The hall gleamed, the guests sparkled, and the auction table dripped with jewelry. The Schuyler Foundation for Career Bridges counts on its fundraisers for the grants it provides young singers, but its yearly galas are more than moneymakers for the organization. They are also big-hearted soirées where each new crew of grant winners is welcomed into the family and performs for a crowd that includes figures like Speight Jenkins, Patrice Munsel, Julius Rudel, and Roberta Peters.
Barbara Meister Bender and David Schuyler Bender, the married couple behind Career Bridges, presided over the affair last May at the Jumeirah Essex House in New York, seeing to the wines and flowers while also attending to the singers waiting excitedly in the wings. Barbara is not only the group’s co-founder and co-artistic director, along with her husband, but also its designated stage mother, straightening a tie here, providing a drape for an overly exposed bosom there. While waiters set up champagne glasses, David gathered the 14 vibrant young singers for a rehearsal of a chorus from La traviata, with which they would entertain the guests during the cocktail hour.
The singers were nearing the end of a few whirlwind days in which they sang for a group of judges, learned that 10 of them—out of 40 applicants—had won grants, sang again for an evaluation panel and then, clad in tuxes and evening gowns, performed their prepared solos during the sit-down dinner.
They had not known they would sing the Traviata chorus, but they gave it their all, gathering around the piano where the noted accompanist and teacher Ted Taylor sat conducting them. Earlier, Taylor had rehearsed their solos with them in his Upper West Side apartment. Some of the singers were en route to or from other competitions. A few had graduated from conservatory programs the day before or would graduate the following week. All were young, but many were already accustomed to the pressure cooker of a singer’s life.
Career Bridges (www.careerbridges.org), now in its seventh year, assists singers who have left the nurturing folds of academia but have yet to find a footing in the vocal field. The Benders, aware that many a promising career has been lost in the interim, began the program in 2002 for singers between the ages of 21 and 32. Each year, 10 singers receive $2,000 grants, renewable for a total of three years, as well as individually written evaluations from a group of 34 experts including vocal coaches, voice teachers, conductors, language consultants, stage directors, accompanists, and agents. For those whose schedules allow, Career Bridges, which is based about 20 miles north of New York City in Bronxville, also provides half a dozen performance opportunities each year. Singers must be re-evaluated each year to continue in the program.
This year’s new recipients included Alyssa Cox, a 22-year-old soprano who was so sure she would not be a finalist that she had to pull out of another competition when she was chosen. Cox, whose graduation from Oberlin was a week away, spoke in an interview about her ambition, her conversion to opera (she had hated it until hearing a CD of Renée Fleming, she admitted), and her determination to embrace whatever suggestions the panel had to offer. “Honest opinions about what we should work on is the most important thing right now,” she said. “The more criticism, the better.”
Kevin Thompson, a 30-year-old bass who graduated from Juilliard in 2002, described the decision he made two years ago to pursue his career in earnest. Within short order, he had signed with an agent and won several competitions. Thompson said he was grateful for the connections and name recognition that the Career Bridges grant would give him. “It was great to sing in front of all those legends,” he said after the gala.
Singers sometimes fortuitously find gigs during the competition itself. The venerable choral conductor David Randolph, who auditioned several of the singers after hearing them in the evaluation session, ultimately hired six of them to sing as soloists with his New York-based St. Cecilia Chorus in Carnegie Hall next season. “I listen with the ears of possibly engaging them,” he said of his two-year association with Career Bridges.
The panel of experts is the core of the program, said David Bender, a former tenor who sang leading roles with New York City Opera, San Francisco Opera, and others. “It’s been a dream of mine to be able to provide singers with the kind of advice I wish I’d had years ago—that what you thought was a vibrato was a wobble, or that you needed to lose 10 pounds to play Cherubino,” he explained. He said he knows from experience how young singers can damage their voices and ruin their careers with unhealthy vocal techniques or unsuitable repertoire. That nightmare happened to him at an early age, although he recovered sufficiently through proper coaching to have a thriving career.
Bender is tall and lean, with debonair leading-man looks and a propensity toward pithy descriptions. Three things matter most in the vocal business, he said: the ability to get along with colleagues, preparedness, and the willingness to change. He cited a talented and handsome baritone with a chip on his shoulder who could never figure out why his career did not take off. Then there was the judge at this year’s competition who immediately ruled out a singer because of her behavior toward the accompanist. “Your attitude has turned me off so much I can’t hear a note,” the judge wrote. That singer didn’t make it, Bender added.
A “wonderful baritone with great potential” showed up for his follow-up evaluation one year while high on drugs, causing him to lose his grant, Bender reflected. But the organization’s commitment to “mentoring, supporting, and caring” can also produce gratifying results.
Bender also described a talented young tenor who was criticized for “pushing and making huge sounds.” With coaching, he began singing sweetly and powerfully. And by the third year, his performance was “powerful and thrilling,” according to Bender. “Lorin Maazel heard him and signed him,” he continued, “and he’s now a full-time singer with an upcoming debut at the Met next year.”
Singers do not receive money from the organization. Rather, Career Bridges pays for needs like special coaching to learn a role or a language, better publicity photographs, or the initial consultation for something like a weight-loss program. “We do not recommend or pay for voice teachers,” Barbara Bender said. “And we do not pay for orthodontia!” she added.
A blue-eyed redhead, Barbara Bender was hired by Richard Rodgers to sing the role of Maria in The Sound of Music, both on Broadway and in a two-year national tour. Leonard Bernstein coached her in Candide, and other roles in musical theatre have taken her around the world. She and her husband, who have been married for 35 years, like to recall touring together with John Raitt in a program devoted to the operettas of Sigmund Romberg.
“When we sang together, something happened,” David Bender said. “The audience felt the synergy.”
Barbara, who has remained as trim as in her leading lady days, believes that being fit is very important for a singer. She advocates dance classes for good posture and learning the piano to improve sight-reading skills. David talks about the importance of thank-you notes and of not singing when you’re sick—or, if you must sing, making sure to inform the audience of your malady. This is not done to get sympathy, he said, but because it’s the professional thing to do.
Although the Benders do not personally teach the grant winners, they do offer guidance, both in formal sessions and informally by phone or e-mail. In conversation, they convey an eagerness to impart what they have learned. Concentrate on what makes you unique as an artist, David said. Barbara, finishing the thought, added, “It’s your soul.”
The Benders acknowledge that more than half the grant recipients each year will eventually leave the field with their hopes unrealized. But they and the Career Bridges organization, which consists of a large board of directors and advisers, take pride in the five singers who have gone on to sign contracts with the Metropolitan Opera. One rising star who received a 2006 Career Bridges grant during a heady period in which she also won a host of other awards is soprano Angela Meade. Referring to her “rare and beautiful singing,” David Bender beamed. “She won ours first,” he said.
