Voice of Reason Follows Vocal Triumph

After judges at the Los Angeles Music Center named Laura Griffith one of the most talented young amateur opera singers in Southern California last week, the Rolling Hills teen-ager was first astonished, then sensible. “It’s a really good thing to put on your resume,” she said. Griffith, 18, knows a little bit about resume-building. She’s been doing it since second grade, after she auditioned for summer stock at a Palos Verdes community theater and played Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Since then, she has had dozens of leading roles in amateur productions and spent two summers at the prestigious Interlochen Music Camp in Michigan.

It paid off. On March 29, Griffith won the Los Angeles Music Center’s annual Spotlight Award in opera, which includes a $5,000 scholarship. The performance was the culmination of a months-long audition process involving hundreds of Southern California’s most artistically talented teen-agers. Griffith, one of two students competing in the finals, performed “The Laughing Song” from Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus” before an audience of 3,200.

Until two years ago, Griffith knew very little about opera, she said. “When you’re little, you think of opera as big fat women singing with horns on their head. I didn’t want that,” she said, laughing. “I wanted to tap-dance and belt out songs on Broadway.”

She attended the Chadwick School, a private school on the Palos Verdes Peninsula where she is now a senior, and spent two summers at the Michigan camp, where an instructor suggested that she had a “voice really suited to opera,” Griffith said.

At first, she was reluctant to try it. “I hadn’t listened to or seen opera. My parents weren’t into it. I had worked on maybe one aria, a Mozart piece from the ‘Marriage of Figaro.’ I wanted to sing from the soul, and I thought the details of opera--it demands so much and it’s so precise--would constrain me.”

She was wrong. “I learned I can sing from my soul just as well in opera,” she said. And she proved it at the Music Center awards.

“Winning has been incredible for me,” she said. “I don’t think of myself as a competitive person. I focus on my own strengths and weaknesses. If I get a part or don’t get a part, it’s because I was right or wrong for that part. It’s not because I was better than someone else.”

Her parents, both music-lovers, introduced Griffith to music early. She started piano lessons in second grade and joined her parents on excursions to the Long Beach Civic Light Opera several times a year. Her father, who is in the banking business, used to play classical music games in the car. “He’d play a song and ask me who the composer was,” she said. “I’d always say Beethoven, because I thought everything was Beethoven.”

Her father’s love for music had a great impact on her, she said. “He has very eclectic taste. Some of it I love, but some of it I can’t listen to. Like the German oom-pah-pah. And he likes Julio Iglesias,” she said, apologizing for the potential embarrassment this public disclosure might cause her father.

Griffith also likes rock music, but because the family doesn’t subscribe to cable television, she never watches MTV. “I don’t collect a lot of rock CDs,” she said. “I collect opera CDs. I’d put on ‘La Traviata’ instead of Pearl Jam.”

After graduating in June, Griffith will attend the Aspen Music School in Colorado for nine weeks on full scholarship from the Music Center. In the fall, she starts at the University of Michigan, where she plans to major in voice. After that?

“I don’t know, that’s a hard one,” she said. “It’s scary following a career in the performing arts. There’s no right path. If you look at the major stars, everyone has done it in different ways. The nice thing about opera, there’s no rush to become a star. There’s no rule that you have to be young. That means you can spend a lot of time just working at it.”

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Bill Wright of Torrance was chosen to represent his city on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California board of directors. A retired schoolteacher, Wright was a member of the Torrance Water Commission from 1976 to 1984.