Singing Their Praises
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LOCAA’s already riding high on the celebrity of a recent alum, 27-year-old soprano Nicole Cabell, newly crowned BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. Vocal competitions are handily dissed in Murray’s book—he calls them “absurd” as a “dumb TV reality show”—and Pearlman, he wrote, found them meaningless except as a source of prize money. But when Cabell—who has the looks to match her extraordinary voice—triumphed at Cardiff and became an international media darling overnight, LOCAA began issuing press releases about the competitive prowess of its brood. In the wake of her victory, Pearlman, who first spotted Cabell, then an Eastman undergrad, in a class he taught at Chautauqua five years ago, allowed that he feels “like a proud papa.”
LOCAA, started in 1974, has morphed from a larger, looser training center into a highly selective two- to three-year program for about a dozen performers. With an annual budget of $1.4 million and four full-time staff members (down from five after the Lyric’s cuts last spring), it’s a nonprofit entity separate from but supported by the opera company, which it serves as a convenient source of labor. (This year the 13 ensemble members are scheduled to sing 103 parts in Lyric productions.) Pearlman screens 500 singers from all over the country annually; final auditions are held in September, and just a few singers (usually four) are admitted each spring. Ensemble members get a union contract, a 12-month stipend (currently $32,500), training in voice, acting, and languages, supporting roles in Lyric productions, larger roles with the center’s educational outreach programs, and the occasional understudy’s big break—a chance to step in for an ailing star. They also get unparalleled exposure in a continual, nerve-racking parade of auditions for directors and agents who drop in at the center on scouting trips.
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