Sondra Radvanovsky has taken on one of opera’s most grueling roles. “You can’t just act it,” she said. “You really have to live it.”
It was intermission on a recent night at the Metropolitan Opera, and the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky was in her dressing room — eyes closed, head bowed — working to summon distant memories.
Radvanovsky, who sings the title role in Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea,” was thinking of her father, and the day, more than three decades earlier, when she was 17, that she had found him dead after a heart attack at her childhood home in California. As part of her preperformance ritual, she began to recite the feelings coursing through her as she looked back: loss, abandonment, love and hatred.
“He’s here with me,” she said, looking at her father’s driver’s license, which she had placed on a piano, not far from a pouch containing her mother’s ashes.
The moment of reflection was all part of her efforts to channel the pain and despair from her life into “Medea,” a tour-de-force opera in which her character, the vengeful sorceress, commits a series of dark and disturbing acts, including murdering her own children.
“You can’t just act it,” she said. “You really have to live it.”
“Medea,” which opened the Met’s season and will be broadcast to movie theaters around the world on Saturday as part of the company’s Live in HD series, has emerged as a career-defining performance for Radvanovsky, 53, who has won praise for her intense and eerie portrayal.
She has approached the role — one of the most demanding in the repertory — with focus and purpose, adding boxing sessions with a personal trainer to build stamina and strength, and rehearsals with her vocal coach to ensure her singing remains warm and resonant throughout the three-hour opera, during which she rarely has a break.
“Medea” has also proved to be defining on a personal level for Radvanovsky, offering cathartic escape from a trying period in her life: Her mother died in January, and she separated from her husband of 21 years in February.
“It’s been very therapeutic for me,” she said. “The rage, the sadness, the depression, the loneliness — I’m unpacking these emotions and feelings in my own life, and onstage.”
David McVicar, the director of “Medea,” said he felt Radvanovsky had found a way to draw on her pain without being overpowered by it.
“She was able to channel that energy, rather than allowing it to destroy her,” he said. “She was able to turn it into a character, she was able to get it out, to express it, to make some art out of those difficult emotions.”
He added: “Weirdly, playing a role like Medea, I think, has been really healthy for her. It’s cathartic.”
The idea of tackling “Medea” came in 2017, when Radvanovsky sang the title character in the Met’s production of Bellini’s “Norma.” Her vocal coach, Anthony Manoli, suggested she spend some time looking at “Medea,” and she began to notice similarities with “Norma.” She said she thought that it would be a natural next challenge, both emotionally and vocally.
“It’s in the same vein,” she said. “I find it like bel canto on steroids.”
Soon, she was discussing the idea with McVicar, a frequent collaborator, and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.
Gelb said that he had been impressed by Radvanovsky’s mastery of the dramatic Italian repertoire. In addition to “Norma,” she had performed, to wide acclaim, Donizetti’s Tudor operas at the Met in 2016, a bravura feat that Beverly Sills made famous in the 1970s at New York City Opera.
“If any other singer had asked me” about “Medea,” he said, “I would have probably not have responded as positively.”
He added, “My instinct was when she said she wanted to do it that we should do it, knowing that it’s a real tour de force for a singer.”
Even with the Met’s support, Radvanovsky knew she was signing up for one of the biggest challenges of her career.
The opera has a daunting legacy. Maria Callas defined the role of Medea in the 1950s with a series of seminal recordings, and her interpretation still looms large. And it’s a physically exhausting undertaking: Medea does not leave the stage once she enters, about 40 minutes into the first act, then is given subtle high notes, expansive arias and an abundance of passages that demand both nuance and power.
“It is vocally herculean,” Radvanovsky said.
The turmoil in her personal life added to the difficulties. The death of her mother, who had Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, left Radvanovsky depressed and lonely.
“I knew that it was going to be hard,” she said, “but I didn’t know it was going to be almost insurmountable.”
The dissolution of her marriage was also a shock. In the aftermath, she felt uncertain as she began exploring her own independence for the first time in decades. She also underwent a physical transformation, losing about 40 pounds.
As she prepared for the demands of the eight-run performance of “Medea” at the Met, she began personal training sessions with a focus on strengthening her core muscles.
In between boxing and bench-pressing at a downtown Manhattan gym recently, Radvanovsky said she was often exhausted for the entire day after a performance, and noted the bruises on her legs. She must writhe and stalk the stage in an unwieldy dress and sing in a variety of supine positions.
“The singing part has to be second nature,” she said. “The rest of the apparatus is what you really have to focus on. What we do is very athletic.”
On opening night last month, she was intensely focused. In the moments before the performance, she said she decided to “open Pandora’s box” and allow herself to experience the trauma of her life more deeply. It was the first time in her career that she could not recall anything about the performance aside from her entrance and exit.
“I really felt I was Medea,” she said. “I didn’t see an audience. I just saw the people onstage.”
Critics applauded her energy and intensity, some commenting that she seemed unfazed by the demands of the role.
“Giving her all in a writhing, high-note-hurling take on the spurned sorceress of Greek myth, pacing herself cannily and commanding at full cry, Radvanovsky would have deserved credit simply for showing up and taking on one of opera’s most daunting vocal and dramatic challenges,” Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music critic, wrote in a review.
Her recent success has led to talk of future engagements at the Met. Gelb said he and Radvanovsky were discussing several possibilities, including three operas by Puccini — “Turandot,” “La Fanciulla del West” and a return to “Tosca” — as well as Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.”
In her dressing room after a recent performance, Radvanovsky was energetic, standing at a sink as she used shaving cream to wash fake blood off her hands. She said she felt uplifted knowing that her performance had resonated with thousands of people.
“It’s such an emotional role, and it’s an emotional time for me,” she said. “I feel a sense of relief.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
