My warm memories continue to linger from last summer when I heard Thomas Meglioranza’s Fontana Ensemble concert. He sang Purcell and Frank Bridge’s war-time songs, and then capped off his performance with a sardonic, cabaret band-accompanied “Le bal masqué” by Poulenc. As remarkable as his voice was, his ability to move freely in such an eclectic, diverse repertoire was what especially astonished. He does it all, and he does it all excellently.
His “warm, distinctive” supple voice, consummate expression, and flair for acting could warm the cockles of the hearts of any skeptic in any audience. Moreover, he is completely at home with his finely crafted voice and repertoire—whether it’s Bach, Babbitt, Schubert, Eötvös (he performed Prior Walter in the North American premiere of Angels in America), John Adams, Gershwin, or Carrie Bond-Jacobs. He is also so comfortable in his singing “skin” and whatever piece he is immersed in that, even in a large auditorium, he makes you feel as if he’s giving you a personal gift in front of a blazing hearth.
After the concert, I found this down-home, unpretentious master singer enjoying an ice cream cone with his regular pianist Reiko Uchida. In between bites, we began discussing his remarkable career. He made his Wigmore Hall debut in London last year singing a program of contemporary American songs and recently recorded a CD of Schubert Lieder with Uchida. In 2006, at the New Victory Theater in New York City, he portrayed the part of Robert Schumann in song for Twin Spirits, the story of Robert and Clara Schumann told in word and song, conceived and directed by John Caird and also starring Sting, violinist Joshua Bell, and pianist Jeremy Denk. Sandwiched in between the recital, opera, and modern works, Meglioranza also has a passionate flair for Baroque music and has appeared with most of the leading Baroque ensembles in America.
You might think, “Nice work if you can get it, but how do you get it?” Here’s how baritone Thomas Meglioranza gets it.
Not having formal classical music training or experience—or even the desire to be a classical singer—when you were young, how did you accomplish your meteoric rise to a successful singing career?
I discovered classical music and singing while an undergraduate at Grinnell College, so I felt like I was hopelessly far behind everyone else. That motivated me to work very hard to catch up—especially when I arrived at Eastman for graduate school and it seemed like everyone around me had been studying music since they were five years old.
After graduating from Eastman, I moved to the New York City area and worked as an office temp. Before long, I was singing in professional choruses, churches, temples, and with a few great local Early Music ensembles (The Waverly Consort, Pomerium, and the New York Collegium), as well as singing a lot of new music. During the summers, I went to some summer training programs including Aspen and Ravinia’s Steans Institute.
About five years after I moved to New York City, I seriously focused on song competitions, since it was art song that got me excited about singing in the first place. I was a winner of several competitions, including the Joy in Singing, the Franz Schubert/Modern Music Competition in Graz, the Naumburg Competition and, most importantly, the Concert Artists Guild Competition, whose prize included a management contract. So, from the time I arrived in New York City to when I could finally quit my office jobs and focus on a solo career, probably took about seven years of gradual progress.
What did you aspire to be when you were growing up, and what other careers were you considering?
I loved to draw when I was a kid, so I thought I might become a cartoonist or illustrator. Once I got serious about singing, I considered transferring from Grinnell College to a conservatory, but I’m glad I stayed and got a liberal arts education and spent those formative years surrounded by people with varied interests and not just musicians. I think that helped make me a more well rounded person and musician—and if I ever had second thoughts about a singing career, I always felt like I could have done a lot of other things.
When did you first realize that you had “The Voice”?
Until early adulthood, I was too shy to sing in public, but occasionally someone would hear me just goofing around and tell me that I had a nice voice, but I never thought much of it. It wasn’t until after my freshman year in college, when I did summer stock at the College Light Opera Company on Cape Cod and was surrounded by singers my age from Juilliard and Eastman, that it occurred to me that I might have a professional quality voice.
Who were your most influential voice teachers and why?
I’ve been lucky to have had great voice teachers all through my singing life, including my current teacher, Fred Carama, and Beverley Peck Johnson, whom I worked with for two summers at Aspen.
Probably my most influential teacher was Carol Webber, whom I worked with for three years at Eastman and who is still a great mentor to me to this day. In addition to vocal technique, Carol conveyed to me the importance of having very high musical, artistic, and professional standards and encouraged my love of chamber music, Bach, and modern music.
Who were some of your primary vocal influences that you listened to?
Some of the great singers that influenced my singing are Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Jan DeGaetani, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, Gerard Souzay, William Sharp, Sanford Sylvan, Olaf Bär, Dawn Upshaw, and Thomas Hampson.
It can be difficult to get management to even view your materials for consideration, let alone secure representation. How did you end up with CAMI?
After four great years being managed by Concert Artists Guild, whose mission is to prepare young musicians for careers and professional management, CAG and I agreed that it was time for me to leave the nest. One of the managers at CAG knew my current manager, Michael Benchetrit and, thinking that we would work well together, put us in touch. This was three years ago, and it’s been going very well.
What steps do you advise for those trying to obtain management representation?
Of course there’s no substitute for persistence and luck—or having the right person make a connection for you. But one lesson I take from my own experience in trying to obtain professional management is that the efforts that I put into telling prospective managers about myself (e.g., sending them my materials and updating them whenever I had an important performance, won an award, or got a nice review) resulted in very little.
But the efforts that I put into making sure that someone could easily learn a lot about me if they wanted to (mainly by having a clear, informative, and up-to-date website) have often yielded good results. People are less likely to be impressed when they hear about a singer from the singer himself. But if someone is interested in learning more about a singer, that’s when the singer has an opportunity to make an impression with a good website.
In your rather short, young career, you have performed a lot of diverse, eclectic music. How has that transpired?
I’ve always been interested in a wide range of repertoire and styles. Since I didn’t go straight into the opera world after Eastman, I had the chance to do a lot more genre hopping when I moved to New York—not only because it suited my interests, but because being versatile made it easier for me to find work as a freelancer.
What is the most interesting, fascinating work that you’ve performed so far?
It’s hard to think of just one work! Among the pieces of new music I’ve sung recently, Roberto Sierra’s Missa Latina, which I sang with the Houston Symphony last spring, really took hold of me while I was working on it because it’s so gorgeous and uplifting. Just opening the score always seemed to put me in a good mood.
Another equally absorbing but totally different piece was John Harbison’s Fifth Symphony, which I sang with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood last summer. Its first movement is a 20-minute-long song for baritone and orchestra on a Czeslaw Milosz poem that retells the story of his [Milosz’s] wife’s death through the legend of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld. It’s a heart-breaking piece but very beautiful.
How do you approach studying a role so you can fully inhabit that character onstage?
I spend a lot time learning the pitches and rhythms and words, as well as the accompaniment. I study the libretto so that I know the whole story really well. As I rehearse the piece, I constantly ask myself, “What would my character be doing now?” and then I try to do that. I did take a basic acting class when I was a freshman in college, but I think that most of what I’ve picked up about acting has come from observing actors and fellow singers, working with directors, and studying the piece itself.
What roles or works do you hope to assay in the future?
There are a few hundred Schubert and Schumann songs and Bach cantatas that I hope to sing someday. My operatic wish list includes Wozzeck, Papageno, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and maybe Golaud when I have a few more gray hairs. I loved singing Chou En-lai in Nixon in China, so I hope I’ll someday get to sing some of John Adams’ other great baritone roles.
Your diction is so impeccable and your English diction, in particular, is pristine and perfectly understandable. How do you consistently manage that? How important is diction for a singer’s career?
I think that baritones have a built-in diction advantage over other voice types because we sing and speak in more or less the same range. Nevertheless, I’ve found that for any singer, being clearly understood is not so much a matter of enunciating everything down to the tiniest IPA squiggle, but rather giving a logical and purposeful shape to larger structures like sentences and paragraphs. I spend a lot of time analyzing texts.
Shifting vocal styles as often as you do, what vocal techniques do you employ and find to be important for that vocal transition?
I don’t consciously change my technique going from style to style. A good classical vocal technique should allow one to sing with a wide range of dynamics and colors with resonance and freedom. I think singing in different styles is more about developing an ear for the given style.
Do you enjoy teaching vocal students and giving masterclasses?
This past fall I took up the position of Visiting Artist in Voice at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve been going up there once or twice a month for coachings and masterclasses, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. By nature I’m not the type of person who goes around expressing my opinion or telling people what I think they should do, so I have to assume a completely different mindset to get myself into “teacher mode.” It’s challenging, but also very gratifying.
Tell us about your long affair with art songs, about some of your favorite composers, and the songs that you enjoy performing.
The director of the choir at Grinnell, John Rommereim, was the first person who encouraged me to pursue singing seriously, and he suggested that I go listen to some recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The 1972 recording Winterreise with Gerald Moore was particularly stirring to me. Up until that point, I had no idea before that songs or the human voice could express so much.
How do you balance the technical aspect of singing with the expression it also needs? During a performance do you focus more on the expression and let the technical aspect be mostly automatic?
I try not to think of them as opposites that need to be balanced, but let them work in tandem as much as possible. Sometimes I can’t do the expressive thing I want unless I first take it apart and figure it out technically. Sometimes I can’t sing a note or phrase in a technically sound way unless I figure out how to motivate it with an expressive impulse that somehow allows me to release some blocking tension. I try to work these things out in the practice room so that I can devote most of my attention during the performance to telling the story.
Tell us about your present accompanist, the importance of the accompanist in performance, and the tight-knit musical rapport you have with her.
For the past five years, Reiko Uchida has been the pianist I work with the most. It’s very inspiring to work with her because she has such a beautiful warm sound and is effortlessly musical and sensitive and imaginative, whether she’s playing Schubert or Milton Babbitt. Also, since we’re both on the quiet and mellow side, we get along well, which is important when you’re stuck at an airport or in other stressful situations.
Although I find collaborating with different pianists to be fun and stimulating, when you have a long-term musical relationship with one person, you’re often more free to try new ideas or take risks in performance because you know and trust each other.
What do you think about the current trends of staging art song to liven them up for the audience?
Although I’m open minded about it, I haven’t seen any staged art song performances that have convinced me.
How do you maintain your family communication and relationships with the constant travel and other stresses of a singing career?
I usually do only one or two operas a year, which means most of the time I’m not away longer than a week or two for an orchestral or festival engagement, or a couple of days for a recital. My wife sometimes travels with me and, as a former musician who now works on the administrative side, she’s also very supportive. We don’t have kids, so that certainly makes things easier.
What’s next on the horizon for Thomas Meglioranza?
I’m about to sing Aeneas in Dido and Aeneas with the Mark Morris Dance Group in Moscow. This summer, I’ll again be singing the title role in a revival of Mackay: The Black Bearded Bible Man in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Then I go to Aspen to perform Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, and then to the Bard Music Festival to sing some songs of Franz Krenek and Alban Berg.
To mark the centenary of Schoen-berg’s musical and philosophical tome, Harmonielehre, I’m putting together a recital program of songs by Schoenberg, Eisler, Blitzstein, and Cage for some TBA concerts in 2011. My recording of Virgil Thomson songs with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project should be coming out in the fall. I’m also singing a lot of Bach cantatas next season in Europe with Andrew Parrott, and in Quebec with Bernard Labadie’s orchestra, Les Violons du Roy.
If you could leave our readers with any last parting words of advice, what would that be?
Never stop learning.
