Vancouver connoisseurs of vocal music are well aware of soprano Simone Osborne, a local now well on her way to a high-powered singing career. Last season she sang the title role in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette for Vancouver Opera; she starts the new year with a performance at Carnegie Hall. Just before Christmas, Simone spoke with me from Texas about her developing career, and the complicated life that it entails, having completed a gig in Switzerland.
“Zurich was a gala celebration of Verdi’s bicentennial, a 120-person choir and a full orchestra in a gigantic indoor stadium—Verdi’s biggest hits. A lot of non-Verdi fans in the audience got their introduction to him, and it looks like they may take the concert on tour.”
Simone was in Dallas to participate in a benefit for the Music Academy of the West, a project of the great American mezzo Marilyn Horne, now a particularly important person in Osborne’s life. “I’m so grateful for all the training I received there. And it was perfect timing—I flew home to drop off my new puppy with friends in Toronto, and then on here to Dallas.” But there is also a secret West Coast agenda: “I’m going to surprise my mother on her doorstep on Christmas Day. I’ve arranged with friends to make sure she will be home.”
It will be a fleeting visit before the “Marilyn Horne Song Celebration” in mid-January. “We will be celebrating Marilyn’s birthday as part of this concert. I am so fortunate to be able to sing in Carnegie Hall, and with Warren Jones on the piano. He’s a true genius, and this is not just soprano-speak. You have never heard anything like it when he touches the piano, even just in his New York apartment it is magical. Then I move on to Scotland, working with Malcolm Martineau.”
A mentor like Marilyn Horne is remarkable, and I wondered how she and the great diva crossed paths. “It was in the first year that I really did a lot of auditions. I was still an undergrad at UBC, but I went to the Musical Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. I had no idea she would be there. I got up to the stage and turned around and there right smack in the middle of the panel was Marilyn Horne! I thought This cannot be true, and then this incredibly focussed voice said, ‘Okay, darling, now what are you going to start with?’ She later told the press that the first aria I sang made her cry — I couldn’t see because they were quite far away, so when I read that, my heart skipped a beat! She has been taking care of me every since — such an incredible mentor to so many young musicians, a grande dame in the true sense of the term, a wonderful lady.”
In a musical world where fierce competition between singers can be intense and even destructive, I wondered about Horne’s mentoring style. “She tells stories in which her own mentor, Lotte Lehmann, was very hard on her. Marilyn can certainly deliver tough love when needed, but I think she experienced the opposite of this generosity in her own young years. She told me, ‘I realized back then that I would never say those things to another singer, never treat a young person in that way.’ She’s had a number of Canadian singers in her program over the years, and she says I need to be less humble, less Canadian. She finds us too self-depreciating and too accommodating. One day she was tearing apart my musical choices, and then she said, ‘Someday, kid, you’re going to have to learn your own worth!’ She can be hard on you, but always to help you find your own balance.”
For instrumentalists building careers, the younger the better seems to be the new rule, but this doesn’t work with singers who must develop physically as well as musically. Osborne was launched at twenty-one, when she won the 2008 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. She’s still very young indeed to be making her mark. “I’m often asked whether my age is a problem, but it’s just my reality. I used to get quite anxious and wonder whether I was making the right decisions—would I be a flash in the pan, just another young soprano who sang too much too soon and lost her voice? A lot of people were telling me to slow down and not burn myself out, but I’ve learned it’s a balancing art— what to accept and when and where. It’s challenging to be hired so early for things. I’m already booked for 2016, and how can you really know whether you are going to be ready to sing a big role then?”
And career pressures? “The industry is a little different for singers these days. We have to become chairmen of our own boards, and decide what is right for us and what is wrong. It can also be financially challenging, because if you accept all the work you’re offered your voice can take a hit, but if you don’t accept the work, your rent cheque may bounce!
“My mother always told me that the essence of life was balance, and I always thought ‘Oh she’s a scientist, she doesn’t get it.’ I was this dramatic kid who wanted to sing rather than clean my room. And then of course when you get into your twenties, you inevitably realize your mother was right all along.
“What singers do is so interwoven with who we are as persons, because our instrument is ourselves. You do want to work with certain people, and maybe be the youngest person ever to sing this role, but you can’t be singing Mimi at twenty-five—your voice won’t last.
“And there are so many facets to opera that people don’t see. They only notice the grand sets and the champagne parties. They don’t ever see that poor woman whose entire job is to carry around my twenty-pound costume train, which mustn’t ever get rumpled or touch the floor, on that long journey back and forth to the dressing room, and how hard that is. But I will take five really great nights singing on stage, with terrific people and great music, in exchange for those 360 other days a year of really hard work.”
Osborne’s career is international, but she treasures her West Coast roots and connections. “I run in the mornings before rehearsals, and I find I am always looking for water, a river or a pond or something, so this must be a Vancouver thing in my subconscious.
“I really want to drive home that I am a Vancouver girl at heart, and I am really grateful to Nancy Hermiston and all my other teachers who helped start all this. Irving Guttman was a real mentor, and Judith Forst who always keeps track of what I’m doing. I hope to get back as much as I can to sing, because I’m really a West Coast girl and always will be one.
“Every morning I wonder, When did this become my life? How lucky I am to be here, and how many other people made it possible for me!”
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