Jessica Pratt, Lucia di Lammermoor, Victorian Opera, Joan Sutherland
An Aussie coloratura in the vein of Joan Sutherland is ensuring Italian opera works are being brought back into circulation.
Australian singer Jessica Pratt has been living in Italy for more than a decade, and her life sounds perfectly la dolce vita. She’s having a stellar career as a coloratura soprano, singing the melodious and vocally acrobatic operas of the bel canto repertoire in Italy’s major houses and around the world.
When not on tour, she has an idyllic home life with her husband-to-be, Riccardo, and their blended family of rescue dogs and cats. They live on an olive farm in Fiesole just outside Florence, and they’ll be getting married in the garden there in August.
When we speak, Pratt is in New York for performances of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera, and happens to mention that she picked up her wedding dress that morning. The mental associations come rushing in: a soprano, a wedding, Lucia di Lammermoor, and the blood-drenched white gown after Lucia has stabbed her husband on their wedding night.
Pratt knows where this is heading and a gale of laughter comes down the line. A wedding-day splatter movie playing out in the olive groves of Fiesole is pretty unlikely, but the groom isn’t taking any chances. “Riccardo says he’s going to get rid of all the knives,” she says.
Luciais more than just another role in Pratt’s repertoire: it has been the making of her career. When she made her professional debut in Italy in 2007, it wasn’t in a comprimario or supporting role but as composer Gaetano Donizetti’s deliriously tuneful and dangerously unhinged bride. In the past decade she has taken Lucia around the world, from Lima to Tel Aviv and to Italian opera’s spiritual home, La Scala in Milan.
Pratt has appeared several times in Melbourne with Victorian Opera, including as Lucia, but has not yet sung with the national company. Later this month, she’ll make her belated debut with Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House — in Lucia di Lammermoor, of course. Taking the stage at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, and in La Stupenda’s most celebrated role, doesn’t faze her in the least. Pratt is her own person, her own singer.
“I find Joan a huge inspiration, she is definitely one of my biggest role models,” Pratt says. But there’s a difference between admiring someone and wanting to be them.
“It would be pointless trying to be somebody else. I don’t listen to other singers when I’m working on a role, because I don’t want to take their interpretations in subconsciously. I can’t say that I’ve listened to (Sutherland’s) Lucia obsessively.”
Not that Pratt has ignored other famous exponents of the role. The original Lucia was Italian singer Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, who sang at the opera’s 1835 premiere in Naples. Donizetti seems to have regarded her indifferently at audition (“Rather cold, but quite accurate and perfectly in tune,” he decided), but he went on to write three operas for her and she sang in revivals of others. She was noted for her effortless top notes, and Pratt observes that Persiani’s tessitura, or vocal range, closely resembles her own.
“There are certain singers of the past who I tend to avoid, because they have a different voice to mine, but with other singers I find their works suit me very well, and she’s one of them,” she says. “They said she had a very easy high voice: she could sing a high F, and it was nothing … Every time I’ve sung an opera written for her, it feels like I’ve been singing it for years, the first time I sing it.”
Pratt has found her calling in the romantic Italian operas of the early 19th century, but it could have turned out very differently. She knew since she was a girl that she wanted to be a singer, but her father, Phil Pratt, a former opera singer turned music teacher, urged her to study an instrument first, while her body was still growing. She studied the trumpet, played in student orchestras and learned the breath control essential for brass instruments — and, of course, for singing. When she finally started singing lessons in her late teens, she thought her future would be as a Wagnerian dramatic soprano. In an alternative universe, this Lucia could have been a Brunnhilde or Isolde.
Pratt’s bel canto conversion happened in Rome. She was a young artist at the Rome Opera, where conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti had taken her under his wing. One evening she saw him conducting Rossini’s Tancredi with singers Daniela Barcellona and Mariella Devia and her world changed. She loved the beautiful melodies and the elaboration of vocal lines with which characters reveal themselves and their feelings.
She took classes with sopranos Renata Scotto and Lella Cuberli, and several years went by doing auditions and competitions. Then in she made her professional debut at the Teatro Sociale in Como. The opera was Lucia di Lammermoor.
Pratt has now sung the role about 100 times, in 27 different productions around the world. At the Met in April she shared performances with South African soprano Pretty Yende, in Mary Zimmerman’s production set in the Victorian era. “It’s a role I sing very often, at least two or three times a year,” she says. “It’s just been very comfortable for me, like coming home. It’s a very good feeling when I sing Lucia, and I miss it if six months go by and I don’t sing it.”
During the past decade, her interpretation has been shaped by conductors and directors, and by her interaction with other singers, especially the tenor who sings Edgardo. The story, based on Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, is set in baronial Scotland on the misty Lammermuir Hills where Lucia’s family, the Ashtons, bear a grudge with rival clan the Ravenswoods. The Ashtons plan to marry Lucia to Arturo, but the girl is secretly betrothed to Edgardo, scion of the hated Ravenswoods.
Within that family feud scenario, Donizetti gives the singers scope to bring the characters to life through song. Pratt says Lucia can be portrayed as a shy girl caught in family machinations beyond her control, or as a furious bride driven to desperate action. Tricked into believing that Edgardo has abandoned her, Lucia marries Arturo under duress — and stabs him in their wedding chamber. In the famous mad scene that follows, Lucia appears before the wedding guests in her bloodied gown. She thinks she can hear Edgardo’s voice, and the celestial harmonies of their dreamt-of wedding day. Her distracted yearnings, terror and madness are all written in Donizetti’s music, with Lucia’s voice mirrored by a spectral flute or, in some performances, by glass harmonica.
“Very often Donizetti will use octave jumps when he’s trying to delineate emotional distress and madness,” says Pratt, who then proceeds to give a demonstration on the phone. “Il fantasma, il fantasma ,” she sings, in the chilling downward phrases of a woman who has seen a ghost.
“All the coloratura he wrote is very indicative of her state of mind,” she continues. “He’ll have these really slow lyric passages, and then suddenly a quick passage, and back to a slow passage. They are essential to the drama and with this particular role I think it’s all very clear, as long as you sing what he wrote.”
Opera Australia’s production is the one first seen in 2012 with another wonderful coloratura soprano, Emma Matthews. Scottish director John Doyle has updated the action from the late 17th-century setting of The Bride of Lammermoor to the early romantic period, contemporaneous with Scott and Donizetti, and with the vogue for gothic horror. In this revival, Pratt’s Lucia will be joined by exciting American tenor Michael Fabiano, who recently appeared with OA in Faust.
Pratt says she rehearses her roles thoroughly so there is no inkling of vocal nerves or caution when she goes on stage. The singing, and especially the high-flying coloratura, should seem to spring from the character and not be a self-conscious showpiece for soprano.
“I think part of the problem is that we see sopranos on stage, and you see them preparing, dropping out of character so that they can get the notes perfectly,” she says. “The important thing for me has been to make sure that technically I’m proficient off the stage. I prepare myself at 120 per cent, so when I’m on stage, all I have to think about is the character, and I don’t have to think about preparing a coloratura phrase, or doing a big jump, or a high note — it just comes out.”
She has greater confidence now, too, than at the beginning of her career. Her ideas about ornamentation have changed, and she is more secure in the midsection of her range.
“I have more confidence in areas of my voice that I had no grip on when I was younger because they simply weren’t developed, because with age the voice changes and grows,” she says. “The centre of my voice was quite weak at the beginning of my career, which is quite normal for a coloratura soprano, and now it’s come out on its own — so I feel so much more comfortable in the central areas of the voice, I don’t have to avoid them.”
While Lucia is Pratt’s calling card, she is working her way through other corners of the repertoire, from Donizetti’s comedies La fille du regiment and Don Pasquale, through to revivals of lesser-known works by Rossini. In September, she’ll appear with Victorian Opera in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and Montagues, in this operatic treatment of Romeo and Juliet), bringing to a conclusion conductor Richard Mills’s Bellini-in-concert series. The innovative Melbourne company has given Australian audiences the most exposure yet to Pratt’s talents, first in La Traviata, then in the bel canto favourites I Puritani, Lucia di Lammermoor and La Sonnambula.
“It’s strange for me, I’m so used to the world where these are the popular operas,” she says. “I remember I once sang Lucia in Amsterdam, and they said: ‘We would love to have you back but we only do bel canto every three years.’
“Are you kidding me? For Italian audiences it’s lovely to sing this repertoire because they are so passionate about it.”
Next year, in Bremen, Pratt is due to appear in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, singing all four soprano parts — a feat undertaken by few sopranos, Sutherland among them. “I’m going to give it a go,” she says. Fans will be waiting to see Pratt in Bellini’s Norma, one of the summits of the bel canto repertoire. She has previously sung the opera in concert, but for now has no staged productions in her schedule.
And she is not finished with Donizetti. The composer who wrote about 70 operas left a wealth of repertoire for intrepid singers. The Donizetti Opera Festival in Bergamo in northern Italy — where the composer was born and where he returned to die, frail and losing his mind from syphilis — has specialised in revivals of his work. Pratt is the festival’s ambassador this year and will appear as Elisabetta (Elizabeth I) in Il castello di Kenilworth, the first of Donizetti’s operatic forays into Tudor history.
These works come into circulation when there are singers to do them justice — a Sutherland or a Maria Callas. In Pratt, the world may have discovered another gifted interpreter of these glorious works of Italian opera.
Lucia di Lammermoor plays at the Sydney Opera House from June 28-July 27. The Capulets and the Montagues is at Hamer Hall on September 14.
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