LIBRETTO WINTER 2024 | ISSUE 158
LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR Q&A
For the Soprano Ashley Milanese, the Best Way to Learn is by Doing INTERVIEW BY MARINA HARSS
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his winter, in her first appearance in Sarasota, the soprano Ashley Milanese took on the role of Lucia in Gaetano Donizetti’s drama Lucia di Lammermoor. It is a notoriously taxing role, vocally and dramatically, requiring both strong bel canto technique, but also the intensity and stamina to pull off a twenty-minute mad scene worthy of the great stage actresses of legend. For Milanese, who performed in Sarasota for the first time, it was the latest challenge in what is already a burgeoning career. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, she has sung with Opera Philadelphia, Komische Oper Berlin, and was an artistin-residence at the Teatro Regio di Torino before and during the pandemic. Soon after her début as Lucia in Sarasota, she will be tackling another role she has long aspired to, Mimi in La bohème, at Opera in the Heights in Houston. I recently caught up with Ashley at home in New Orleans, to which she recently returned after living in Europe for four years. How did you prepare to sing Lucia? What were the challenges? It is a very substantial role; she’s there almost the entire time. And all of her singing is pretty demanding. She sits in the passaggio [the transition between lower and higher vocal registers] quite a bit and then she extends upward sometimes. And there’s quite a bit in the lower register. Many singers add in a lot of high notes. One of the things that I’m still wrapping my head around is the fact that the role is so iconic. I didn’t want to disappoint the audience.
SARASOTA OPERA | LIBRETTO
Do you have a favorite version that you go back to? That’s a difficult question. Someone I listen to a lot is Renata Scotto. How did you figure out your approach to singing the mad scene? I watched every single person who’s ever done that scene to figure out what makes each one different, and what people tend to do the same way. There are so many performance practices that are actually not written in the score, not only the cadenzas but also timing, slowing the tempo down or going twice as fast at random moments. It’s almost this secret code that every Lucia is supposed to know. That has been really fascinating. And I tried to sing it a million times. I tried to sing through the whole show at least twice a week with a pianist. And how about dramatically? My experience so far is that I learn a lot about the character in rehearsals. The director will give me ideas, and it all starts to become more clear. But I’ve playing with it on my own as well and seeing what I want to do dramatically. I have to work out the pacing because it’s a twenty-minute scene and if it’s too generic, it gets boring really fast. So I’ve been trying to map out places where I want to hold back a little so I can give more later. It’s better when the audience doesn’t get everything right away. How did you get started in opera? It all started when I was 11 or 12, almost accidentally. I was always performing and putting shows for my family. Then I went to a school that held a Christmas concert every year, and I told the music teacher that I had heard an excerpt of the Queen of the Night
aria from The Magic Flute. And I said, “yeah, I could probably sing along with that.” And he laughed. So I started singing, and he couldn’t believe it. He said I sounded like an opera singer. So he put me in the Christmas concert and gave me a big solo. My parents and a bunch of people came. It was like an out of body experience, for me and for everyone. No-one could quite understand what had just happened. And from that moment, opera is the thing I have to do with my life. Where did you train? I went to an arts high school here in New Orleans with a small opera program, and studied with the soprano Phyllis Treigle, and then, right after high school, I went to Juilliard. For my last year, I transferred to Curtis in Philadelphia, because it’s really small and you have a sponsor supporting all of your studies. The main difference for me was that Curtis had a motto of “learn by doing,” and I was looking for that kind of experience. CONTINUED ON PAGE 5
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