Fifteen thousand people sang during the 2013 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. They were between the ages of 20 and 30; from 40 districts, in 12 regions across the country. From 15,000, ten made it to the finals earlier this week.
From 10, there were six winners, including three baritone-basses. Efraín Solís, a baritone, was not one of the three, despite a stunning performance.
But clearly this is a young man at the gates. He won the San Francisco district in the auditions, which is no mean trick, and was awarded first place in the East Bay Opera League Scholarship Competition and second place in the Berkeley Piano Club's Dorothy Van Waynen Vocal Competition.
He’s 23, and by day a graduate student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studies with César Ulloa. He describes his voice as “not huge; it’s decent but not a Wagnerian voice. I don’t know what it’s gong to turn to.”
We caught up with Solís earlier this week to ask about the competition and also about his graduate recital at the conservatory, which will be held this Sunday, March 17, in Sol Joseph Recital Hall at 8 p.m. He will be performing with Mai-Linh Pham on piano; Igor Pancevski on piano, and soprano Andrea Flores.
Solís is from Orange Country and a graduate of Chapman College. He is the first member of his family to go to college, and has been studying music since sophomore year in high school. He counts about 30 competitions in his life and notes that the final Met concert was actually “not very stressful.”
“It was my first time in a finals with an orchestra but it was alright. The atmosphere was welcoming and I like competing, I enjoy the process. It pushes me to work harder and to focus on really being the best. Somebody told me once, find out what you’re good at and then make sure you excel at that. At this point my strength is my age; I was the youngest male in the competition and that’s very important these days when there’s so much emphasis on HD and videos, and you have to look good both on stage and on camera.”
Is there anything he would change in his performance?
“There may have been some things I would have done differently; I’m not sure. The repertoire is limited because your voice is going to get bigger but at the same time you’re trying to show as many styles as possible.
“Right now my strength is Classical and Baroque. Those are what I do well and you just have to keep going. It’s all part of the layering process in a career. You keep building on what you’ve learned, you keep working on your technique, you stay patient, you keep adjusting to changes in your voice. It’s like a stick shift in your car; you can’t go from first gear to fifth, you have to work your way up through the gears. By the same token, you can’t wake up one day and say you’re going to sing Verdi when you’ve never sung any Mozart.”
This spring, Solís will join the Studio Artist Program at Opera Santa Barbara and take the role of Dr. Malatesta in Don Pasquale. This summer, he has been selected for the Merola Opera Program and will sing the part of Junius in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia.
As for his final recital at the Conservatory, he notes the timing was not the best.
“It was crazy of me to try to do that this week, but I had little choice since I’ll be gone in April. So I decided on a balance of things that are for me musically pleasing: Mahler, on the heavier side, musically and emotionally, balanced by Vaughan Williams and Ravel, which is not so taxing but musically satisfying. For the finale (the last scene from Eugene Onegin), I chose something I’ve wanted to sing with someone I’ve known since high school, Andrea Flores. We were also in college together. She’s actually one of the people who drew me to opera. She’s very passionate about it and that transferred to me. Interestingly, we’ve never sung together.”
Asked what advice he might afford to young singers considering a professional career, Solís replied, “One thing that’s part of me is that I really enjoy the process — I enjoy learning musical technique and languages. And that’s what it comes to I think your heart has to be in it; otherwise, it’s just a job. Of course, you have to pay the bills, but if you don’t have something else driving you it can be very tiring. I’ve seen people who don’t love it and the audience knows when a performer isn’t being truthful. You just feel it. It’s like not being convinced like when someone tells you a story, when you don’t believe them …
“In high school, one year I was in Les Miserables, and after each performance I realized that this was something I wanted to do all my life. I had a job working as a teller in high school, and my parents were very happy with that. They hoped I would stay in banking. But there was just no way I could do that. Would I have been happy finding a teaching position somewhere and being part of the church choir? No, that wasn’t enough for me. I never gave myself that option.”