Sondra Radvanovsky Masterclass at Walter Hall, University of Toronto Faculty of Music. December 1, 2015.
In 2012, I considered myself very lucky to attend soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s Toronto debut at Roy Thomson Hall. Though I had not heard her sing before that, I had enjoyed her relaxed manner as host of the Metropolitan Opera Live HD broadcast of La Fanciulla Del West, including a frank discussion of the surprises that can arise when a horse is part of the cast.
On the occasion of her TSO debut, she brought touching vulnerability to her rendition of The Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin, as the ingénue who puts her infatuation into words she will live to regret. She also carried herself with robust confidence and great enthusiasm when speaking to the audience.
Today I considered myself even luckier to watch Sondra Radvanovsky teach at the Riki Turofsky Master Class in Voice at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Briefly explaining to the audience that she tried to make performers in her master classes feel safe so that she could help them develop their technique in a variety of ways, she got down to work with four young vocalists performing arias by Bellini, Rossini, Mascagni and Massenet.
For each singer, she targeted a vocal technique that could be honed to improve their performance, explaining her reasons for focusing on that issue, illuminating the physical process of the sound production she wanted to enhance, and demonstrating through gesture, performance and hands-on demonstration, where the changes needed to take place. Preparation of the breath, mouth and tongue position and proper distribution of vowel production were three issues she pinpointed.
Radvanovsky’s engagement with the subject matter and the young proteges was so infectious it had me quietly mimicking the facial expressions, mouth and tongue positions and breathing postures in my seat. Singing is a whole-body process, and Radvonosky threw her own body into the instruction without inhibition, putting her hands on the singers’ faces to show them where to feel the breath in their head, and grabbing their hands and placing them on her ribs so they could feel the breath working in a three-dimensional triangle.
Much of the time her hand was placed on a spot on her torso that was above her pubic bone but below her hips, a part of the anatomy referred to as “here”, and occasionally she put her hand on the same spot on the singers’ torsos. Forming instantaneous partnerships with each student, she walked with them, swung their arms, bent over like a monkey beside them, and even crouched at the low-end of the piano and pretended to lift it with one performer to help her get the sense of the posture required for a particular effect. It can’t have been easy for these young women to receive instruction in front of an audience that filled over half of Walter Hall, but Radvanovsky was so warm and supportive that they were able to relax and make changes on the spot.
“People say we’re singers,” she said to the last student. “But we’re really athletes.” Watching Radvanovsky I could see that like an athlete, she works out her lungs, tongue, sinus, teeth, cheeks, vocal chords, diaphragm and virtually everything she’s got to achieve the effect she desires.
The generosity with which Radvanovsky teaches is matched by the generosity of Riki Turofsky, who has sponsored these master classes for nine years and plans to continue.
Sondra Radvanovsky performs at Koerner Hall on Friday, December 4th at 8 p.m. For details see here.
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