Last night I went to a recital at our local junior college. The performer, a coloratura soprano, was not connected to the school other than that her mother is the orchestra director there. Keeping with my style of anonymity I will give the soprano a pseudonym… I will call her Gracia.
Gracia has been accepted into the AIMS program in Graz, Austria to study for six weeks this summer, and as the program is quite expensive, she put on this program in her hometown to help raise funds. For a little bit of background, Gracia has a BM in vocal performance from Biola, a private Christian college in California, and a MM in vocal performance from a state university in Florida, which she only just completed this spring.
I was interested in going to her recital largely because I was interested in seeing (and hearing) where she was at, vocally and dramatically, in her development. You see, I have this conception in my mind that everyone is better than I am, and I feel like the consumate underdog. Yet I also have another side of my psyche that is intensely proud of my vocal abilities. So I am incredibly insecure, but at the same time I have quite an ego. Go figure.
I must say that Gracia was really pretty good. Her intonation was dead on and she has a very big voice, with pretty good tone in those really high notes, but her coloratura was a little slow, I thought. She is good at singing loud, but she could use some work on singing quietly. A good piano is much harder than a good forte. My main disapointment, though, was not her singing, but her acting. By far the best song she sang was Glitter and be Gay from Candide. It was very good. It was the only one of her arias, though, that she really seemed to understand. With that song, every dynamic, every repeated word, everything had a purpose, and she portrayed it beautifully. It was clear that she had gotten into the character and understood her and where she was coming from. I only wish she’d been able to do the same for her other pieces.
All in all, it was a good recital that I quite enjoyed. I wish Gracia the best as she studies in Austria this summer and continues to work toward her goal of being an opera singer. It is not an easy road, but she has a good foundation, and as long as she continues to work at honing her skills she will do well for herself.
I went to Gracia’s recital, honestly, to compare her singing with my own, and to try to guage my own chances of being accepted into a program such as AIMS at some point in the next few years. My conclusion after seeing her perform is that yes, with a little more study and, of course, a lot of hard work, I should be able to get into such a program easily. Paying for it, of course, will be a different issue. 
Good luck Gracia. And good luck me.
~Wannabe
PS: I recorded the whole recital. Perhaps after a while I will post a bit of it on here, if I can figure out how.
