Song in their hearts

All week, young out-of-towners could be seen scooting and lugging their precious cargo of seasoned wood and shiny brass up and down upper Broadway. The singers also appeared, wrapping delicate necks with woolen scarves and sipping incessantly from plastic water bottles. They dropped sheet music in hotel lobbies, got lost on subway platforms and spied each other in the cheap seats at the Met. They were nervous and green to the city and underdressed for a flash snowstorm. Then, finally, each got to perform: seven minutes at a time, 10 at most.

It was audition week at the three great conservatories in Manhattan, and thousands of student musicians came from all over the country, all over the world, in fact, to plead their case.

After years of casual coordination, the Juilliard, Mannes and Manhattan schools of music now carefully synchronize their audition schedules the same week in March so applicants can make one trip for one collective ordeal. Certainly, these instrumentalists and singers could find a quality education in many other cities such as San Francisco, Cincinnati, Rochester and Boston.

But the journey to New York matters most to many because they are convinced this city is the fount of every blessing in the performing arts. No matter their hometowns, no matter their justification for asking wary parents to back them in this costly and crazy quest, they share similar imaginings: “You know you’re going to end up in New York at some point if you want to be an opera singer,” says Katie Bolding, a dazzling soprano from Norman, Okla., who gave up smoky bars and football games her senior year at the University of Oklahoma to prepare. “So why not come, even if it’s a pipe dream?”

The odds are rotten. But last week’s visitors to the borough of Gershwin, Sondheim and Glass might fleetingly imagine themselves in that league just for having survived the first screening to win an audition. The Manhattan School of Music, for example, received 600 applications and audition CDs for its undergraduate and graduate programs in voice alone. Only half the singers were invited to New York to audition, and the school has room for only 30 sopranos in its master’s program. Juilliard has room this year for only two in that category; Mannes College of Music accepts about a dozen.

The schools’ administrators have empathy for the hopefuls. “Everything is dependent on those two little vocal chords inside their bodies. If you’re a little sick or a little too dry or a little nervous, it can be over,” explains Maitland Peters, the chairman of Manhattan School’s voice department for 13 years. “In fact, it is a little bit like ‘American Idol’ -- a few minutes to show if you have it or not. Usually, talent prevails....”

A rock band detour

Katie Bolding is lithe and blue-eyed, self-possessed but with an upbeat style. She began college in Florida State University’s music program but dropped out after two years to start her own rock band. Oddly, when she finally returned to college, she majored in finance. But music still compelled her, and when by chance she met an inspiring opera coach on a visit to Texas, she decided to throw herself back into classical music training.

At the urging of that coach, she set herself up to apply for graduate school in Manhattan and a few other places. It took all year to prepare six arias and four classical “art” songs, combining works in German, French, Italian and English. The singers get to pick their first song during auditions; the judges and members of the conservatory faculties pick a second contrasting piece from the applicant’s repertoire.

For Katie, the audition week begins inauspiciously. Her flight from Oklahoma to New York is rerouted to Washington, D.C., because of bad weather. Luckily, the woman sitting next to Katie on the plane invites her and her mother, Lynn Cherry, home overnight and takes them to the train the next morning. Katie barely makes her first audition -- the only one outside of Manhattan -- at State University of New York’s Purchase College, about 45 minutes north of the city. That goes well enough for the program’s director to offer her, on the spot, a place for next fall.

This buoys daughter and mother until they find themselves the next morning sitting on hardwood benches with half a dozen tense chatterboxes waiting for auditions on the second floor of the Manhattan School of Music at 122nd and Broadway.

The atmosphere is palpably tense and after a school official announces that the auditions are about to begin, she rounds the corner and admits to her aide, “I’m glad my auditioning days are behind me.”

Two sopranos from Chapel Hill, N.C., discuss the dreaded “sight reading” portion of the audition. “We should all decide to do badly,” a young woman named Chrissy announces, twirling around the chiffon skirt of her tea-length aqua audition dress as she talks.

“I’ll blow it if you blow it,” Katie jokes, but then returns to studying her song list while the other young women prattle on about their colds, pantyhose that constrict, museums to visit, and lessons to corner with famous members of the conservatory faculties. (Katie has set up two that week.)

As her audition nears, Katie retreats into herself, closing her eyes to block out the sounds of “Carmen” and “The Marriage of Figaro” coming from the auditorium. She changes in the bathroom into a close-fitting, long black dress and pulls her shiny hair into a black velvet scrunchy. A few minutes before her audition she meets the young pianist who will play for her. (Note to self: Next time meet the accompanist a day in advance.)

Jangled nerves

When it’s finally her turn, Katie starts to walk into the room but is told to hold off. The judges, who will hear 60 singers that day, have to take a break, jangling Katie’s nerves that much more. She waits another few minutes and then is invited in. Her mother leans her ear against the door to listen to the first song, then to a second. Then there’s an abrupt break in the singing and a burst of laughter. Laughing? What is there to laugh about?

Katie emerges, looking frozen. “It went OK, I guess,” she says. She explains that she was asked at the end to compare New York to Oklahoma. “Well, it sure is different from what I’m used to,” she replied, and then came the guffaws.

To her mother, Katie later quips, “I guess they don’t think we have runnin’ water.”

That night back at the hotel, Katie has a meltdown, her mother tells me later. Which side of the dream should she believe -- that she has artistic talent and can get into one of these schools or that she has been deluding herself? What is she doing in New York, anyway?

It’s miserably cold here and overwhelming and her second song didn’t go that well. She spends her first evening in Manhattan warming and moistening her vocal chords with a humidifier she carted from Oklahoma. She runs five miles on the hotel treadmill and won’t even turn the heat on in the room for fear of dryness. She spares her voice by barely speaking to her mother, who later jokes, “It was a barrel of fun. I’m frozen and there’s no one to talk to.”

Katie explains her frustration: “I’ve been thinking about this every day for a couple of years -- singing, perfecting, practicing. Then I get here to sing and nobody wants to talk to me except for a minute and I don’t have 50,000 contacts....”

And yet there’s an evening at the Met for “Turandot” and then to Broadway for “Beauty and the Beast” and meals at restaurants that leave Katie and her mom breathless. Even food at a diner had perfect pitch. After a few days the subways seem not so daunting, and glimpses of ordinary New Yorkers start to remind them of home.

Then there’s the audition at Juilliard. Katie emerges from her 10 minutes ecstatic.

“That was the best yet,” she says. Off came the reserve and the shoulders began to rock, shades of Katie, the lead singer of the Mudslingers, who grabs the mike on stage and belts out tunes like “Cuttin’ Loose.”

“I feel like a big gum ball,” she tells us giddily. “I just wanna roll around! It was really fun.”

Later that night, Katie phones me at home: “I got a call back. At Juilliard -- they liked me!” When you’ve spent every weekend of college driving 4 1/2 hours to Amarillo, Texas, for voice lessons, it’s pretty heady stuff to have seven members of the faculty of what is considered the country’s best conservatory show even the slightest approval of your performance.

A parent’s patience

In a quiet moment, while her daughter is off practicing, Katie’s mother, a wise and reserved woman who trains horses for a living, admits her daughter’s passion for opera has sometimes confounded her. But Lynn Cherry knows dedication and has come to understand the need for patience while a voice develops.

“I once said to Katie’s voice coach,” she recalls, “ ‘Well, let’s get this career on the way,’ and she told me that you really have to wait until she’s 30 to even know if she’s gonna have a career.”

The Juilliard callback and the Mannes audition, according to the singer, are extraordinary. “I felt like it was me singing instead of an out-of-body experience.”

There is a mishap, however. She is back in Oklahoma on Saturday when she retrieves a cellphone message from Friday that Mannes wanted to hear her sing again. She missed the callback; still, she feels proud. “Getting those callbacks was my own work, done on my own merit.”

There’s no way to determine if Katie’s $2,000 trip to Manhattan was worth it, if she’ll return here for school. Decisions will be made by early April. People-in-the-know say that even before the auditions, the best conservatories have figured out what they’re looking for, depending on what voices are needed for the next year’s performances.

Yet, just like that guy lugging the bassoon through the revolving doors exiting Juilliard and the young woman leaving Mannes with the violin strapped to her back, Katie Bolding of Norman, Okla., had a chance to perform in this city, to join her spirit with the spirit of her music and live a few feet above the ground. Even for just 10 minutes.