Perhaps it’s a bit ironic that even though opera productions have yet to resume in any significant way just yet, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard is suddenly more visible than ever.
She just made her directorial debut with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Close Quarters series episode #12 (Beyond the Horizon – available for streaming here).
This Saturday she will join fellow opera singers Ailyn Pérez and Nadine Sierra in a streaming concert live from the Royal Opera of Versailles in France as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s Met Stars Live in Concert series. All three performed together in the 2017-2018 Met Opera production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
In June she stars in Desert In which was created for her by director James Darrah, composer Ellen Reid and writer Christopher Oscar Peña and includes compositions by Reid, Vijay Iyer, Nico Muhly and more.
Leonard is known for singing the title role in Muhly’s Marnie; Blanche de la Force in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites and Miranda in Thomas Adés’ The Tempest at the Met. She has performed in opera houses around the world since launching her career in 2007.
What better time to talk to Leonard about her new projects and the state of the arts in a post-pandemic world. What follows are excerpts from last week’s Zoom interview that have been edited for length and clarity.
I know you’re a big Ella Fitzgerald fan. Something she said sounds to me like a description of your career: “A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside. I’m going to try to find out the new ideas before others do.”
I am a huge fan. I couldn’t love that more. From the very beginning my hope was always to bring an experience to the audience. To spend a period of time experiencing something they may have never experienced. That’s all I’ve wanted.
I think anybody involved in the opera business knows how far behind we are in general. Even on days when I think I’ve come up with a new idea, it might be new to the opera world, but it’s not new to the world in general.
Is directing part of your path to realizing that goal? What prompted you to take on this project with LA Chamber Orchestra?
Mainly because it was James Darrah who asked me. There are a few people in this business who say you should take this risk and I’ll follow them. You meet people along the way who see things the way you do and understand what you want to do and see your vision. James is one of them. I’ll follow him blindly into fire. I was terrified and I said yes.
Isn’t that where the most rewarding experiences come from, jumping in head first into the unknown?
With this piece it’s sort of funny. I said once a week to James, “I don’t feel like I’m a director. I don’t feel like I’m directing anything.” And he said, “Welcome to the world of being a director.” I just remember we had a first initial meeting and this is what I’d love to see happen with music and storytelling.
I was very affected by Fantasia when I was a child. Most people, when you talk about classical music, they talk about Bugs Bunny or a car commercial or something tied to a visual. We’re super visual people. The better the visuals and music tell the story in tandem, the more successful we can be. That was my idea for this project.
Jessie Montgomery, who curated your episode, told me she was very excited to see what an opera singer would do with music that at its most fundamental level is based in improvisation. How did your training in the rigors of opera mesh with creating a visual style for these compositions?
For me the idea of improvisation in that sense is not terrifying. If you said go sing with a jazz band and improvise I could, but it wouldn’t be particularly good. Improvisation comes from knowing your craft so well that you can forget it. I had a dance teacher who said you have to practice until you forget it so that your brain doesn’t have to tell your body what to do. When I know a piece I don’t have to tell myself what to do.
Streaming works like Close Quarters and the upcoming Desert In are redefining how classical music and opera is presented to the world. What role do you see works like this playing in the future?
I think and I hope that most of the companies that have put so much time and resources and their learning curve into this little box will hold onto it moving forward because they see how valuable this is. To come up to speed is great – we should be here already. The next step is to keep moving forward and keeping find out the best way to bring what we do to a wider audience and inspire them to want new content.
In addition to catching up with the power of technology, is there any one thing that you think the classical music/opera world has learned and perhaps the world at large during this pandemic?
Contrary to popular notions that artists had a year off, most artists were hustling like crazy just to pay grocery bills. That was one major thing that everybody has been dealing with the entire time. I started teaching as soon as I could very soon after the pandemic started because I knew we were going nowhere fast.
I cancelled all my subscriptions except Netflix. I knew we’d need it.
This should be a huge awakening to people who look at movies and art about how valuable that art and those artists are because this is what got you through the pandemic. Imagine if none of this existed and you had 10 VHS tapes for the whole year and a half of the pandemic. You’d be nuts.
As soon as the pandemic started the first people out of a job were artists. That’s not to say, “Oh woe is us.” I still lead a very privileged life as many of us do. But when it comes to a business and trying to see the business grow and be more sustainable for those involved, it means things have to change.
It’s not going to be easy. Broadway is coming back. Classical music is coming back. It’s back, but everybody working in that building is not doing better. They might be performing, but they’re still struggling and maybe even more than they were before the pandemic. There’s so much to do.
What kind of change do you think will be necessary? And what changes do you want to make moving forward in your career?
It’s not about complaining, it’s about having a conversation 100 times with as many people as you can find. We’re all in that boat right now trying to figure out how to make this sustainable for those people in it. I don’t know how to fix it, but I do think about it a lot. All these things are really interesting moving forward in the arts.
For me it’s about working on projects that scare me like LA Chamber Orchestra or doing a crazy opera film like Desert In. I’d love to do movies and bring my talents into another medium. By doing so bringing people from that medium to say, “Oh, she does opera, let’s go see an opera.” Or “Who is this person? Let’s see Marriage of Figaro. Oh, she can be a boy, too, that’s interesting.”
We must remember how integral and how important what we do is because it brings a lot of peace, joy and cathartic moments. I have lots of hope.
Photo: Isabel Leonard in Desert In (Photo by Michael Elias Thomas/Courtesy Boston Lyric Opera)