Diva Alessandra Marc Makes Her Mark Twice

Alessandra Marc figures that recording both soprano roles in Strauss’ “Elektra” in one year has already set a record. But with taking on back-to-back performances as Puccini’s Turandot for Opera Pacific, starting this weekend, she may be heading for another.

Marc was going to alternate in the killer Puccini role with Jane Eaglen, who had never sung it before. But Eaglen withdrew, finding her concurrent duties as Norma for Los Angeles Music Center Opera quite enough of a challenge. Faced with finding a replacement, Opera Pacific impresario David DiChiera broached the subject of Marc doing all six dates.

“My immediate reaction was, ‘Sure,’ ” Marc said over coffee Friday in her local hotel. “For some, maybe for most, it is [difficult] because there have been people who probably have sung it who should never have sung it. But I have thus far found that this role really honestly fits my voice like a glove.”

Besides, she said, she’s done something harder recently. She sang Aida in the Arena di Verona and Turandot the next night at the Macerata, Italy, summer festival.

“That coupling--Aida and Turandot--is a much more difficult one, I feel, than doing Turandot back to back,” she said. Still, “I think [it] would be insane to do that on a regular basis.”

Marc, who gives her age as mid-30s, was born in West Berlin where her American father, a U.S. military intelligence officer, married her German mother.

“We moved just about every two to three years. We lived everywhere. Most of my family now lives in Los Angeles.” Her brother works for Xerox Corp. in Orange County. Her father lives in Del Mar. An aunt, uncle and cousin live in Woodland Hills. They will all be coming to “Turandot.”

Currently, she lives with her husband, Bart, and their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Olivia Lynn, outside Washington, D.C.

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Marc studied voice at the University of Maryland in College Park, where she was being steered toward the lyric soprano repertory, but she wasn’t happy.

“That environment just wasn’t nurturing my talent. And at some point, as fate would have it, or, you know, God, maybe, I was put in the right place at the right time.”

Singing in an audition for a local opera company, she met the teacher Marilyn Cotlow, the original Lucy in Menotti’s “The Telephone.” Cotlow told her she was right for the stronger-voiced dramatic repertory, and was destined to sing Strauss, Wagner and Verdi.

“Come and work with me,” Cotlow said, “and I will give you the technique and the support that you need to survive in this.”

So Marc left the university and studied privately with Cotlow for four years. Not only did Cotlow give her a good technique, “what was of equal importance to me was the emotional, psychological support that she gave me. That’s so vital. Singers just by nature are very vulnerable, sensitive people.

“To be an artist, you have to maintain the vulnerability on stage, which takes a lot of courage, and at some point you have to allow the music and your artistry to pass through you, to be a vehicle for that and that at some point has to come naturally, without any blockage.”

That sense informs her interpretation of Turandot. “There’s a real human aspect to her character, which is revealed near the end of the opera, which is also in the music. She’s not just a ‘Princess of Ice,’ but also ‘of Fire.’ And the fire aspect, in my interpretation, is the human, passionate, womanly aspect of her character.

“Frankly, bringing that part of her personality alive makes the character of Calaf more believable as well.”

Marc sang her first Turandot in 1992 with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and subsequently sung it at the Royal Opera Covert Garden. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Aida in 1989, and since then has sung at the Vienna State Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the San Francisco Opera, among others.

Her recordings include Chrysothemis in Strauss’ “Elektra” under the direction of Daniel Barenboim, and the title role under Giuseppe Sinopoli (to be released shortly).

“If nothing else, I think I made history there,” she said, by singing both roles in one year.

Still, she feels her career has not flourished proportionately in the United States.

Has her large size kept her from being cast in some roles?

“This is what I’ve been told,” she said. “Look, we live in a fat-phobic society. This is a fact. We know it by the countless daughters and sons that we have and are raising who are anorexic, bulimic and have all of these eating disorders. It’s a subject matter that’s been discussed, I think, ad nauseam on talk shows.

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“I do believe a prejudice against larger people--and I emphasize the word people--is still one of the last accepted prejudices in our society. This certainly has its detrimental influence, in my opinion, in casting for opera of a certain repertoire.”

However, big singers, she feels, are “a godsend for opera and the repertoire that requires a woman or a man of a larger stature with the stamina to sing this repertoire.”

The issue is, she said, “something that is extremely frustrating,” but she has no intention of letting it interfere with her career. “I’ve always known that singing is my destiny,” she said. “There’s nothing else I’d rather do and as long as I can be allowed to give my talents and my talents are appreciated, then I’ll keep doing it.”

* “Turandot,” Opera Pacific, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Saturday and Sept. 25, 27, 28, 8 p.m. Sunday and Sept. 29, 2 p.m. $22 to $89. (714) 979-7000.