Racette's singing, acting start with passion

By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic

February 25, 2007

Anyone who has seen her Madama Butterfly or Jenufa or any of the other complex women she has portrayed on the operatic stage knows Patricia Racette is far from your average opera singer.

She is a singing actress of a rare order -- a performer who invests herself so completely in the roles she portrays and inhabits them with such musical and dramatic strength that they speak to audiences with startling conviction.

Maria Callas, Renata Scotto and Magda Olivero also had that gift for searching out and projecting emotional truth onstage. Not surprisingly, those are the divas who Racette says most inspire her.

"For me, it's the combination of theater and music that is interesting," said the brisk, outgoing American soprano during a recent conversation backstage at the Civic Opera House, where her sympathetic portrayal of Madame Lidoine, the warmly wise new Prioress in Lyric's premiere staging of Francis Poulenc's "Dialogues des Carmelites" has been drawing ovations.

"Quite honestly," she said, settling back into a chair in her dressing room, "just singing, all by itself, has never interested me. I think I have the most to offer when I have a character that gives me equal levels of vocal and theatrical commitment."

Roles have something in common

The two roles she is performing this season at Lyric -- Liu in Puccini's "Turandot" and the new Prioress in "Carmelites" -- are typical Racette territory: fully dimensional characters whose outward fortitude masks deep vulnerability.

In "Carmelites," Racette plays a devout nun who sacrifices herself to a common fate the Carmelites had always believed in and indeed longed for. Its central figure is Blanche de la Force (soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian), a young Parisian aristocrat at the time of the French Revolution who joins the Carmelite order to escape her fear of the world but joins her sisters in martyrdom in the overwhelmingly poignant final scene.

"I have sung Blanche many times, but this is my first Lidoine," Racette says. "Vocally, the new Prioress suits my more Italianate vocal style, which is what I sing most often.

"Lidoine is a woman of great courage. Unlike Blanche, her struggle is situational, not personal. She is a mother hen who feels responsible for her daughters of the monastery. She accepts the difficulties of the political climate with simplicity and strength. But it's a mistake to play her too confidently -- she's showing strength through absolute terror."

Like the character she portrays onstage, Racette seems absolutely certain of who she is. A smart, articulate vocal artist who knows her worth, she doesn't have to affect the prima donna airs in which less secure performers cloak themselves. No wonder her colleagues are quick to sing her praises.

"Pat is always completely committed to what she's doing," says baritone Nathan Gunn -- appearing as Guglielmo in Lyric's currently running production of Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte" -- with whom she has collaborated on numerous occasions, most notably the world premiere of American composer Tobias Picker's "An American Tragedy" at the Metropolitan Opera in 2005.

"It's really about the communication when she's onstage," Gunn says. "There's no phoning in the performance. She's always engaged and always believes in what she's singing. That's what singers are supposed to do, but it's surprising how often you find people onstage who think only about the vocalism."

Racette's friend Francesca Zambello, who has directed her many times, including productions of "Carmelites" at the Santa Fe and Paris operas, says she respects her colleague for her refusal to operate with a safety net.

Bares soul onstage

"Pat is in that special group of singing actors who are not afraid to bare part of their soul onstage," says the director. "She's very inquisitive, very much a dialogue person when it comes to developing a role. When you find people [like her] who are really capable of digging and creating something in a unique way, you want to work with them as much as possible."

Lyric music director Andrew Davis, who is conducting the company premiere of "Carmelites," agrees. "Pat is incredibly compelling onstage, one of those performers you can't take your eyes off," says the conductor, who has worked with Racette since 2000, when she sang an affecting Jenufa in the Leos Janacek opera, her Lyric debut. "The voice speaks with a lot of passion and intensity. It's a very beautiful sound and she can vary the colors of it so intelligently."

Growing up in the blue-collar mill town of Bedford, N.H., Racette showed an early aptitude for music. She persuaded her parents, who she admits were not musically inclined, to let her take guitar lessons. "I bought a chord book from the music store and started to make up my own songs," she recalls. "I would go to the Hallmark store and read cards to get ideas for songs."

Eventually she went off to study jazz at the University of North Texas at Denton, intending to become a jazz vocalist. As a vocal-performance major, she was introduced to the world of opera and music theater. She found it a revelation. "If I had to choose one moment that really hooked me on opera," Racette recalls, "it was hearing Scotto's recording of the aria `Senza mamma,' from Puccini's `Suor Angelica.' I can remember sitting on the floor of my cheap little college apartment and getting chills up my spine."

After graduation, in 1988, she was accepted into the San Francisco Opera's Merola apprentice program. She spent the next 10 years in San Francisco and considers that city's opera company her artistic home, although she has sung in every other major theater, here and abroad.

The five roles Racette has performed at Lyric Opera suggest how uncommonly wide-ranging her repertory is: everything from French heroines such as Marguerite in Gounod's "Faust" and Micaela in Bizet's "Carmen," to heavier lyric roles like Liu and Lidoine, up through big dramatic parts such as Jenufa.

Her uncommon ability to inhabit a role to the vocal and dramatic hilt has made her the favorite muse of composer Picker, who wrote two of his operatic heroines, the title role in "Emmeline" and the hapless Roberta Alden in "An American Tragedy," expressly for her.

"If I have a niche, it's being niche-less," Racette says. "It's something I'm rather proud of. I'm making more and more choices now that are character-based, within my vocal placement. I don't want to fill my schedule with things that don't take advantage of all I have to offer."

Just as important to her is being able to shove her datebook aside and escape to the tranquility and rugged natural beauty of northern New Mexico's high desert country, just outside Santa Fe, where she and her partner, mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton, make their home.

"Being there just feeds my soul beyond belief," Racette says. "We also maintain an apartment in New York, but this is where our stuff is, and where our hearts are."

Sunrise over mountains

Adorning her dressing room mirror is a photo she took of the sunrise over the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo mountains on one side of their home. She carries the photo with her wherever she travels.

In recent years she and Clayton have spoken openly about their relationship, and Racette clearly wants it known that she and her partner are "a very harmonious couple."

They met in Santa Fe in the summer of 1997 during performances of Verdi's "La Traviata" in which the soprano portrayed Violetta and the mezzo sang the supporting role of Flora Bervoix. "It may have been the only time in opera that Violetta went home with Flora!" Racette jokes.

She says she and Clayton have never tried to separate the professional and personal sides of their lives. "It's not logical or feasible," she says. "We're not secretive; we don't talk around it. We're very happy and very proud.

"Practically speaking, Beth and I study with the same teacher, attend each other's lessons and even sing for one another," Racette says. "So we speak the same technical language. We know how to help one another."

Since their busy professional lives often find them singing on different continents at the same time, being able to keep in more or less daily touch via the Internet has been a godsend. "We have cameras on our laptop computers, which is divine because we can sit there and talk to each other -- we do a lot of that!"

The singer says she tries to give herself enough time between operatic and concert performances for study, reflection and to recharge. The last two seasons, however, she worked 17 months without a break -- capped off with a run of Metropolitan Opera performances in the role of Elisabetta in Verdi's "Don Carlo."

How did she wind up so overbooked?

"I was stupid, greedy, ambitious, oh, yeah!" Racette says with a laugh. "The voice was OK, but I was in bad need of rest. The mind, spirit, heart -- I was exhausted."

Racette took her exhaustion as a warning to pace her professional life more prudently. Following Lyric's final performance of "Carmelites" on March 17, she will give herself the luxury of 10 days' rest before beginning rehearsals for a new production of "Jenufa" at the Washington National Opera.

"You want to be working, but you don't want to be at it six days a week!" the singer says.

After all, even the most dedicated seekers of musical and dramatic truth on the operatic stage know when it is time to say con forza -- "Enough!"

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jvonrhein@tribune.com

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