Vivica Genaux set for Vivaldi at Brisbane Baroque festival

Vivica Genaux, one of the world’s leading mezzosopranos, had no time for opera as a kid in Alaska.

Vivica Genaux ‘has built an extraordinary repertoire of baroque and bel canto music’. Picture: Nicola Dal Maso

For a girl raised in Alaska, traditional gender stereotypes tended to be trumped by practicality. Jewellery, make-up and flashy clothing are much less important than staying warm or, say, learning how to quickly change a car tyre during a nine-month winter. It’s a harsh environment that demands self-reliance and resilience from its inhabitants. So it was for Vivica Genaux, one of the world’s leading mezzosopranos, who spent her first 17 years living in a log cabin in a valley outside the town of Fairbanks.

Today home to a metro population of 97,000, Fairbanks is commonly known as America’s coldest city, where temperatures sometimes drop below minus 50C. “Growing up in Alaska, you had to be useful and functional, more than masculine or feminine,” she says. “You had to be strong and capable of confronting difficult environmental situations.” Old habits die hard: despite a successful and acclaimed career in the performing arts, Genaux still prides herself on an ability to solve problems and fix things — “Duct tape is a big thing in Alaska!” — and carrying a Swiss Army knife everywhere, just in case. Except when carrying luggage on to an aircraft, of course.

Her home-town climate meant the young girl had to become comfortable with spending most of her time indoors, encased within the warmth of four walls. Genaux was drawn to artistic expression from a young age: she experimented with dance, pottery, stained glass-making, ballet, orchestra and jazz choir. Big band practice was scheduled before school. While some of her friends missed class for days on end due to being snowed in, Genaux’s mother taught high-school English and foreign languages, so absenteeism was never an option. “My mum had to be at school at 7am anyway, so I might as well do something,” she recalls with a laugh. “I’d get up at six o’clock, and there was Orion — which has always been my favourite constellation — smack-dab in front of me as I walked out into the 40-below.”

One art form that didn’t take with the young performer was opera. She was no stranger to classical music; she played violin for nine years in the school orchestra, and her father — a biochemistry professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — would listen to symphonies as he graded papers. Opera was where she drew the line, though: Genaux’s vacuuming duties not-so-coincidentally overlapped with her mother tuning into Met Opera broadcasts. “I hated it!” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t know anything about opera. I always completely avoided it when I was growing up. But when I started singing, I learned that it was so much fun as a form of expression. I just loved it. There was an opportunity for expressing anything, and as a nervous, timid, shy girl, I found that I could really get my guts into it.”

Call it fate or fortune but the music worked its way into Genaux’s heart, and this happy pairing has been humanity’s gain. She studied at Indiana University, where she received a bachelors degree in vocal performance, before spending five summers in Italy with the Ezio Pinza Council for American Singers of Opera. Her career as a recording and performing artist began at age 24, and more than two decades later, this voice from the cold has built an extraordinary repertoire of baroque and bel canto music. She has inspired words such as these from The New York Times in 2006: “Her voice is as striking as her looks: less striking, even, for the light, free upper notes or rich chocolatey lower ones than for the runs of coloratura that she releases with jackhammer speed, gunfire precision and the limpid continuity of spring raindrops.”

This month, the American will star in a single Sunday night show as part of the second Brisbane Baroque festival, where she will be performing some of Vivaldi’s most exuberant arias and a selection from his set of 12 concertos known as La Stravaganza. Her reputation as a scintillating live performer precedes her. “She’s one of the world’s leading baroque mezzosopranos,” says festival artistic director Leo Schofield. “Mention her name to people who are into ­baroque music and they recognise it ­immediately.”

The one-off Viva! Vivica + Vivaldi gala concert at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre will pair Genaux with the Camerata of St John’s, a local 18-piece chamber orchestra that last year accompanied the Austrian countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic at the inaugural Brisbane Baroque festival. “I’m so excited, because Vivica is absolutely the real deal and Vivaldi arias are some of the most exciting pieces of music on earth,” says Brendan Joyce, Camerata orchestra leader and violinist. “She’s an astounding talent with incredible stage presence. I think the place is going to go wild when they hear her. She’s got incredible virtuosity, and her vocal ability is second to none.”

When Review connects with Genaux via Skype in mid-March, she is in Madrid, preparing for five performances of El Imposible Mayor En Amor, Le Vence Amor by Spanish composer Sebastian Duron. Double-billed alongside another Duron opera, each evening was running for about four hours. “A true baroque experience!” is how she describes the Madrid show. A dress rehearsal took place the night before, and the mezzosoprano readily admits to feeling nervous. Genaux, 46, was stationed in the Spanish capital for weeks before opening night. “It’s been cut down into quite a manageable piece, with fairly easy singing,” she says. “My main thing is programming my brain what to expect.”

Ideally, the multilingual singer will have learned her parts so well that she can devote most of her concentration to the performance. She likes to allow about 15 per cent of her brain to dealing with unexpected events — accidentally setting the stage on fire, for instance. With a laugh, she recalls making her debut at the Met in New York City in 1997, at the age of 28. While performing as Rosina in The Barber of Seville, her character was required to light a candle in the second act. Having grown up in a log cabin, where open flames were strictly forbidden, this was a bigger ask than you might expect. “I hadn’t lit that many candles before. I thought I blew out the match and threw it across — but it wasn’t quite out, so I ran around the stage and stomped it out!” she says. “I’m surprised they ever asked me back again. There will be none of that in Brisbane.”

After Madrid, Genaux has a benefit concert in Italy — she is based in Venice with her husband, Massimo Patella, when not touring — and then a 10-day break ahead of the Brisbane Baroque performance, though not all of that time will be devoted to rehearsal with the Camerata of St John’s. “We’ve got very little time to prepare — about a day and a half with Vivica herself, if that,” says Brendan Joyce. “That’s not so unusual in these scenarios, where we have to come incredibly well prepared, and so does she. You hope that the chemistry will be right, and that you can put it together very quickly. But I think that’s where Leo [Schofield] has a good feel for these things. He has a sense that it’s going to work. We’ll be fine,” says the orchestra leader and violinist. “She’s sung a heck of a lot of Vivaldi.”

It was while performing on stage that Genaux says some of the traditional characteristics of gender became apparent. “I never really knew how to use my feminine side; that was never something that was really useful in Alaska,” she says. “So being on stage, I was able to learn the more stereotypical traits and tools of getting what you want, or of interacting with people as a female, rather than as a more neutral, functional being.” She pauses, then places emphasis on the next word. “Capable. My dad always thought that beauty and femininity meant that you were not useful, not functional, not intellectual — not capable. So for me, that functional capability was always the strong part. But to find out that the two did not mutually exclude one another was one of the biggest awakenings of my life.”

As a mezzosoprano, Genaux found herself regularly playing the parts of men: the so-called trouser roles where the singer dresses and performs as a male character. “I really found my niche when I started singing the baroque repertoire,” she says. “In that period, what was considered the most beautiful voice was the castrati, who had a range which is similar to mine — about 2½ octaves. They still had the stronger quality of voice in the lower register, and a very feminine quality in the top. If they were young and had fine features, they played as women, too.”

All singing requires physical fitness, but for Genaux an understanding of the human body has become crucial to her craft, too. She is fascinated by the way magician David Blaine speaks about learning to control his breathing and heart rate for some of his more demanding performances as she sees a clear correlation with the musical world she inhabits.

“Physically, the castrati developed enormous thoracic cavities: if you see any drawings of them from that time, they’re often very large men with a very big, barrel chest, so they had incredible breathing capacity,” she says. “But that said, for the sopranos — the women in that time period — the music is basically identical in terms of having very long phrases.”

Both roles, then, require a development of the diaphragm and abdominal cavity, as well as carefully expelling air from the lungs under pressure over as long a period of time as possible. “It’s like swimming, or any activity that involves breath control,” she says. “We don’t have the Kenny G capacity of doing circular breathing; for singing, that’s not possible.”

Nowadays, Genaux can easily switch off from studying, rehearsing and performing, which allows her to draw a clear line between her career and her private life. “I don’t live it,” she says of her art. “I don’t hang out with that many singers. I can turn it off and on.” When performing opera, she still needs to find something in her character that she can identify with, but she no longer immerses herself in the psychology of a role.

“For lot of people who don’t have that safety fuse, they end up having to live that character 24/7,” she says. “There are some characters that are really dangerous to have to live with constantly. I choose happiness over method, or over embedding. It’s hard to have people around you when you are dedicating that much mental concentration. So I have both options: if I’m on my own for a month, like I am at the moment, then I do embed. If I have my husband with me, it’s tough.”

After Brisbane Baroque, the singer has elected to stay in the same longitude ahead of engagements in Thailand and China in early May, where she will perform concerts centred on Handel and Vivaldi.

Despite the regular travel and the physical demands of her work, Genaux insists that her natural state is that of a house cat. “I’m really happy inside, on the couch, or in bed,” she says. A soprano colleague gave her a nickname to that effect some time ago: “She said, ‘You’re not a person, you’re a larva!’ ” Genaux recalls, laughing. “It’s also kind of true, because I come out of my larval stage by becoming a beautiful butterfly on stage, then go back to being a larva afterwards.”

By now, she has been speaking with Review for an hour, and notes that she should give her voice a rest ahead of her performance that night

For Genaux, speaking with journalists appears to be a pleasant rarity rather than a regular fact of life. To that end, she doesn’t envy her colleagues in pop music. “I can’t imagine doing eight shows a week with choreography, where they’re moving a lot, and it’s so based on physical appearance,” she says. “We get a little bit of a pass on that. They’re expected to do a lot more press than we do. We have more of a mantle of respect and privacy; we don’t have that constant crush that stars do in the pop world, which is really nice. I don’t know how I’d deal with that.”

When she first discovered opera, the girl from Alaska saw it as an opportunity to express herself and overcome her shyness. The timid, unsure Vivica Genaux has been replaced by a woman who no longer needs to project a false sense of confidence on stage. Instead, she lives it.

“I’ve learned so much by being on stage, and having the freedom of a variety of reactions available to me,” she says. “A lot of that was through male roles early on, and then through stronger female characters as well. So it’s not a matter of my intentionally exuding confidence. I really like who I am right now. I feel like, when I go on stage, I have a hundred per cent opportunity of being me. And I love that.”

Viva! Vivica + Vivaldi will be performed as part of Brisbane Baroque on Sunday, April 10, at the QPAC Concert Hall, South Brisbane. brisbanebaroque.com.au