A Visit from Vivica

Mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux returns to the Minnesota Opera this month as the title character of Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers. This will be her fifth appearance with the company, having dazzled previously in Semiramide, Lucrezia Borgia, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Cenerentola.

Genaux has become the linchpin of the Minnesota Opera’s commitment to bel canto opera, the lyrical but technically demanding style favored by Rossini and other composers in the early nineteenth century. She has developed an admirable international career, but favors her stops here. “I love Minnesota Opera! I love the people,” she says. “This is one of the few companies that feels like an actual family. It takes care of its artists. For someone who’s traveling constantly, that is something to look forward to.”

Genaux was raised in Fairbanks,  Alaska, which, she insists, had a surprisingly cosmopolitan music scene. “We benefited from the Cold War,” she says. “When the Russians closed their air space, artists from Europe going to the Orient had to go across the North Pole and would often stop and perform on the way. [Alaskan audiences] needed something to get them through the cold, depressing darkness.”

She trained professionally in the continental United States, including several years studying with Nicola Rossi–Lemeni, a frequent colleague of Maria Callas’s, who gave her grounding in the bel canto style. “You always have to sing on the breath. It’s like walking a tightrope,” she says. “You have to be precise; you can’t get flabby with the sound. I have a smaller voice, so I have to concentrate all the more on technique.”

Genaux focuses on bel canto and Baroque opera and says she is content to maintain this limited repertoire, listing tenor Alfredo Kraus and soprano Mirella Freni as her models. “They had long careers by being selective,” she says. “I saw Kraus in Lucia when he was seventy, and he was amazing. There is such pressure today for singers to sing everything, and I do not understand why.”

Even in a phone interview, Genaux’s openness is disarming. She is willing to talk candidly, even about her early career insecurities. “I was always afraid I was going to get found out, that they would ask me to leave. So I worked very hard and kept my head down,” she says.

In 1994, she got her first lead role as Isabella in Italian Girl. “She is just a hoot, such an amazing character. And she became the touchstone of my career,” Genaux says. “She was everything I wasn’t and always wanted to be—charismatic and strong.”

The current production, which originally premiered in Santa Fe, is also a hoot. It updates the opera to the 1930s, so rather than having Isabella involved in a shipwreck, she is stranded in a biplane crash and strides onstage in an aviator helmet, à la Amelia Earhart.

Genaux performed Italian Girl at the San Francisco Opera, where it was a resounding success. Here, Helena Binder, responsible for last season’s magical Tales of Hoffmann, directs—so this Italian Girl will be in good hands. Nov. 10, 13, 15, 17, 18. Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 345 Washington St., St. Paul, 651-333-6669