The Reluctant Diva

Wearing a severe black gown that leaves her shoulders bare and a black veil over a short blond wig, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt enters from the back of the stage at the War Memorial Opera House and walks slowly, painfully toward the footlights for her final scene in Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”

Playing Octavia, the emperor Nero’s banished wife, she appears so broken by grief--in the spirit of the great farewell aria she is about to sing--that she seems scarcely strong enough to sing at all. But after a long silence she begins: intimately, almost tonelessly, letting the words carry her upward into towering lyric eloquence.

The ovation that follows stops the San Francisco Opera performance in its tracks, signaling Hunt’s recognition as a full-fledged diva: that breed of operatic goddess who can fuse music, emotion and star power into unforgettable flash points. Not long afterward, UC Berkeley announces that Hunt’s scheduled program of solo Bach cantatas early next year has sold so well that a second performance has been added.

Southland audiences will remember Hunt in the title role of another antique opera, Handel’s “Xerxes,” at L.A. Opera four years ago. “Lorraine Hunt wound her lustrous mezzo-soprano around the heroic coloratura lines of the amorous king with splendid bravado,” wrote then Times music critic Martin Bernheimer. When she sang the role in Boston two years later, Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe called her “the finest female Handel singer since the prime of Dame Janet Baker,” and compiled an imposing list of Hunt’s virtues: “tonal luster; virtuoso bravura; astonishing sophistication of tuning, coloring and phrasing; and a jolting, electric immediacy of communication.” At 44--no dewy debutante--Hunt accepts the accolades as part of the job, but she’s determined not to let them overrule her priorities. She’s increasingly uncomfortable, she says, with being pigeonholed as an early-music specialist or even as a diva.

“I’ve never been--what’s the name for it?--a career singer who gets a handful of roles and sings them all over the place,” Hunt says, relaxing in San Francisco, her hometown, between “Poppea” performances early in the summer. “I don’t consider opera my main gig.”

Her performance Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl, singing Mahler’s poignant “Songs of a Wayfarer” with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the L.A. Philharmonic, testifies to her prowess in more familiar and recent repertory than the Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell, Rameau and, particularly, Handel rarities she has recorded for Erato and Harmonia Mundi. And she absolutely insists that singing recitals and chamber music interests her as much as grand opera.

“I’ve always,” she says firmly, “done sort of everything.”

‘Everything,” in Hunt’s case, includes a first career in music that had nothing to do with singing.

As a child, she took piano and violin lessons, then turned to the viola, majoring in both voice and viola in college. She played in student orchestras, landed jobs with the Berkeley and San Jose symphonies, and was a member of a new-music string quartet. She worked for such conductors as Herbert von Karajan, Seiji Ozawa, Andre Previn and Kent Nagano, and sometimes accompanied major opera singers. Only as she approached 30 did her interest in singing become dominant. She tried out for the vocal program of Juilliard but didn’t make the cut.

“I don’t think I was what they were looking for,” she told the New York Times a few years ago. “An unformed singer at 29!”

She was still playing viola professionally and studying singing on the side, at the Boston Conservatory, when director Peter Sellars first heard her.

As Sellars tells it, in a phone call from Salzburg, Hunt was a member of the orchestra for his production of Handel’s “Orlando” in the early ‘80s. Craig Smith, the conductor of “Orlando,” told Sellars that their viola player also sang, asking “Should we hear her?’ ”

They did, and what they heard struck Sellars as “a volcanic outpouring of passion and energy which, like genuine acts of God, creates a silence in the universe simultaneous with an eruption that is completely shattering.

“It puts her for me in the category of that handful of people in the Callas range of talents,” he says, “people who are so unusual that they really can’t be compared to anyone else.”

Hunt first attracted international attention in the telecasts of Sellars’ productions of “Don Giovanni” (as Donna Elvira) and “Giulio Cesare” (as Sesto) a couple of years later, and Sellars also directed one of her greatest triumphs to date: Irene in Handel’s “Theodora” at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1996.

Sellars disagrees with Hunt about a possible connection between her viola playing and her vocalism. She acknowledges no conscious link, while he finds in her singing what he calls “a tremendous soulfulness that you associate with the viola repertory.

“I think that is her character ultimately: something that has this deeper intensity, dark but fiery and glowing.”

Wearing a loose pink shirt with large mother-of-pearl buttons over dark brown velvet trousers and black boots, her chestnut hair falling to her shoulders, Hunt looks youthful and casually chic even without any makeup other than lipstick. Only a necklace of fire opals and garnets suggests a taste for glamour. She wears such jewelry all the time, she says, “even in the shower.”

There’s also an engagement ring--from Peter Lieberson, the composer of “Ashoka’s Dream,” an opera in which Hunt sang a leading role during the 1997 season in Santa Fe. And though no wedding date has been set, Hunt looks very dreamy indeed when speaking about her “new life” with Lieberson and their plans to live in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Between upcoming engagements, of course--engagements that will take Hunt to Copenhagen, London and Amsterdam this month and next for more “Wayfarer” singing with the Philharmonic; to the Salzburg Festival next summer for Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and “Symphony of Psalms;” to New York City late next year for her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in John Harbison’s new opera “The Great Gatsby” (playing Myrtle Wilson); to Cleveland in 2000 for Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”; and to points unknown for a yet-to-be-announced John Adams opera, again in 2000.

Hardly bread-and-butter diva rep. And Hunt’s most immediate challenge is equally unusual: three solo Bach cantatas to be staged by Sellars as monodramas and sung everywhere from UC Berkeley to the Cite de la Musique in Paris--but not, so far, any Southland venue.

Cantata 199, which she first performed in France in 1997, begins with the line “Mein Herze schwimmt in Blut” (My heart is bathed in blood), and the Sellars/Hunt interpretation creates a portrait of a woman “in very nun-like garb,” Hunt says, “going through some sort of breakdown or hellfire. It couldn’t be more dramatic.”

“Peter also did it with Dawn Upshaw,” she points out, “and it was very different. The basic idea was the same but it wasn’t as if he tried to get us to do exactly the same gestures or movements. Each of us had a very personal take on the emotions of the work.”

In contrast, cantata 170, “Vergnugte Ruh’, beliebte Seelenlust,” (Pleasant rest, beloved soul’s desire) offers Hunt a chance to play someone she describes as “a high-society character” in a world coming unglued. And cantata 82, “Ich habe genug” (I’ve had enough), depicts what Hunt calls “the end of a life, dying.”

“It’s three different women, three different situations,” she explains. “The idea is to make the stagings very simple, small, with the chamber orchestra on the stage, the singer nearby and the acting space defined by lighting. We haven’t staged the last two yet but we want them to be able to travel easily and let the music and text speak for themselves.”

Sellars insists that there are plenty of singers he wouldn’t let near this kind of project, but Hunt “can be an amazing colleague.” “She’s not just a star--her main focus is that the whole reaches its destination,” he says.

To “Xerxes” director Stephen Wadsworth, working with Hunt on “The Marriage of Figaro” in St. Louis eight years ago taught him to appreciate her humor, resilience and imagination. “I realized that Lorraine the actor understood style as subtly as did Lorraine the musician,” he told Opera News in 1996. “I knew I had a collaborator and muse for life. She not only animated my notions, she transformed them.”

For her part, Hunt agrees that collegiality is crucial--flexibility and respect between artists and directors or conductors:

“I’ve never been whatever a purist is--believing that there’s only one way to sing something. I certainly can feel strongly about certain tempi or phrasings, and it can be hard to do them the opposite way. But if there’s enough respect for the other person’s ideas, there can be a compromise.”

“Tempo is a very interesting problem because different voices--different weights, colors, sizes--can affect it. And a conductor sitting at a piano going through the score, singing it in his own voice, sometimes gets an idea ‘this is the tempo,’ and it could be right for one voice and not another.

“It’s been a long time, but there was an early music conductor at a festival--and this is the kind of music-making I’m so uninterested in--who sent everybody a score in which he had written all the tempi and [vocal] ornaments. They weren’t marked by the composer but he had written them in--he was a real scholarly type who had researched everything to the nth degree from some treatise, and basically I couldn’t give a s---.”

She laughs, declines to name the man (“he’s not well known”) and explains that she couldn’t take the tempo he wanted on something. “He ended up having to follow me at that one moment,” she remembers. “He would have rather not.”

Another kind of mismatch would have occurred early this year, when Hunt was supposed to sing the title role of “Carmen” at the Paris Opera--definitely a star assignment. However, she canceled after taking a look at the production a season earlier while appearing in “Giulio Cesare” there.

“It was just not good,” she says, putting enormous dread into those three little words. “Everybody knew it--it wasn’t just me. I have rarely broken a contract, and it took me a long time to make the decision. But I’m very picky and choosy about what I do.”

Asked to describe her priorities and influences as a singer, Hunt ponders for a long while, then apologizes, saying “I always blank out when it comes to opera. Or just repeat what other people say they see and hear.”

Finally, she begins in a speculative tone: “I would say that I try to bring a directness and openness to my performances. But I haven’t been much of an opera queen, really--I don’t have a big CD collection of singers. Still, I’ve always loved Christa Ludwig. I always want to be touched or moved by a singer and there’s a recording of ‘Fidelio’ with her [as Leonore] that brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. And there’s many times I’ve felt that way when hearing Janet Baker.”

She admits that Leonore represents a “fantasy role” for her, “which means I probably would never do it--I don’t have the range, first of all. But I certainly have sat down and played through the score, and the big aria, ‘Abscheulicher!,’ is really something . . . .”

Does she miss the stable professionalism of viola playing as opposed to the giddy uncertainties of high-stakes vocalism, with the very real danger of becoming a diva in spite of herself?

“No,” she answers emphatically. “I’m finding that my life is more pleasant and I’m enjoying it more as I grow older. In a lot of ways, I’m just reaching my peak and I feel grateful that I didn’t start singing too early and burn out.”

Besides, Hunt’s viola was stolen 10 years ago and she hasn’t replaced it. “I took it as a sign,” she says with a laugh.

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Lorraine Hunt, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Thursday, 8:30 p.m. $1-$65. (323) 850-2000.