DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Diana Soviero instructs with more than just her voice. She illustrates and punctuates her points with facial expressions and movement.

Master with class

Opera star Diana Soviero
conducts a white-knuckle
coaching session

---

By Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.com

Let's be frank. In the annals of embarrassment, there are few grislier scenes than the sight of an amiable young tenor or soprano submitting to artistic vivisection at the hands of a diva. You know it as a master class. And while opera's heroes and heroines have endured everything from stabbings to consumption, firing-squad shootings to suicidal leaps from the Castel Sant'Angelo, it's a blessing none of them ever had to go through anything like this.

"Sit where I can attack you," Diana Soviero warned a class of 10 white-knuckled hopefuls at the Hawaii Opera Theatre rehearsal studio Saturday. It's a joke, of course, though the only laughs you hear come from the 20 or so audience members, a cadre united by its love of blood-letting and hair-raising thrills.

DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Diana Soviero pretends to do a prayer after Lydia Knudsen doesn't quite project the way she was supposed to in a vocal exercise.

DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Soviero then watches as Knudsen practices a series of vocal exercises.

DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM She offers positive reinforcement when Knudsen performs perfectly.

Perhaps also they are devoted stargazers. Soviero is certainly one of opera's celestial bodies, her shimmering soprano voice winning acclaim at La Scala, the Met, the Opera Bastille and just about every other stage on Earth. They're still talking about the way she picked petals from a flower as Violetta in "La Traviata." (Or, at least one fanatical Internet fan is. The man, who declines to give his name, says that he travels the world to see La Soviero, for "Diana is magic, and I seek out that magic as often as my finances will allow.")

For the present, that magic is thinly disguised behind a modest black pantsuit and shaded from view by a pair of ordinary spectacles. But its presence is still palpable, that and the singular fear it inspires.

"Whoever wants to be first, please do so," she says, a sweet invitation that's followed by what feels like 10 minutes of dead silence. "Don't all jump at the same time."

Nothing.

"You have one more minute." Again nothing. "Do I have to point?"

For Soviero, there's a moral in every gesture and breath, and the singers' reluctance to step forward provides a convenient launching pad for her pupils' first lesson. Forget what you've heard about opera, she says, all that talk of champagne glasses and air kissing, glittering opening nights and long gloves. The singer's path is brutal and Darwinian ("it's a very demanding lifestyle and you have to know that") and success comes only to those who seize every opportunity. Otherwise, "somebody with more guts than you is going to jump right up" and grab the brass ring.

Now, she says, "Who ... is ... first?"

DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Diana Soviero works with Quinn Kelsey as other voice students watch intently.

Clang go the chairs as Georgine Stark and Mary Chesnut grab their sheet music and storm the stage. Both local singers arrive there in a photo finish, a tie that precipitates a few general threats, a mock cat fight and Chesnut's return to her seat. Stark is clearly pleased to have won this round, but her smile quickly evaporates upon the realization that she must now face Soviero.

"I'm singing 'O Mio Fernando' from Donizetti's 'La Favorite,'" says Stark nervously.

"'La Favorit-a," corrects Soviero. "It's Italian."

The pianist is cued, the aria begins, and Stark tries to conjure up the world of 14th-century Castile, of a palace where she is mistress of a king but loves Ferdinand, who's already renounced the monastery for her love. The song ends to a round of applause, then silence.

"Are you a mezzo?" asks Soviero.

"I am this year," responds Stark quietly.

"This year? What are you doing in 'O Mio Fernando'? You like the water?"

And then, like a master mechanic performing an all-points inspection, Soviero sets about the task of coaxing out Stark's lower register. "Lean forward," she commands, her hands tracing lightly over the singer's abdomen, feeling for the action of the diaphragm.

"Everybody in Hawaii swims, right?" she says, searching for a metaphor to explain what she's looking for. "The diaphragm goes down first, but then bounces up like a diving board."

After several inhalations that don't meet with Soviero's approval ("conductors like fast breaths!" she warns), Stark finally leaps off the diving board, her voice landing in a place where projection is full and the tone is exquisitely rich. The sense is that she will not only be a mezzo today but perhaps tomorrow, too, though not without a significant amount of work. After 10 minutes of diaphragm exercises, a few more minutes of "wa wa wa" vocal exercises ("the Indians -- they never got hoarse -- they did that all day"), Stark is drenched in sweat and desperate for a tissue. In the moment it takes her to get one, Soviero has already grabbed another moral for the class.

"It's hard work, kiddo. Get used to it. Otherwise nobody's going to hear you over 80 guys sawing in the pit."

DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Diana Soviero uses a considerable amount of body english while critiquing and training her students. Quinn Kelsey is being taught the finer points of using his whole body when he sings.

Seemingly grateful to have survived the workout, Stark limps wearily back to her seat, the other students applauding her bravery. Over the next three hours -- in a hot studio with exposed insulation overhead and mottled cinderblock walls surrounding us -- Soviero will use every tool in her alchemical bag to locate the golden voice buried within the architecture of some of Hawaii's best singers. The trip takes her (and us) to soprano Lydia Knudsen's nasal cavity ("that's the Cathedral of Notre Dame," she announces), the inner workings of Chesnut's jawbone, Julius Ahn's artistic imagination and Quinn Kelsey's capacious "O" vowel.

But it's Soviero's digressions that prove most interesting to the nonsinger, as when Kelsey's "O" summons a memory of the great tenor Piero Cappuccilli ("I used to die when I sang next to him because he had Olympic vowels"). Another singer's nerves occasion a homily on acquiring a thick skin.

"When I sang at Parma, I was ready to get a tomato every night," she said, speaking of the Italians' notorious impatience with poor singing. "If you see me, I'm singing with a twitch in Parma -- you've got to be ready for anything."

It's that last piece of advice that most reverberated throughout the studio, a mantra that no doubt bounced off the heads of many and penetrated only a few. But it's out of that combination of grit and preparedness that an opera career is born. A pretty voice simply isn't enough.

"There's no recipe for success," says the diva at one point, the speech somehow avoiding even a whiff of camp. "I never had the greatest instrument, although they say I did. But boy oh boy, nobody did more work when they were a young singer than me." And so, when her break came at the New York City Opera (after the lead became ill, the first understudy broke her leg and the second understudy had vocal trouble), Soviero was ready. The five-year contract she was subsequently offered by the New York City Opera might have seemed like luck to others, but for Soviero, who used to sing in front of her family day after day to rid herself of stage fright, it was simply a case of chance favoring the prepared mind.

Her time with the singers now drawing to a close, it was difficult not to feel a certain amount of pity for this crop of Hawaii hopefuls, each of whom still appeared undaunted by the challenges that lie ahead. At any point along the journey, something as minor as a diaphragm that wouldn't bounce or a tongue mistakenly pressed against the wrong palate could threaten their entire careers.

Then there's the matter of the teeth, the lips, the jaw, the throat and vocal cords all improbably working toward a common goal. And let's not forget such miscellaneous threats as cattle call auditions, egotistical directors and the hazards of over-air-conditioned rooms, which can single-handedly deliver a singer to laryngitis or worse. With all the obstacles facing young singers, you had to wonder whether theirs was a dream better left undreamt.

But then you saw Julius Ahn, nervous yet impassioned, fighting his way through "Amor ti vieta" from Giordano's "Fedora," his character Loris' great love aria to the title character. It's a difficult song, and when he finished Ahn was obviously displeased with his performance. Taking his hand, Soviero was sympathetic. On top of all of opera's other demands, she said, a singer must look into the eyes of someone he hardly knows and hardly cares for and pretend she's the love of his life.

"If you don't like her," she said softly, "think of the most gorgeous creature you've ever seen in your life, and paint a picture. It's called acting." Every "ahh" you utter "has to be like gold dripping from your mouth."

On cue, as ever, the pianist began the aria again, Ahn staring deeply into Soviero's eyes, indeed never taking them off of her, despite his surprise at what he heard. It was the robust sound of a young man ardently, passionately, in love. And at that moment, also on cue, the cinderblock walls and tattered ceiling vanished, replaced by the glittering court of St. Petersburg and the pathetic sight of a pair of young lovers whose romance was doomed.

And Soviero, who must have played Fedora countless times in her youth, and who this day peered through spectacles at a Loris half her age, fell in love yet again for the first time.

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