Placido Domingo says Operalia prizes ‘went to the right people’

When he arrived last week in Los Angeles for Plácido Domingo’s annual Operalia competition, the young Guatemalan tenor Mario Chang experienced a singer’s worst fear: He had come down with a throat infection.

“My throat started to feel a little sore. I saw the doctor, and he prescribed me antibiotics,” the singer recounted.

With rest and medicine, he mustered enough willpower not only to compete but also to emerge as one of the event’s biggest winners. Chang took three prizes Saturday, including the first-place award for male singer for his performance of an aria from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” He was matched by American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen, who won the first-place female award plus two other recognitions.

The Saturday finals held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion capped off the splashy annual event, which gathers some of the most promising young opera singers from the world.

From an applicant pool of about 1,000 singers, just 40 were invited to L.A. to compete. A 14-person jury narrowed the field to 13 singers.

Willis-Sørensen, a 30-year-old soprano from Washington state, said she didn’t expect to win for her rendition of a Wagner aria from “Tannhauser.”

“It might be one of the easiest pieces in my repertory,” she said.

Another big winner was 31-year-old American tenor Joshua Guerrero, who took two awards, including a second-place prize for his performance of a Puccini aria from “Le Villi.”

Guerrero, who grew up in L.A. and Las Vegas, said the most challenging aspect of Operalia was the time spent in between rounds.

“It was the waiting,” he said.

Guerrero’s path to opera is one of the more unusual in the competition. After a period in seminary training, he began his professional career as a crooner on the Vegas Strip, at one point working as a gondolier at the Venetian. He did the nightclub circuit in L.A. and eventually segued into opera after participating in a competition in Palm Springs in 2010.

“I knew he was musical,” said his mother, Sylvia Hernandez, who attended the finals with the singer’s extended family. “He was always singing as a kid and being a goofball.”

Guerrero is in L.A. Opera’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program.

The female second-place winner was American soprano Amanda Woodbury, who impressed the judges and audience with a performance of Ophelia’s mad scene from Ambroise Thomas’ “Hamlet.”

Since founding Operalia in 1993, Domingo has served as the competition’s public face and biggest champion. On Saturday, he conducted from the orchestra pit and later handed out the awards.

“I think at the end, the prizes went to the right people,” Domingo said after the ceremony. He added that next year’s competition would be held in London.

The Operalia prizes are decided by a jury of prominent leaders from opera houses around the world.

The level of this year’s competition was particularly high, said Christopher Koelsch, the president and chief executive of L.A. Opera, who served as a judge. “It was on a par with the best Operalias I’ve seen.”

Judges consider a singer’s entire presentation when scoring, but “voice and singing — what one does with the voice” are the primary considerations, said L.A. Opera music director James Conlon, a late addition to the judging panel on Saturday.

This year’s results included two ties that resulted in four singers taking the third-place prizes. They were sopranos Anaïs Constans and Mariangela Sicilia and countertenors John Holiday and Andrey Nemzer.

Some of Operalia’s winners have gone on to international careers, including Joyce DiDonato, Rolando Villazón and Erwin Schrott.

Chang, the Guatemalan tenor of partial Chinese ancestry, not only won first place but also received the male prize for zarzuela, the Spanish operatic genre, as well as an audience prize voted by the public.

He will next be heading to Germany, where he is scheduled to perform with the Frankfurt Opera. The tenor is a recent alumnus of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Willis-Sørensen also took a zarzuela prize. The soprano began studying opera at age 17, “which is pretty late,” she said. Her upcoming engagements include productions at the SemperOper Dresden in Germany and the Houston Grand Opera.

The two first-place winners will receive $30,000 each.

david.ng@latimes.com

Twitter: @DavidNgLAT