Thursday 2 July 1998

From the ghetto to the Met

Denyce Graves grew up in a neighbourhood where drugs, crime and hopelessness were common. Steven Mazey reports.

Steven Mazey
The Ottawa Citizen

Denyce Graves made her Metropolitan Opera debut as a sultry, charismatic Carmen.

She is only 32 -- practically a toddler in opera terms -- but she is already one of Placido Domingo's favourite co-stars, she has been profiled on 60 Minutes and she has been called "one of the singers most likely to be an operatic superstar in the 21st century."

She opened the past Metropolitan Opera season as Carmen, a role that has won her raves around the world. She had her own Christmas special on PBS last year, and she has just signed a contract with a major record label.

But getting there meant surviving the tough, hard ghetto where she grew up in Washington, D.C., a neighbourhood where opera was about as remote as the surface of the moon.

Praised internationally for her dark, sumptuous voice and charismatic stage presence, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves grew up in a neighbourhood where drugs, crime and hopelessness were commonplace, and where her friends and neighbours did not spend a lot of time talking about opera. As a girl, she once saw a man shot in the street. Children brought knives to school.

"Of the kids I grew up with, half of them are either dead or in prison," she says today.

But Graves survived and escaped that world, thanks largely, she says, to two women who helped shape her life.

There was her strict mother, who was determined that her children would not be victims of their neighbourhood. Raising three children on her own after her husband left, Dorothy Graves kept them busy with chores, extra homework and activities that included singing in the choir at the Garden of Prayer Pentecostal Church. Every day, she told her children that they were smart and talented, that they could have any kind of life they wanted.

And there was her elementary-school music teacher, who recognized her student's love for singing and who offered encouragement and guidance right up until Graves' departure for Oberlin Conservatory.

"At home, I was protected by my mother, whose faith cannot be shaken. And at school I had this guardian angel in my music teacher," says Graves, who on Saturday will sing with the National Arts Centre Orchestra for the first time.

"I wasn't unusually talented when I was very young. It wasn't until my late teens that my voice really developed. But my teacher saw what singing did for me and how much I loved it, and she encouraged that. She took me under her wing."

Graves' first Ottawa performance, conducted by Mario Bernardi, will include show-stopping arias from Carmen, Samson and Dalila and Werther, along with lighter American pieces from Show Boat and Porgy and Bess and songs by Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen.

Graves discovered the popular songs only after leaving home. At home, her mother allowed only gospel music and refused to let her children listen to pop or rock, though they sometimes listened to Michael Jackson and others when their mother was away.

The popular songs she'll do Saturday "are songs I love to sing around the house for my own enjoyment, but they're all songs I discovered only fairly recently," says Graves, speaking recently from San Francisco, where she was singing Carmen for the San Francisco Opera.

"Growing up, I had no exposure to it. But they're all songs that speak to me." In elementary school and junior high, Graves was awkward and unpopular, teased by classmates for not

having a clue about the popular rock groups of the day.

When her school music teacher suggested that she audition for the Duke Ellington School of Performing Arts at 14, Graves' life changed. She suddenly found herself with students who loved the arts as much as she did, and she was no longer an outcast.

At first, Graves thought she might go on to be a gospel singer.

But when the school attended a dress rehearsal of Beethoven's Fidelio, she was swept away. And when a teacher gave her a recording of Marilyn Horne singing an aria from Cavalleria Rusticana, Graves was similarly enthralled.

"I sang along with it over and over until I knew it by heart," she says. "I knew this was what I wanted to do."

Taking on a heavy course load, Graves finished high school at 16, and went on to Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and then to the New England Conservatory in Boston. She worked her way through school doing odd jobs that included singing at cosmetics counters and working overnight shifts at a Boston hotel.

In 1988, she won a spot in the training program of the Houston Grand Opera.

She sang small roles there for the next two years, and quickly attracted notice for her rich, powerful voice and her stage presence. She also won several awards and competitions.

When Graves appeared in a production of Othello there with Placido Domingo, she so impressed the star tenor that he began asking for Graves for his concert appearances. People began talking about the sensational young mezzo, and the offers started arriving.

It wasn't long before Graves was singing starring roles in big opera houses. She won particularly enthusiastic acclaim for her Carmen. Several European critics have said she is the most exciting interpreter of the role working today.

"I was fortunate that I had my first big success with that role," says Graves. "Because it's such a popular staple of the repertoire, it got my foot in the doors of the big houses. I had the vehicle to take me there, but once I was there, I worked very hard to prove myself as an artist."

Though she is particularly known for Carmen and her Dalila, Graves has also won positive reviews for other roles, including Charlotte in Werther, Adalgisa in Norma, Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte and Baba the Turk in The Rake's Progress.

"I like characters that have substance and blood to them. I'm not just specializing in sex bombs," she says with a laugh.

Though early in her career she was offered secondary roles by the Metropolitan Opera, Graves turned down the company until they invited her to debut as Carmen in 1995. She wanted her first performance there to be a big role, and she was a smash.

"Ms. Graves has a classic mezzo-soprano voice with dusky colourings and a wide range, from her chesty low voice to her gleaming top notes," wrote a New York Times critic. "She is a compelling stage actress who exuded the sensuality that any Carmen must have but few do.

"If anything, Miss Graves underestimates her charisma. She didn't need to do all the standard-issue hip swivelling É Much more effective was the moment after her arrest É when, sitting on a table with her hands tied behind her back, she slowly lifted her skirt above her knees with her teeth. From that moment, Ms. Graves had the Met audience enthralled."

Graves says she's tough on herself, but is happy with a performance "if my voice is all there, if I'm in control and able to do what I want. Sometimes you're not able to execute your intentions. But when my voice is responsive, when I feel that what I'm doing is honest and true, and I can lose myself in a piece, then I'm happy."

Graves says she's delighted to have achieved success that allows her to be choosy and to space out her engagements.

"In the beginning you feel so seduced by everything, so compelled to accept every engagement. But now I'm realizing it's not how much you work, it's the quality of the performances. I've become more discriminating. I need time to re-charge, so that I'm hungry for the stage."

Graves lives in Virginia in a large country house with her husband David Perry, a guitarist who also helps manage her career. They have formed their own production company, and last December they produced Graves' Christmas special, taped in front of an audience at a cathedral in Washington.

She's a hometown heroine there, and she says her mother, her elementary-school music teacher and many of the friends and family who supported her for years were there to see the result of her hard work.

"When I see the way my mother looks at me, that speaks so much to me. I know she's thrilled, because I'm thrilled too."

Graves says she's especially proud of the way she has been able to share her new world with her family.

"I come from an experience where the word opera was as foreign as one could get. This thing has opened up my family to something that they felt they had no connection to and couldn't relate to, and now we all enjoy it. That thrills me."

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Denyce Graves joins the NAC Orchestra and conductor Mario Bernardi Saturday at 8 p.m. in the NAC Opera. Tickets, from $27 to $57, are available at the NAC box office, or, with surcharges, through TicketMaster outlets (755-1111). Half-price student tickets are available in person only, with identification, at the NAC or at TicketMaster outlets.