Sarah,
Good topic. I haven't competed in them yet, but I have gone to the Regional finals in San Francisco a couple of times.
Could you share what you've observed about your friends who have won? I'm very curious to hear what happens to these winners afterward.
I have a friend who won the Finals and became a Met apprentice (he was, I believe, 24). He received excellent training, mainstage performance opportunities (small parts), and is now in the process of building a career. It didn't rocket him to stardom, but it gave him polishing and a boost, so now he is singing large parts in small cities.
The competition I observed this year in SF was strange. There were six or seven singers, most of whom were sopranos, and they were mostly in their mid-twenties, polished although not perfect vocally, and boring, boring, boring to listen to. There was only one voice there that had an exciting bite to it, an edge -- and she was a 22-year-old soprano, singing two fachs too big for her, with what sounded like not enough technical training or physical stage presence. She won. The judges, who took a LONG time to decide, included Runnicles (maestro for SFO) and Jonathan Friend (stage director for the Met), and someone else.
The singer chooses an aria, and then the panel requests one. They almost always asked for a Mozart. Every single person was asked to sing something that showed agility.
The rumor is that the Met apprenticeships take only the youngest, most precocious superstars. Early twenties is good; naturally big, early-maturing voices are good. Although I think this serves a small, promising segment of the singing population well, it unfortunately overlooks the dramatic voices, the spinto voices, the voices who fully mature in the late twenties and early thirties... in other words, the Met competition have the reputation of favoring the babies in the field. Which is great if you're a 23-year-old Violetta, but not very realistic in terms of the singing population as a whole.
Just my observations. I look forward to hearing what Sarah's friends' experiences with the program were.
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y...
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