Angela Meade's Met debut

Birth of a diva:
Backstage at the met with Angela Meade

STEVE COHEN

It is 18 minutes after eight on Friday, March 21, and an audience of 3,500 sits in the Metropolitan Opera awaiting one of the most difficult of all soprano arias. About to sing it is a substitute artist: a young woman making her Met debut with one day’s notice.

She is Angela Meade, a third-year student at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, who was hired as a "cover" for the main soprano role in Verdi’s Ernani. Her job requires her to be ready to sing and geographically within 20 minutes of the Met on performance days. The woman she understudies, Sondra Radvanovsky, became ill on Thursday, and the Met management told Meade she’d be going on as the leading lady.

Meade travels from her home in the Art Museum neighborhood on Friday morning as her parents fly in from their home in Seattle. Last-minute flight bookings like this are expensive, but Angela tells them the tickets are her treat. Other friends from Philly arrive by train for the performance.

That afternoon Meade vocalizes with her AVA coach, Bill Schuman. At 6 p.m. she meets with conductor Roberto Abbado, who had never heard her sing, to go over tempi. Then she tries on her four elaborate costumes. Around 7 the stage director, Peter McClintock, walks Meade around the Met stage for the first time, giving her instructions.

Meade had rehearsed her part for two weeks with other covers, with an alternate conductor at the piano. They practiced stage movements, but only with each other and in a large room rather than on the stage. She never met any of the production’s principal singers until Friday evening.

Much has been written elsewhere about the change from the bad old days when opera singers walked onto stages they’d never seen before to interact with casts they’d never met before. Such things supposedly never happen any more. But clearly they do.

Giddy anticipation

Verdi’s rarely heard youthful opera returned to the Met for the first time since 1985. Ernani’s first scene is for the male singers. Then Meade must make her entrance with the trickiest aria in the whole opera, "Ernani! Ernani, involami," a showpiece that was famously sung by great figures like Rosa Ponselle, Zinka Milanov, and Leontyne Price (not to mention Carol Vaness at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Muti farewell gala in 1992). The role has a wide range of more than two octaves. Naturally, the audience was apprehensive.

Meade was giddy with anticipation before the show. "I wasn’t nervous at all until just before the curtain opened," she says. "But then I had to sit by myself as the curtains for my scene swished open." Wearing a flowing light blue and gold gown, leaning on a red paisley pillow, Meade is alone on the huge stage as she starts the big aria.

She tosses off the technically daunting passagework and coloratura embellishments with impressive ease and a stunning trill. She shows a bright yet warm sound with a more solid bottom than one normally hears from coloratura singers.

Weight worries

"Hard to believe that she was just last year a National Council Auditions winner, a kid," says Met broadcaster Margaret Juntwait. Meade is not exactly a kid. She didn’t begin singing until past the age of 20, and she turned 30 this year.

Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met, stops at Meade’s dressing room after the first act to tell her she looks fantastic and is singing well. The first part of his comment impresses Meade the most because she has been dealing with weight issues and she knows that Gelb pays attention to the attractiveness of his casts. She says she’s lost 30 pounds this year because she’s been so busy she can’t sit at home snacking.

The melodramatic Ernani features face-off duets and trios, with Meade joining baritone Thomas Hampson and tenor Marcello Giordani. Meade lacks the dark dramatic sound of Zinka Milanov from an illustrious 1956 production, but she does possess a free, clear delivery and more coloratura accuracy than Milanov or Leontyne Price, who sang it in the 1960s. Bear in mind that I’m comparing Meade to the giants in opera history, and Meade comes out creditably. And no one since Price has sung it nearly this well.

Back to Philadelphia

After the opera ends, Meade signs autographs for fans at the stage door, then drives back to Philadelphia with her parents and friends. She’s paid extra for the performance, but not enough to afford Manhattan hotel rooms.

With reviewers from the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer out-of-town for the Easter weekend, the event passed almost like the proverbial tree falling in a forest. But the Associated Press did report: "Angela Meade, a 30-year-old soprano still in vocal school, hadn't sung a single professional performance before her debut Friday night."

Although other AVA alumni have sung lead roles at the Metropolitan, they worked gradually up to that level. None ever did it out of the box like Meade– nor did they do it while still in school. No singer has been introduced in such an exposed role since Astrid Varnay’s debut as a substitute in Die Walkure in 1941. Some other singers, including Placido Domingo in 1968, made premature debuts, but they were already listed on the company roster and were scheduled for later performances. And he had a much more extensive professional resume then than does Meade today.

Meade entered AVA in 2005 and sang many roles in the school’s productions, including Agatha in Der Freischutz and Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte. She will sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs and a Mozart concert aria in April 2009 with the Symphony in C for Astral Artistic Services at the Kimmel Center and will sing Rossini’s Semiramide at the Caramoor Festival in New York tthe summer of 2009.

She’s considering leading roles at European opera houses for next season. No offer yet from Gelb and the Metropolitan. Another performance of Ernani is scheduled for March 26, then an international broadcast of it on Saturday the 29th. Radvanovsky still has flu symptoms and Meade will again be standing by.



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