The lady with cred

“We are living in an age where you have to be ... credible,” says Isabel Bayrakdarian, pausing with deliberation before the adjective. She knows the value of spacing words, weighting them, making a point artfully.

But then she should.

The Armenian Canadian soprano who will sing Susanna in Los Angeles Opera’s new production of “The Marriage of Figaro,” opening Saturday, has won over some powerful figures in the music world -- at the 1997 Metropolitan Opera auditions, for instance, where she took first prize, and at Placido Domingo’s 2000 Operalia in Los Angeles, where she did the same.

Credibility, in fact, is the coin of her realm.

It figures in her response to the question rousing so much debate among opera aficionados: Can a supersized singer waddling onstage persuade audiences to suspend disbelief and think of her as an irresistibly beautiful, romantic character? Bayrakdarian says no.

“Credible acting, credible singing, credible image -- they’re all important,” says the sylphlike singer, who seems to possess all of those attributes in operatic spades. “Yes, it’s a delicate matter, but I’m sympathetic to directors for wanting the whole package. The voice is not enough. It’s just one element of music theater. Singing the role and looking the part are both necessary.”

A number of observers have already been persuaded by Bayrakdarian as Susanna, the maid (and the title character’s fiancee) who floats somewhat above the fray of social revolution in Beaumarchais’ 18th century comedy about the servant class versus the nobility, on which Mozart and librettist Da Ponte based their opera. Indeed, she has sung the role in two highly regarded productions, Giorgio Strehler’s and Peter Hall’s, both of which have been seen widely. Until now, the latter was a mainstay at Los Angeles Opera.

Two years ago, she made her Paris Opera debut in the Strehler staging, “and it was also my first Susanna,” she says, rolling her big brown eyes and sipping from a glass of Evian after a recent rehearsal.

“Imagine doing both those things at once. It could be the most painful exposure. I just did it. They call me fearless. But no. When an opportunity comes, you assess it with your good self-knowledge. Can I do it? That’s the only question. If yes, then tune out the background noise of doubters and go ahead. There’s nothing left to think about.”

Fate’s engineering

Bayrakdarian, now 29, was born in Beirut to Armenian parents. When she was 14, the family moved to Toronto. Isabel, the youngest of seven children, viewed her siblings, “who all became doctors,” as role models, and not surprisingly she decided to pursue a career in biomedical engineering. Then, as it so often does, fate intervened.

Her family was a band of amateur musicians, but it was Isabel who started studying voice in 1993, as a sidebar to her demanding major at the University of Toronto. Her aim was “to be a better choir member at church,” she explains, adding that she fully intended to continue singing for love, not as a profession.

“Stability was the key to my plans and their goal. Period,” she says. That was a lesson well learned from parents who stressed pragmatism with a capital P.

In 1997, about to graduate, she was offered a contract by a leading Canadian biotech company, where she had worked as an intern. “I would have been a pioneer in a burgeoning field, one of the few women hired at that top level,” she says. Simultaneously, however, she was receiving “feelers of interest” in her singing. Those feelers didn’t prompt her to consider a different career path, but they did lead her to enter the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

With her big victory came the moment of truth: “to follow the dream,” as she puts it. “There was no one day, though, prior to that, when I imagined my voice could take me to that place.

“But what chutzpah it took to give up so many zeros,” she says, referring to the lucrative salary she could have expected. “Even so, all those semesters of getting by on four hours of sleep were not a waste: I’d had an empowering education. Yes, I can even open a car hood and know what to fix. It’s true -- I’m fearless.

“There were and are no regrets. I never had to think, ‘Oh, my God, if I don’t make it as an opera singer, I know nothing else to do.’ ”

Still, Bayrakdarian remains humble. She believes in serendipity, that one thing leads to another, that you take your cues from life -- “traumatic or joyful.” She quotes a Yiddish saying: “You want to give God a laugh? Start planning.”

Though she still calls Toronto home, she’s now well established as one of the bright new stars in her category: a lyric soprano with coloratura assets. Besides Susanna, she’s sung Pamina in “The Magic Flute,” Rosina in “The Barber of Seville” and Zerlina in “Don Giovanni” -- the “ina” roles, all innocent soubrettes who can, under the right circumstances, assume greater dimensions.

And she likes to approach those portrayals with spontaneity.

“All you need to do in opera,” she says, “is inhabit your one character. You take her measure and see what part applies to you. Susanna is bottled sunshine -- yes, a big part of me. Singing her lines brings joy to my heart. She’s spunky and smart and absolutely without malice. She’s not a doormat, nor a trapped servant at all, but actually a confidante, a friend to the countess.”

That is an understatement in Ian Judge’s new staging, with the action updated to the early ‘50s. The director calls that time “the last great romantic period” and says he wants to get away from the image of characters “trussed up in costumes like china dolls, to free them in order to catch the spirit of Mozart instead of what we think the era is.”

Instinct for spontaneity

A recent rehearsal of Act 2 found a wanton countess lying languidly on her bed and beckoning to the randy adolescent pageboy Cherubino. And who was “enabling” the tryst, hovering over the couple, attending to their whims? Susanna, of course.

“But this only reaffirms for me that the characters are not bound by 18th century niceties, like curtseying,” Bayrakdarian says.

Which brings her to Bayrakdarian Rule No. 2: “Stay in reactive mode.” In other words, she believes in responding moment by moment to her fellow singers -- if they do their parts, the action stays vital and true. She insists she never arrives at rehearsals with the kind of pre-choreographed mannerisms that so many opera stars carry from production to production.

That instinct for spontaneity is particularly important in an ensemble romp such as “Figaro,” which is, after all, a household drama, its characters like family even if they’re not related by blood. It’s also a comedy of eros, in which libidos run wild and sexual fantasies run even wilder. Identity confusion -- about who is who and, for that matter, who is what (male or female) -- becomes an integral impetus.

Bayrakdarian says that in Los Angeles, she’s been given the run of the show. “They’re pretty free with me, because they know I’ve done ‘Figaro’ many times, while the other principals never have” -- meaning, besides the director, conductor Stefan Anton Reck, baritone Erwin Schrott (Figaro), mezzo Sandra Piques Eddy (Cherubino), baritone David Pittsinger (the Count) and soprano Darina Takova (the Countess). “But they also rely on me to feed them lines.”

All of them also stop in their tracks when Susanna gets to sing the last act’s achingly tender “Deh vieni non tardar.” It’s the moment when the emotional wraps come off, when disguise belies her deepest feelings.

“The last thing Susanna wants to do,” Bayrakdarian says, “is deceive Figaro. It’s their wedding night, and she wants only to kiss him, yet here she is, in the countess’ dress, not her plan at all. But in the middle of the aria, she sings just of her longing for him. It becomes a very sad serenade. She can’t go on with the charade. She can’t be fake.”

Only credible.

*

‘The Marriage of Figaro’

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Saturday and May 26, June 2, 5, 11, 16 and 19, 7:30 p.m.; May 29 and June 13, 2 p.m.

Price: $25-$170

Contact: (213) 365-3500