‘BEAUTIFUL SOUND’ ISN’T ENOUGH FOR LEBLANC
Winner of the audience choice award in the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio Competition in November, Myriam Leblanc has a soprano voice that travels well.
Montrealers knew this in September when the native of StLazare projected clearly to the back of the barn-like Salle WilfridPelletier as the High Priestess in the Opéra de Montréal production of Verdi’s Aida.
“Just have faith in your technique and don’t push the sound,” is her advice.
Leblanc is more broadly schooled than most singers. She studied violin at Montreal’s Académie de musique Pierre-Laporte, and was admitted to the Camp musical de Lanaudière as a practitioner of this instrument and left as a singer. Mezzo-soprano Marie-Annick Béliveau heard her voice (which Leblanc had hitherto developed in a church choir) and knew instantly where her future lay.
Studies at CEGEP de St-Laurent and McGill followed. Then a period of thinking things over (and work at a hotel) led to a return to academe as a graduate student of choral conducting at the Université de Sherbrooke.
Leblanc credits her friend and colleague Léa Moisan-Perrier with marching her to soprano Yolande Parent for more vocal coaching. Within months, Leblanc had won the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières Competition in 2014. Also in that year, she was named a Jeune Ambassadrice Lyrique and last season was accepted into the Atelier program of the OdM.
Self-classified as a lyric coloratura, Leblanc names Violetta (Verdi’s La Traviata), Lucia (Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor), Juliette (Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette) and Donna Anna (Mozart’s Don Giovanni) as roles suited to her voice, training and temperament.
She will sing Micaëla (Bizet’s Carmen) for the Orchestre symphonique de Longueuil in May and Donna Anna for the Saskatoon Opera the following month. Leblanc plans to apply for the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium and the Montreal International Musical Competition. Acceptance seems likely.
Much as Leblanc loves art song, the opera stage is where she feels most at home, because it allows her “to take risks at all levels.” It is too early to say whether her career will expand beyond Canada, but this soprano is obviously thinking big.
“I have a deep admiration for singers with drive,” Leblanc says. “I think of Maria Callas, and today, Anna Netrebko. The production of sound is not the main criterion for these singers, although the sound is magnificent. They communicate true emotion.
“Beautiful sound, for me, is not a goal in and of itself. Communion with the character is, and everything that character experiences.”
My wish for 2017: At least one concert by the McGill Symphony Orchestra and Alexis Hauser in a facility suited to big repertoire, by which I mean the Maison symphonique. It might take a donor, or a reasonable rental fee. It will pay dividends for students and listeners alike.