the world
and I might just want to sit at home and drink pina coladas in the house and,
you know, uh... eat bon-bons all day, and you know.
If I choose that,
I probably will be bored in about five minutes because I like
the contact with people and I…and I like
bringing music to the world. So
I’m going to hopefully sing. And we’ll see from there. You consider yourself probably
never struggle
with your career.
I hope not I've been very fortunate.
Always smooth, right?
I have, besides the two injuries, vocal injuries, I have been very blessed, I have to say.
The Metropolitan Opera
has given me so much.
And uh...
they’ve believed in me so much.
And I really…my career went like this.
I just
started running. I mean I…I did my first
full role at the Metropolitan Opera, like I said, when I was twenty-seven.
I did “Trovatore”.
I mean,
who does that? Who does that? A lot of young singers are not
as lucky as you are. What would you say to them?
Keep working.
And unfortunately, they have to work harder than our generation did.
Because there's less and less opportunities with opera companies
going under.
They have to just keep…
keep pounding through it. And
if you don't love it, do something else.
On that note,
I'm afraid we're out of time.
But what a pleasure it has been visiting with you, Sondra. Thank you. Thank you so much for
being with us. Thank you. My pleasure. This has been Classic Talk with Bing and Dennis.