San Diego Spotlight : Lincoln Students Doused With Duo’s Love of Music

What does it take to make a career in music?

“Love . . . and grit,” was opera singer Debria Brown’s succinct formula for career success. “You need to feel you’ve got to do it or else.”

“I’ll say amen to that,” said Michel Warren Bell, a fellow opera singer, who prefers to be called Mick.

The pair told their success stories, answered students’ questions, and performed during a Monday afternoon assembly at Lincoln High School in Southeast San Diego.

Brown can proffer her advice from an enviable platform. Singing the role of Nicey Bridges in Carlyle Floyd’s post-Civil War opera “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” Brown has brought audiences to their feet in Houston, Miami and, most recently, San Diego. One critic accused Brown of stealing the show with her rich mezzo-soprano voice, and Times music writer Daniel Cariaga noted wryly that Brown’s San Diego Opera performance could teach opera superstar Jessye Norman something about sincerity.

Bell, who also performs in the San Diego “Jonathan Wade,” impressed local audiences in San Diego Opera’s 1987 “Porgy and Bess” production. In Gershwin’s classic opera he sang Porgy, a role he has performed frequently here and in Europe. As recently as four years ago, the versatile bass-baritone also sang with the pop vocal group The Fifth Dimension.

“When I started taking voice lessons in high school, I would sneak into the library to read about famous opera stars,” Bell said. “I didn’t want anyone to know I was interested in opera, so I started my own rock ‘n’ roll group on the side to distract them.”

Bell also noted that he came to school at 7 a.m. to take vocal lessons because football practice occupied him after school while growing up in Fresno.

Both singers praised their high school music teachers, who heard the potential in their voices and insisted they begin to study voice.

On Monday, the singers were preaching to a promising audience, which included members of Eileen Moss’ 80-voice San Diego Youth Master Chorale. Moss organized the assembly with the help of San Diego Opera’s education director Roger Pines.

Brown, who teaches voice at Xavier University in Louisiana when she is not performing opera, explained that she came to opera because of her early interest in drama. She was also inspired by the singing of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who first sang in Brown’s home town of New Orleans. That spiritual inspiration was part of her message to the Lincoln High School assembly.

“We have a spiritual intensity to contribute, which is something the world is longing for,” she told her largely African-American audience. “God has given us a beautiful spirit, and it’s up to you to share this. My grandfather had a saying, ‘Give till your heart hurts.’ He was right, because halfway just isn’t good enough.”

Appropriate to her uplifting declaration, Brown sang Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Climb Every Mountain” for the students, while Bell took a more contemporary tack and closed the assembly with “The Greatest Love of All.”

Your “Mother” is calling. Auditions for Virgil Thomson’s opera “The Mother of Us All” will be next Saturday in UC San Diego’s Erickson Hall (Mandeville Center, Room B-210). The classic but rarely performed opera about 19th-Century women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony will be a joint production of the UCSD music department and the La Jolla Civic-University Orchestra under music director Thomas Nee.

According to Nee, the Nov. 2-4 production will be staged as a costumed pageant with the orchestra seated in the Mandeville Auditorium pit. Nee is looking for 22 singers running the “gamut of singing and physical types.” The title role “Susan B.” is written for a dramatic soprano who must have the stamina to remain on stage most of the opera. Stipends will be awarded for some roles. To schedule an audition, call 534-4637.

Swiss connection. The Coastal Communities Concert Band, under music director Don Caneva, will perform in an international band festival in Lucerne, Switzerland on July 12-19. The local ensemble, one of five American bands invited to participate, plays under the adult education program of the San Dieguito High School District.