Imagine this: You are in a master class singing “Caro mio ben” (or “La donna e mobile” or “Lasciatemi morire”), as untold numbers of singers in master classes have sung before you. But the setting is not the usual airless stage or fluorescent-lit classroom. Instead you are in a 12th century chapel, complete with pale frescos and green marble, whose stone walls return a more sumptuous version of your voice than anything you have ever heard in your shower. A virtuosic accompanist at a Steinway concert grand supports your every inflection. Outside the chapel, people stroll in a sun-flecked cobblestone piazza; a few blocks away lies an open-air market crowded with ruddy local farmers and their wares, exactly the kind of place Rossini might have stopped in for bread and cheese on his way to a rehearsal.
Every classical singer’s fantasy? Perhaps, but during a few weeks each summer in Spoleto, Italy, it is a reality for a select group of aspiring professional singers.
The Spoleto Vocal Arts Symposium, held in an almost impossibly picturesque medieval city in the province of Umbria, provides singers the opportunity to pursue their art while immersed in Italian culture and daily life. In the words of Carole Everett—who with her husband, C.J. Everett, founded the symposium 13 years ago: “Singers need the experience of singing within the culture where opera was born.”
The participants in the program are a diverse group from many parts of the world, but all are serious, aspiring artists. Several have already had some professional success and are seeking to refine and hone their craft. Along with a passion for the arts of opera and classical song, they share a lively interest in the Italian Bel Canto tradition. The symposium offers them the opportunity to explore those interests in a disciplined and in-depth fashion.
The 10-member faculty is composed of leading voice teachers and coaches from both the United States and Italy, including Judith Coen and Nico Castel of New York and Enza Ferrari of Venice. Each faculty member contributes his or her own unique expertise in the areas of vocal technique, repertoire, interpretation, and diction.
The international flavor of the symposium, and its emphasis on the deep connection between the art of song and the language and culture of Italy, reflect the professional lives and interests of its founders. C.J. Everett, with a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music, has pursued multiple careers as a jazz drummer, an educator and a linguist. Carole Everett, a mezzo-soprano with international performance experience, has a distinguished résumé in educational administration, including seven years as Juilliard’s director of Admissions.
The couple first came to know and love Spoleto 30 years ago, while working in the city for several seasons in orchestra management for Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds. The idea of an international operatic arts program in Italy held a powerful attraction for both Everetts. Carole recalls a decisive conversation with Marilyn Horne after a master class Horne had given at Juilliard: “Marilyn said, ‘You know, you have a vision. Why don’t you start your own program?’” Adds C.J., “I knew the town fathers in Spoleto, so I went to them with the idea, and they were very enthusiastic.”
Thus, the Vocal Arts Symposium was launched.
The success of the first session—in 1992, with 30 participants from 12 countries—inspired the Everetts to expand on their original vision.
“I wanted a kind of mini-university,” explains C.J. “I asked my friend, Reginald Gibbons, the poet and translator, to inaugurate a writing workshop.”
Gibbons brought novelist Rosellen Brown aboard to help create a second symposium, the Spoleto Writers’ Workshop. Several years later, Spoleto added a culinary arts program under the tutelage of celebrated Umbrian chef Eros Patrizi. Then, says C.J., “We wanted to reverse the process—to bring an important American art form to Italians. So we started the Vocal Jazz Workshop.” In this unusual program, acclaimed American jazz vocalist Michelle Hendricks and Berklee-trained Italian pianist Renato Chicco, who now heads the jazz department at Austria’s University of Graz, work with professional Italian jazz singers to help them develop a more idiomatically American style.
For the Vocal Arts Symposium participants, these concurrent symposia enhance an already rich learning environment. Singers have the opportunity to hear readings by the Writer’s Workshop faculty and participants, taste the culinary delights produced by the Cooking School, and enjoy al fresco performances by the Italian vocalists with top-of-the-line Italian jazz players.
Beyond the resources of the symposia, Spoleto in the summertime offers a wealth of performing arts events. Symposium singers arrive in time to hear the final concerts of the Festival of Two Worlds. And the city sponsors a series of concerts and performances—including, this past summer, tenor José Carreras—presented almost daily in Spoleto’s numerous scenic venues: charming piazzas, antique churches, theaters, and two opera houses.
The heart of the Vocal Arts Symposium, however, is the intensive daily work with the dedicated faculty, in master classes and private sessions, on every aspect of the singer’s craft.
“We work hard,” says participant Ariana Soverigno, “but the concentration on technique is great.” Instruction is informed and inspired by the principles of Italian vocal technique, which emphasizes the connection between singing and “emotional speech.”
Coen and Ferrari, both renowned voice teachers who have been with the symposium for a number of years, have shaped this orientation first and foremost. Ferrari, who taught Maria Callas and toured as pianist with Giuseppe di Stefano, is perhaps the foremost Italian teacher of the Bel Canto tradition. Coen, who studied in Rome as a Fulbright Scholar and was on the roster at the Metropolitan Opera, runs one of New York’s most active voice studios. She credits Robert Shewan, her former mentor and a longtime colleague in Spoleto, with helping to form her approach—and enabling her own career to flourish.
“After my conservatory education,” she relates, “I returned to my hometown, where as a girl I had been something of a celebrity. And everyone said, ‘What happened to you? You lost your voice.’”
She began to work with Shewan, who was interested in the neurological aspects of singing, and she was able to connect him with doctors she knew at the Institute for Neurological Disease in Philadelphia—whereupon Shewan “taught himself the science of neurology,” says Coen. Shewan’s book, Singing and the Brain, encapsulates his method of teaching singers to mentally coordinate pitches with emotional speech sounds.
“His approach was a miracle,” Coen says simply. “He saved my life as a singer.”
Faculty members Brad Hougham and Dauri Shippey studied with Coen and pursue international performing careers. The method, “is truly language-based and emotion-based,” says Hougham, a New York City–based baritone. “We as teachers have learned the deep link between the language and the art form.”
Shippey, a Juilliard graduate and former Beverly Johnston student who has a studio in Lawrenceville, N.J., adds: “It’s a very holistic approach to singing. It incorporates diction, breathing, color, intensity—all aspects of singing.”
Vocal coach and accompanist Pam Gilmore, who heads the opera department at Rutgers University, notes that the technique is strongly tied to Italian speech.
“The pedagogy is based on learning to sing the way Italians speak,” she explains. “Americans don’t use a high degree of emotion or varied pitch when they speak, so they only engage one part of the brain. When an Italian speaks, all parts of the brain are in play.”
The method comes alive during a typical morning’s master class in the Sala Pegasus—that beautiful, acoustically generous medieval chapel. After Coen conducts a group warm-up alternating singing with heightened speech, she works with a baritone on vowel sounds.
“Think of the shapes of your face, different for each vowel,” she says. When the singer has trouble with a high note, she advises, “Don’t try to reach the pitch—bring the pitch into your voice.” Hougham contributes: “The high note doesn’t have to feel bigger or harder; it’s just a note.”
When the singer performs his first phrase again, the difference is dramatic. Coen turns to the other students, listening attentively in the pews: “I love that sound, what do you think?” They burst into applause.
A soprano takes the stage and begins Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro.” After a few phrases, Shippey stops her and leads her through an exercise in approaching the pitches through heightened speech. The singer concentrates, her expressive speech flowing more and more freely, and finds herself suddenly in tears.
“Singing is a very emotional event,” responds Shippey, giving her a hug. “That was lovely work—I started to hear the shimmer.”
On another morning, a soprano sings Donizetti’s “Regnava” in a masterclass led by the renowned Nico Castel. A tenor at the Met for 30 years and a diction coach at Juilliard and elsewhere, Castel has produced close to 20 volumes translating and explaining the major operatic literature.
Castel has fond memories of singing The Consul at the Menotti Festival here 33 years ago. This morning, though, he is entirely focused on the young soprano in the Sala Pegasus. He gives her numerous suggestions to refine her diction, and then focuses on interpretation.
“This is a very spooky aria,” he says. “I have to feel the horror. And lean on the notes toward the end …” As she sings again, he sings silently with her, conducting. His energy and passion are extraordinary, contagious. She locks eyes with him, mirrors his gestures, and loses herself in the aria.
Meanwhile, in the city’s elegant, if slightly down-at-heel, 18th century Music Institute a few blocks away, Nico’s wife, Carol, is presiding over a class on drama and the creative process for another group of singers. An accomplished soprano, she now works as a director and drama coach. It is her mission to help opera singers realize the emotional and dramatic arc of what they sing.
On this morning, she has divided participants into small groups and given each the assignment of improvising a mini-opera that tells the story of a fairy tale and includes an aria, a duet, an ensemble number, a recitative, and a dance.
“You have six minutes to come up with it,” she tells them blithely.
Exactly six minutes later, the performances begin. Students enact “Three Little Pigs” several times, followed by a couple of “Little Red Riding Hoods.” The skits are clever, engaging, and often hilarious. After the final ensemble number, joined robustly by the wolf lying dead on the floor, Carol congratulates them.
“Having done this,” she exclaims, “how can you ever again not be confident?”
Afterwards, a participant sums up the contributions of the Castels to the symposium process.
“Nico gives us the connection between the diction and the meaning, the feeling,” says soprano Marianne Matos, “and Carol gives us courage.”
Technique, diction, courage—all are supported and deepened by one of the most unique aspects of the symposium: regular sessions with Italian coaches. Alessandro Benigni and Federico Brunello, experienced pianists and vocal coaches, work with the singers to refine their understanding of Bel Canto tradition. Patrizia Caprelli, a Spoleto native who studied language and teaching at the nearby University of Perugia, offers intensive daily Italian language classes.
American faculty members of the Spoleto Symposium appreciate the chance the symposium offers them to enjoy life, Italian-style.
“It’s different from all the other summer singing programs we’ve done,” says Carol Castel. “They make sure that we have time for ourselves, that we’re not exhausted.”
“This is a program,” affirms Nico, “that respects us as artists—and acknowledges that we are, after all, in Italy. We can really take the riposo!” he adds with a laugh, referring to the sacrosanct Italian custom of a long rest period after lunch.
Participants themselves don’t always get to take an extended riposo, what with coaching sessions, language classes, and individual practice. They work intensely to prepare repertoire for performance in one of several symposium concerts, held in Spoleto’s beautiful, historically resonant theaters—including the 17th century Caio Melisso opera house, where they can experience the thrill of singing in an environment where opera was born. Concerts focus on various aspects of the vocal repertoire: operatic, sacred, and Broadway. Plans for 2006 include an evening of opera scenes.
Still, participants find ample time to experience the delights of Spoleto, which is equal parts cosmopolitan music center and medieval hill town. They can enjoy the specialties of the Umbrian region, with its native olive oil, fresh fruits and vegetables—and most especially the black truffles hiding coyly in the forested countryside.
For the calorie-conscious, a mere walk up and down the steep stone streets of the old city takes care of the latest meal. More ambitious walkers can tour the immense castle that perches atop the town—La Rocca, once a summer home to Lucrezia Borgia—or cross the spectacular Roman aqueduct spanning the gorge east of Spoleto and climb Monteluco, a mountain whose winding trails lead to grottos and caves once inhabited by St. Francis of Assisi. All the while, of course, participants are surrounded by Italians speaking Italian. “We’re literally immersed in the language,” says soprano Kristianna VanOveren.
An added attraction of all the symposia is the Kid’s Camp, open to children of participants as well as citizens of Spoleto. Originally created to provide the Everetts’ son Colin, now 12, with a stimulating multi-cultural environment, the camp has blossomed. Under the supervision of Jenny Flaherty, a young doctoral student in comparative literature, it offers such an array of exciting activities, from white water rafting to day trips to Florence, that adults occasionally declare themselves “honorary kids” and come along for the fun.
In the end, the Everetts’ vision of bringing cultures and artists together is the soul and spirit of the Vocal Arts Symposium. At dinner one night—under the stars in the spectacular, stage-lit Piazza Del Duomo—this spirit was in full force. Michelle Hendricks held forth, singing standards with a trio that included C.J. Everett on the drums. In an inspired moment, Judith Coen joined her on “Summertime.” As the soprano’s rich tones intertwined with Hendricks’ dusky alto—and an operatic rubato bloomed suddenly in the heart of Gershwin’s great jazz ballad—there was a moment of true fusion: jazz with opera, America with Italy, past with present.
Rossini would have loved it.
For information on the Spoleto Vocal Arts Symposium, visit the website www.spoletoarts.com.
