Conway opera singer on tour to China with Domingo
Posted on Sunday, January 4, 2009
Special to the Democrat-Gazette Soprano Micaela Oeste as Blanche in Francis Poulenc's opera The Dialogues of the Carmelites at Northwestern University.
Coloratura soprano Micaela Oeste is from Conway and her career is on the cusp of something colossal.
Oeste, 27, a graduate of the University of Central Arkansas with a newly minted master's degree in vocal performance from Northwestern University near Chicago, is in her first year in the Washington National Opera's Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists program, which works with young professional singers on the verge of international careers.
This week she's headed - with three other young singers, a pianist, a conductor and legendary tenor and conductor Placido Domingo, the Washington National Opera's general director - to Beijing, where they will perform Friday at the Chinese capital's newly opened Reignwood Theater, near Tiananmen Square.
"It'll be my first trip that far east," says Oeste, the daughter of tenor and UCA faculty member Wolfgang Oeste. "Of course, I've been to Europe many times."
Oeste and soprano Jennifer Waters, mezzo-soprano Brandy Hawkins and baritone Nathan Herfindahl will join Chinese tenor Yingxi Zhang, a former Young Artists Program member, in China. They and several Chinese singers will participate in a program that will include selections from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's
Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte and operas by Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Georges Bizet, Gaetano Donizetti and Pietro Mascagni.
Domingo will sing and conduct a chamber orchestra from the Chinese National Opera House Symphony Orchestra.
Oeste's showpiece for the program will be the aria "O luce di quest' anima" from Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix. (Oeste admits this is not exactly one of Donizetti's more popular operas; in fact, it's rarely performed, but the aria is considered a gem in the standard soprano repertoire.)
Oeste and Herfindahl will sing the duet "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni; she and Hawkins will sing the "Duetto buffo di due gatti" (better known as the comic "Cat Duet") by Gioacchino Rossini.
She will join Waters, Hawkins and Domingo in "Andro ramingo e solo," the quartet from Act III of Mozart's Idomeneo. And for the concert finale, Oeste, Herfindahl and the entire company will sing "And make our garden grow" from Leonard Bernstein's Candide.
Oeste says Domingo handpicked her for the concert.
"Placido decides," she says. "It depends on the repertoire." Domingo had some showy repertoire in mind for this concert and, Oeste says, "As a coloratura soprano, all my pieces are showy."
The trip marks the beginning of a three-year education partnership cultural exchange between the theater and the American capital's opera company.
The collaboration will give the opera company access to China, where classical music is becoming a more prominent art form, and "cross-cultural educational opportunities for the opera company staff and its young artists," according to a news release.
"In exchange, the opera company and Domingo will contribute their arts administration expertise as the Reignwood Group develops its own young artist program for Chinese performers."
Oeste, who was born in Germany and moved to Conway when she was in the sixth grade, got into the young artist's program in September after leaving Northwestern, where she studied with Karen Brunssen and famous baritone Sherrill Milnes.
She recently made her Washington National Opera company debut in the role of Annina in Verdi's La Traviata and this spring will sing the role of the Forest Bird in Richard Wagner's Siegfried.
"That's probably the only Wagner I'll ever sing," she says. The Forest Bird is pretty much the only coloratura role in any Wagner opera.
She has also sung with the Chicago Opera Theater, Opera Tampa and Opera Santa Barbara, and in 2005 was one third of the cast of the Opera Theatre at Wildwood's Young Artists touring production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel (she was Gretel), which visited schools across the state.
Her current two-year "gig" puts her in the company of some of the world's greatest singers, including soprano Renee Fleming, who starred in the company's production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia in November.
"I sat in the wings and watched every rehearsal," Oeste says fervently.
"You make a lot of contacts. The people you meet are so important; they're in a position to recommend you to others. And agents come to the shows." She's also gotten to sing at several embassies and hobnob with the diplomats.
Domingo started the program in 2002 with "generous support" from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation. Participants get weekly sessions with vocal and drama coaches, voice lessons, language classes, master classes with prominent singers, conductors and directors and advice on career development.
The program pays a small stipend, enough for her to live on in suburban Maryland; if she gets a "mainstage" role she gets paid in a separate union contract as though she were an out-of-town guest performer.
"And every performance I can go to for free," she says.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
