If you’re angry, people can hear it in your voice. “The throat and the emotions are so bound up together.
“I’ve never been sexually abused, but I know what it’s like to be an outsider, growing up as a Black man in the South.” His challenge is to manage an intensity that rarely abates after the first explosion. In the weeks before the curtain goes up on September 27, what Liverman will be worrying about most is how to balance the role’s technical and emotional demands - specifically, how to channel the character’s rage without clenching his larynx. And not just any opening night: This would be a new production, a Met premiere, and the company’s first work by a Black composer. This casting propels him into a rarefied club, singing the lead in a new work on opening night at the Met. He’d performed with regional companies, had a couple of secondary roles at the Met (plus a stint as Papageno), and drawn the attention of some talent-sniffers. “The audition tape he sent us was a confirmation of what we already knew.” Until that moment, Liverman was a promising young baritone with a knack for classic comedic roles like Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
“We’d felt he was the right singer and had discussed it with Terence,” says the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb. “A few days later, we signed the contract.”īehind the scenes, he had been all but cast already: He was the only baritone asked to audition for the role. Liverman turned to the aria and read the line “Prepare to die, motherfucker.” “I thought, What am I getting myself into?” he recalls. “The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears,” Blow writes, and the opera, like his book, is a tough tale of sexual abuse, poverty, racism, and violent threats during his upbringing in Louisiana.
The Metropolitan Opera planned to reopen with Terence Blanchard’s 2019 adaptation of Charles Blow’s memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones. A year ago, with concert halls and opera houses shut and most professional singers reduced to performing for their pets, baritone Will Liverman received a life-changing phone call.
0 kommentar(er)
