US tenor Michael Fabiano says a pared-back Lucia di Lammermoor will fire our imaginations
Star US tenor Michael Fabiano says Opera Australia’s Lucia di Lammermoor will prompt audience members to engage their imaginations.
Arts
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SOME operas are festooned with furbelows and groaning with gimcracks.
But Opera Australia’s production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is “scant”, according to superstar American tenor Michael Fabiano, 34, who will sing the lead male role of Edgardo.
“I’m very much in favour of scant productions. It really showcases the singing,” Fabiano says.
The sets will be dark and simple.
“The public will have to use their imagination,” Fabiano says.
No one can be left in doubt of Fabiano’s opinions. Likeable and friendly, the New Jersey-born singer is confident to a fault and his drive and ambition are obvious.
But Fabiano’s ambition is not just for himself. In 2016 he co-founded ArtSmart, a non-profit organisation that provides weekly singing lessons to “underserved students” aged 11 to 18 in schools.
The program began in Newark, New Jersey, expanding last year to San Francisco and Philadelphia.
New York will be next. The lessons are conducted one-on-one by high-ranking music graduates called mentors. Fabiano himself gives masterclasses when his schedule allows.
No doubt Fabiano imparts the need for swift action to seize opportunities — as he did in 2015 when he stepped into the role of Edgardo at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York with just seven hours’ notice.
A colleague had fallen ill, and Fabiano was asked in the afternoon if he would be available to cover the role. That was surely a stressful occasion?
“It was exhilarating,” Fabiano says.
He had debuted at the Met in 2010. But his 2015 Edgardo, performed so obligingly, won the audience’s heart.
That was the same year Fabiano made his Opera Australia debut in Faust, which won him a Helpmann Award for best male performance in an opera.
He has sung Edgardo at Opera de Paris, Vancouver Opera and at The Met just a month ago.
George Shirley, the first African American tenor to perform a lead role at the Met and who is now very elderly, told an 18-year-old Michael Fabiano that he had a huge vocal talent and it was his obligation to share it with the public.
Fabiano took Shirley seriously. He now has a transcendent international career that takes him to the great opera houses of the world.
Fabiano’s teachers and mentors include the famous American tenor Neil Shicoff, and Jack LiVigni, a Sicilian-born tenor whose grandfather used to walk more than 30km to Palermo to hear the legendary Beniamino Gigli perform.
As for George Shirley, he is still alive and Fabiano is in contact with him regularly.
But the “figurehead” among Fabiano’s mentors is soprano Julia Faulkner.
“She’s known my instrument since close to the beginning,” he says.
Opera Australia: Lucia di Lammermoor, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House; June 28-July 27, adults from $46, sydneyoperahouse.com