AT HOME IN THE RANGE: CONTRALTO AVERY AMEREAU
“THE LOW PARTS OF MY VOICE HAVE ALWAYS FELT THE EASIEST, AND I COULD FIND THE MOST BEAUTY IN THEM. IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT YOU HEAR SOMEBODY WITH SUCH EASE IN THE LOWER PART OF THEIR VOICE.”
Avery Amereau was in the midst of an important day in New York City when Pasatiempo spoke with her by phone in early December. She was looking forward to her upcoming solo appearances with the Santa Fe Pro Musica Baroque Ensemble — but a more immediate concern was her performance that evening at the Metropolitan Opera, where she made her house debut last month as the Solo Madrigalist in Puccini’s Manon
Lescaut. It was her first professional opera production. In a few hours she would walk onstage to sing that role for the seventh and last time this season, having added to her portfolio of glowing reviews and gaining more national attention than one would expect from a twenty-five-year-old singer who is still a student at the Juilliard School.
Even that, however, was not the most momentous matter that Wednesday. “I just talked to my manager today,” she said, “and we’ve decided to rebrand as a contralto. I’ve always known that’s what I am. The low parts of my voice have always felt the easiest, and I could find the most beauty in them. It’s not often that you hear somebody with such ease in the lower part of their voice. I think this color that people are hearing is that I’m an alto. Last night, I did a Messiah at 415” — i.e., Baroque pitch of A=415 Hz, a half-tone lower than modern pitch of A=440 Hz — “so it meant going down to a low F-sharp. It said on the program I was a mezzo-soprano, and it just felt like a lie.”
To a classical singer, committing to a vocal category is an important decision. Whether a female vocalist is a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, or a contralto is a matter of where her range falls on the spectrum of pitch and what notes within her range represent (as Amereau put it) “where the beauty blossoms.” But more subjective issues also enter the equation. “I was advised it might put me in a box, that the term was antiquated, that being identified as a contralto might deny me some opportunities. You get hired to sing Erda” — the deep-voiced Earth Mother in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. “Even roles like Olga [in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin], Lucretia [in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia], and Rosina [in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville] — these were all written for contraltos, but they got taken over by mezzo-sopranos and sopranos. So people wouldn’t automatically consider me for those. But I’m still singing mezzo-soprano roles. In rebranding as a contralto, I didn’t change my voice at all.”
The vocal scene is never heavily populated by contraltos. The Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, the go-to catalog of professional classical musicians available for hire worldwide, may list about 10 contraltos in a given year, compared to more than 500 mezzo-sopranos and 1,000 sopranos. Top contraltos in recent years have included Ewa Podles´ (who is nearing the end of her performing career), Nathalie Stutzmann (who now divides her time between singing and conducting), Anna Larsson, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Younger singers in the contralto ranks include Meredith Arwady and Claudia Huckle. Mention of the contralto voice nonetheless tends to summon up names of earlier eras, legendary ones like Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Sigrid Onegin, Kathleen Ferrier, Marian Anderson, and Dame Clara Butt, of whose trombone-like voice Sir Thomas Beecham purportedly remarked, “On a clear day, you could have heard her across the English Channel.”
“The contralto voice,” Amereau observed, “responds to music where the greatest emotional content is in the lower range. It was said of Kathleen Ferrier that hers was the voice Mahler dreamed about but never heard.” She has found that her voice is very much at home in sacred music, and especially in Baroque repertoire. In the course of her studies at Juilliard she has worked with a number of Baroque specialists who have visited the school, including conductors Masaaki Suzuki and William Christie. She describes the former as “so classic” and the latter as “wild — which is great, because working with different approaches you get the extremes of what you could do.” When she appears in Santa Fe, she will sing an extended and ambitious Psalm setting by Vivaldi,
Nisi Dominus (RV 608) apparently dating from early in that composer’s career. “I love singing Bach and Handel,” she said, “but this is my first Vivaldi. Early music is very healthy for the voice, and I especially love singing at A=415, which casts the music lower. That really suits my voice.” ◀