The Roles Are Starting to Go Her Way

There are years when you feel that everything is going your way. This is one of them for Shana Blake Hill, opera singer on the rise--and she knows it. In 2000, she has sung the lead in the premieres of two operas--albeit small ones. At the end of April, she was Sally Hemings in a concert version of a work called “Monticello,” mounted by L.A. Theatre Works, and last month, she was Ticie See in “On Gold Mountain,” mounted by Los Angeles Opera in a semiprofessional, off-site production. Then, next Sunday, she takes to another local stage to sing the role of Kate Pinkerton in a concert version of “Madame Butterfly” at the Hollywood Bowl.

And at summer’s end, there’s a plum job awaiting her--as a resident artist at Los Angeles Opera, which means guaranteed work for the 2000-01 schedule. As a soprano--and for some reason nature has created more sopranos vying for opera jobs than any other voice type--she competed against a field of 50 to get the position.

“I love being 30,” Hill says, having revealed that the big three-oh has just caught up with her. Though in fact she looks much younger than that this day, with her hair parted into two pigtails on either side of her face, and wearing jeans and cowboy boots--on her way to do some horseback riding. “I feel like I’m coming into my own, closer to so many of the things I’ve envisioned for myself.”

And while she’s been able to meet the right people at the right time--people who helped her develop her talent, who showed her a path--she’s had her share of bumps along the way too.

Over lunch--and before horseback riding--Hill fondly recalls the music she grew up with as a child. Two of her favorites were Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” She grew up in a household in which a seriousness of purpose was emphasized--something reflected in the expressive intensity Hill displays on and off stage.

Her parents, both lit majors, met at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and spent the early years of their marriage in the quiet town of Walnut Cove. “In the ‘70s in North Carolina, it wasn’t a really good thing to be an interracial couple out in public,” Hill says. Her mother was black, her father white. “So I think part of the reason we were there was they really wanted to isolate themselves in the South. We didn’t go to much that was public.”

Her parents pursued academic careers and eventually taught at universities. They had high expectations for their only child, and, trying to avoid the corruption of pop culture, they allowed her to listen to only classical music. Well, with a few exceptions--Broadway musicals and, indeed, the Beatles, whom Shana was crazy for.

In high school she discovered an aptitude for performance (she was cast as Rosalind in a production of “As You Like It”). She began participating in National Chorus Council Auditions, in which selected students were sent to intensive workshops. “They were very tough competitions,” she recalls, “and it’s totally how I learned to be professional.” Through that program, she met Randall Scarlatta, a precocious high schooler who introduced her to a broad expanse of opera music as well as to her first voice teacher.

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Admitted to Oberlin College in Ohio, in 1988, Hill worked herself into its Conservatory of Music by the end of her freshman year. “I’ve been kind of kicked along by circumstance or whatever,” Hill says, “but once I found music and I started studying it, it answered all of the things that I had been longing for. There was such a variety of things I was good at and passionate about--languages, history, anthropology, music, theater, performing in general--and all of these things came together when I found opera.”

But during her senior year, her mother fell seriously ill with breast cancer, so sick that Hill returned to North Carolina to look after her mother during what turned out to be the last four months of her life.

“When I was nursing her, I would practice music every day, and my mother would come out to the living room and listen to me practice,” Hill says. “During that time I started learning Mimi [from “La Boheme”], just because I loved it so much and wanted to sing it. I started my first attempts at singing those arias because they just healed me.” (Recently she returned to North Carolina to sing that part with the Durham Triangle Opera and will sing it for two student matinees with Los Angeles Opera in December.)

Admittedly, grand tragedy is the stuff of grand opera. But Hill points out opera’s magic. “The wonderful thing is that it deals with tragedy in a way that’s so painfully beautiful,” she says. “It’s never ugly, it’s beautiful and uplifting.”

After her mother died, Hill felt an urgent need to move on. She came to Los Angeles in 1994 to study voice at USC, another turning point. (She completed her Oberlin degree with outside credits.) Gifted with a natural singing voice, she had done well at Oberlin but felt a lack of challenge. “Nobody tried to make me better than I was,” she says. “They just let me be as good as I was. Nobody really wanted to take me to the next level, until I came here to USC.”

At USC, she studied with Margaret Schaper, whom Hill cannot praise enough. “She really did everything for me--mother, friend, teacher,” Hill says. “She’s a constant inspiration for me.” (Today she continues voice training with Judith Natalucci Gail Gordon.)

After she got her master’s degree in 1997, she sang in the chorus of L.A. Opera, with Long Beach Opera and the Mallarme Chamber Orchestra in North Carolina--and took odd jobs temping in offices to support herself.

Four years later, she’s left the odd jobs behind. She learned about the parts in “Monticello” and “On Gold Mountain” through personal contacts, auditioned and won them. In “Monticello” there was special poignancy in taking the role of Hemings, the unacknowledged slave mistress of Thomas Jefferson. Hemings was light-skinned, which Hill is as well, so she felt a personal identification with the role.

However, Hill prides herself on finding a way into all the roles she tackles. Even though Ticie in “On Gold Mountain,” for example, finds her husband’s affections diverted to a much younger woman, she picks herself up and goes on. Thus, Hill admires her for being “a strong woman, a survivor.” And while traditional opera often depicts women as lovelorn victims, she believes that “any role can be made different depending on how you play it.”

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The upcoming residency at Los Angeles Opera will give her a chance to work on roles full time for at least one season. Under the resident artist program, the company retains a handful of singers every year, about one in each voice type, depending on the upcoming season’s needs, who sing the secondary parts in many of the productions and cover for the main parts. Alumni include Richard Bernstein, Greg Fedderly and Paula Rasmussen.

Hill auditioned for the 1998-99 season, but L.A. Opera decided it didn’t need to add a soprano that season. Based on that tryout, however, the company came back to her when a slot opened for 2000-01, and in the top half of next season, she is scheduled to perform as one of the wicked stepsisters, Clorinda, in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola,” as the Niece in Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” and in the two student matinees of Puccini’s “La Boheme.” Later she’ll be Barbarina in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and an understudy for two other operas.

It’s a good place to be, on the rise. “I think 29 was just a year of getting rid of any vestiges of childhood and adolescence,” Hill says. “I really feel more like an adult than I’ve ever been. There’s so much deadwood that gets cut away by that! I’m more focused than I’ve ever been.” *

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“MADAME BUTTERFLY” Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by John Mauceri, Hollywood Bowl, 2701 N. Highland Ave. Date: Next Sunday, 7:30 p.m.

Prices: $3 to $105 Phone: (323) 850-2050.