Gianna Rolandi, spirited soprano with a radiant voice, dies at age 68

Gianna Rolandi, an American soprano who brought effortless coloratura technique, bright sound and a vibrant stage presence to diverse roles over a 20-year international career, died Sunday in Chicago. She was 68.

Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Rolandi earlier had been the director of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, a training program. No cause was specified.

Her husband was the renowned British conductor Andrew Davis, who will step down Wednesday after nearly 21 years as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera.

Rolandi’s auspicious 1975 debut at the New York City Opera, as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” came when she was 23 and

just out of the conservatory. She took over the role on short notice when the scheduled soprano withdrew. (Three days later, she made what was to have been her official debut, as Zerbinetta in Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)

She quickly won attention for the agility and radiance of her singing — and for, when it was called for, a beguiling sassiness. Beverly Sills, City Opera’s greatest star, became a crucial mentor to Rolandi in the 1980s, when Sills retired from singing to become the company’s general director.

Along with career guidance, Sills gave Rolandi insight into roles she herself had performed to acclaim, among them the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.”

Reviewing her feisty performance as Zerbinetta with the company in 1982, The New York Times’ Donal Henahan wrote that “in Gianna Rolandi the City Opera had a Zerbinetta capable of creating pandemonium in any opera house anywhere.”

Her “deft and virtually unflawed handing of her big, florid aria, one of opera’s most feared obstacle courses for coloratura soprano,” he added, “brought the performance to a halt for as extended an ovation as this reviewer has heard at either of our opera houses this season.”

Rolandi starred in two notable “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts of City Opera productions: “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1982, and, the next year, the title role in Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” an enchanting folk-tale opera centering on a community of forest animals and a few humans.

“The Cunning Little Vixen” was largely unfamiliar to American audiences when City Opera introduced its colorful production in 1981. It was performed in an English translation of the Czech libretto, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and directed by Frank Corsaro, with sets and costumes realized from designs by Maurice Sendak.

Rolandi was cast as the bushy-tailed, impish Vixen. It was “one of Ms. Rolandi’s finest roles to date,” the critic Thor Eckert Jr. wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that she acted “with feline grace and an occasional touch of crudity just right for the role.”

Her Metropolitan Opera debut came as Sophie in Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1979. But despite some acclaimed performances at that house, including the title role of the Nightingale in Stravinsky’s “Le Rossignol” in 1984 and Zerbinetta in 1984-85 (with Jessye Norman as Ariadne), she made just 17 appearances with the Met over six years.

Even while appearing with major houses in America and Europe, Rolandi was content to call City Opera her base.

“I feel like I’ve grown up here,” she said in a 1982 interview with The Times. The company “is a blessing for me,” she added. “You get exposure and you don’t have to leave home.”

Carol Gianna Rolandi was born Aug. 16, 1952, in New York City. Her mother, Jane Frazier, from WinstonSalem, North Carolina, was a successful soprano who met Dr. Enrico Rolandi, an Italian obstetrician and gynecologist, while performing in Italy.

They married and settled in New York.

In 1955, when Rolandi was not yet 3, her father died in an automobile accident. Her mother moved with her and her brother, Walter, to the South, began teaching, and had a 30-year career as a professor of voice at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where Rolandi grew up.