From truck-driving and wrestling to singing Tosca
British opera is in for a surprise with the arrival of exotic Puerto Rican soprano Scheherazade Pesante. Adam Sweeting meets her
The Barbican complex in the City of London is an austere concrete labyrinth of tower blocks, underground car parks and elevated walkways – the last place you’d expect to find exotic Puerto Rican soprano Scheherazade Pesante.
Brash, buxom and ruby-lipped, a pair of large, grey eyes gazing out from beneath a cascade of vermilion curls, she’s like a thicket of brilliantly-coloured rainforest that has mysteriously erupted in cool, grey northern Europe.
“Would you like a tour?” she purrs in the doorway of her Barbican flat, especially keen to point out a cross-shaped construction on the wall that features an effigy of herself, complete with nipple-rings, a corset and her very own pubic hair.
We have met to discuss her forthcoming appearance as Tosca in a new production of Puccini’s epic of lust and murder by Opera UK – a new professional opera company that uses singers and musicians rapidly building up their reputations. The performances will be staged next month, at Christ’s Hospital Theatre in Horsham and Questors Theatre, Ealing.
“I adore Tosca,” says Pesante, fluttering her eyelashes like tiny hummingbirds. “Especially the fact that she would kill for love. She’s a very complex character. She has this love in her life, Cavaradossi, but then there’s also this man who repels yet attracts her, which is Scarpia. Scarpia thinks he loves her, but his desire turns into something dark and ugly.”
Now in her mid-thirties, Pesante (pictured, right) approached opera back to front. Last year, she sang Carmen for the semi-professional AAC opera. She is about to start her fourth year of vocal studies at the Guildhall School of Music (conveniently situated next door to her flat), and harbours a yearning to sing Violetta in La Traviata.
Before this, however, she spent a couple of riotous decades in cabaret and fringe theatre in New York, interspersed with bouts as a female wrestler, an artist’s model and a part- time truck driver delivering Heinz ketchup.
Not unlike her namesake in the ancient Persian legend of Scheherazade, who spun 1,001 exotic tales to dissuade the bloodthirsty Sultan Shahriah from executing her as he had done all his other wives, she is never more than a few seconds away
from another outrageous
anecdote.
For instance, there’s the one
about how she used to own an
ancient coffee plantation in
her native Puerto Rico,
where the grateful
descendants of former slave
workers would emerge
from the undergrowth to
award her sacks of fruit and vegetables in her role as matriarch and landowner.
She also likes to flash back to her days in New York, when she appeared in a musical called Saturday the 14th (“It was really turgid”). Police raided the theatre every Monday night because the company performed in the nude.
rior to plunging headlong
into opera, Pesante amassed
plenty of performing experience as a crooner and cabaret singer, including regular appearances with the Operatic Cabaret ensemble in salons and cruise ships.
Not for her the suffocating conservatoire disciplines undergone by conventional divas
Psuch as Dame Kiri or Angela Gheorghiu. But surely she faced daunting technical problems in her move from cartoon-like lounge entertainer to opera singer?
“Well, it hasn’t been that much of a leap, because I’ve done it over a few years,” she says. “I wasn’t just singing jazz yesterday. I also croon, and you could hear the opera in my voice from the crooning. At the Guildhall, they’ve taken it further; it’s just wonderful what my voice does now.”
The operatic world can’t imagine what’s in store for it. Opera UK perform ‘Tosca’ at Questors Theatre, London W5 ( 020 8567 5184), on Oct 12 and 15; then at Christ’s Hospital Theatre ( 01403 247434) on Oct 19, 21, 22, 24, 26 and 28.