In HGO’s ‘Tosca,’ Soprano and HGO Studio Alum Wilson Offers a ‘Down-to-Earth’ Take on the Titular Role
Apr. 17, 2023
Wilson in 'Tosca' (photo by Lynn Lane)
HOUSTON HOLDS A special place in the heart of internationally renowned, Arizona-born soprano Tamara Wilson, who makes her role debut this Friday as Floria Tosca in the Houston Grand Opera’s production of Tosca.
Wilson is a 2005-2007 alumna of the HGO’s Butler Studio Program, one of the world’s most respected young artist programs. Although she had sung very little opera before joining the program, Wilson quickly developed a strong work ethic, covering lots of roles, and sitting in on company rehearsals to observe first-hand how professional singers collaborate with different directors and conductors. Then, in 2007, the powers that be at the HGO asked Wilson if she could replace Patricia Racette as Amelia for the entire run of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball). Despite never having sung a note of Verdi, Wilson decided to go for it.
“It was one of those things where if I step up to the plate, do a big ol’ swing and miss, then that’s fine. I’m still learning,” says Wilson. “Luckily, it was a home run for me.”
Wilson, who now lives in Houston, has gone on to enjoy a highly successful career singing plenty of Verdi as well as the music of Mozart, Strauss and Wagner. She returned to the HGO last year to sing the title role in director Robert Wilson’s highly acclaimed production of Turandot. Tosca will be yet another achievement in her already illustrious career.
While Tosca is often played as a melodramatic diva, and Verdi’s music can certainly lend itself to that, Wilson’s take on her role is refreshingly down-to-earth. “I think she’s just a gal who was an orphan, who has been lucky enough to meet the love of her life,” says Wilson. “She gets jealous, just like anybody would in a relationship, but deep down, she has this feeling of, ‘Don’t leave me.’”
Along with that deep vulnerability, Wilson is also adamant in portraying Tosca not as a weakling, but as a strong woman. “Tosca was raised by monks and having gone to Catholic school as a young ‘un . . . you kind of build up a thick skin,” says Wilson, whose mother works for the Catholic Church. “That’s the easy part about Tosca — all the Catholic stuff!”
Known for her ability to skillfully perform a wide range of demanding repertoire, people often describe Wilson’s dramatic, coloratura voice based on whatever rep they’ve happened to have heard her sing. “I mostly hear my mom in my voice,” says Wilson, again, bringing things down to earth. “I hear me and my mom on a piano bench just singing and hanging out.” (There’s a charming and prescient video on YouTube of Wilson’s first public performance at age three with her mother playing piano.)
In high school, Wilson’s first voice teacher told her, “Sing with your voice. Everyone else’s is taken.” Years later, Wilson still strives to sing with an authentic voice, a voice you might not recognize upon first hearing it, but a voice that is truly her own. “People go to live theater to see something that is authentic and truthful and your performance,” says Wilson. “It’s not just how you sound. It’s how you tell stories, and how you connect with the music and your colleagues. … And it should always evolve.”
Tosca opens Friday, April 21, and runs through May 5. John Caird directs, and Benjamin Manis conducts.
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IT IS RARE for a classically trained musician to abandon the traditional landscape of the conductor and orchestra to explore a looser, more improvisatory way of creating music — but that is exactly what Rice music grad and former Houston Symphony Principal Harpist Megan Conley has done.
On April 15 and 16, she and her fellow musicians in the Silk Road Ensemble are in town to perform the Houston premiere of composer Osvaldo Golijov’s song cycle Falling Out of Time, an elegiac “tone poem in voices” based on Israeli writer David Grossman’s experimental novel of the same name. “It’s definitely out of my comfort zone,” says Conley of her role in the ensemble, which includes her husband Shawn Conley on upright and fretless bass. “I loved playing in the Houston Symphony. But I reached the point where I wanted to be able to do things like this. The subject matter itself feels so important.”
Grossman was inspired to write Falling Out of Time after his son Uri was killed in the Israel war in Lebanon in 2006. Using prose, poetry and drama, Grossman tells the story of a father grieving the death of his son, who is driven to embark on a pilgrimage, on foot, with the hope that he will find some way to communicate with his boy and come to grips with such unfathomable tragedy. Golijov discovered the book in 2013 and was compelled to drop a composition he had been wrestling with and bring Grossman’s story to life with music.
The instrumentation for this weekend’s performances of Falling Out of Time includes three vocalists and a combination of classical and rock instrumentation, including electric guitar, modular synthesizer, and drums. Conley came on board after Falling Out of Time’s premiere, which featured pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and this weekend’s performances will be her first with the group. “Golijov writes for people, not the instrument,” says Conley. “So when Wu Man was not able to do this tour, they didn’t just look for the next best pipa player in the world, they looked for someone who could fill the role that she played.” While the harp shares some similarities with the pipa, the musical language is very different; Golijov has been working with Conley to utilize the full possibilities of her instrument, asking her to improvise as well as play scored rhythms within set timelines.
Since stepping away from the Symphony and becoming a mother (she and Shawn live in Honolulu and have a five-year-old boy who is taking piano lessons), Conley, now 40, has also become very passionate about ocean conservation and protecting the Earth’s waterways. Her non-profit organization Ocean Music Action presents performances of music thematically connected to water and the ocean and facilitates direct conservation action. “Using music to inspire people to take action is a really positive thing,” says Conley. “We can all, in some way, give back and protect the resources that belong to and are important to us.”
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