Verdi and Venezuela Meet in the Voice of Ana Lucrecia García

Ana Lucrecia García sings the role of Odabella in the Seattle Opera production of Verdi’s Attila, January 14-28, 2012.

Ana Lucrecia García heard her first opera from the pit, where she was playing as a professional violinist. She’d been studying violin since early childhood, nurtured by the national network of music education in Venezuela, El Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles. By age eight she was already in an orchestra. Garcia had plenty of exposure to choral singing particularly around Christmas, but opera was something she was not sure she liked, until that pit experience.

It was Bizet’s Carmen, and the descriptive, expressive arias hit her like a ton of bricks. She began mimicking them for her colleagues, from the sopranos to the basses, and soon they began to say: “You should really take some singing lessons.” She was 23 when she began to study singing in earnest, and found a fulfilling joy in it, which surprised her as she had always thought the violin was her first love.

Moving to Spain in 1998, she worked with opera greats Teresa Berganza and Alfredo Kraus, but after a few years felt there was something missing and took time off. Speaking though Seattle Opera interpreter Maria Durham, she says the singing and the repertoire she was doing did not make her happy.

But then, everything came together when she found “a marvelous Italian teacher in Madrid, Enzo Spatola. I had my first class with him December 19, 2004, began officially with him January 2005, and I’ve never stopped. He taught me to sing in a different way, and the voice bloomed that I have now. What I had inside could come out. It’s what I dreamed of doing.” Together, she says, they can do spectacular work. “I love the preparation, the discovery, the creative part of the work before the public hears the results.”

The work she achieved has indeed been spectacular. Six short years later, she was tapped by La Scala for the second cast heroine, Odabella, for Verdi’s Attila. She’d never sung such a dramatic role, never done this kind of bravura singing, requiring enormous agility in voice and body language. She had a year to prepare, and did so thoroughly.

When the opera opened last summer, she was strolling the streets of Milan with her fiancé in the afternoon, not being on for that night’s performance, when she was called at 4 p.m. to tell her that the first cast Odabella could not sing and she was needed immediately. The Italian press said after: “She staked everything on ‘Santo di patria’ the role’s intimidting calling card, and emerged with all honors.”

With each succeeding production, García continues to grow. She sang Aida here in Seattle in 2008, in a fine performance, but her skill and artistry have grown beyond that now, and even beyond her La Scala Odabella last year.

Verdi has remained her first love, and she has sung little else. Aida, I Duo Foscari, Nabucco, Macbeth, La Forza del Destino, Il Trovatore, Don Carlo, and the less-known I Masnadieri as well as Attila are all now in her repertoire, but down the road she would like perhaps to sing Puccini’s Tosca and Manon Lescaut, and Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. She has just however sung Bellini’s Norma in Salerno, a role which needs great agility and range.

Asked how her orchestral background has helped her in her opera career, she says it has in every way. “To start with, I hear opera more easily. I read it like a musician. The line of the singer is easier for me than that of the violinist. I feel I can be inside the orchestra and hear all the instuments and their language, and it gives me a different type of security. I get to know the music so well that even if I’m singing it for the first time I already know what all the music is about.” Sometimes, she says, she is told when embarking on rehearsals that it’s as though she had sung it before.

She has found this Seattle Opera production of Attila (set in the 20th century) a little hard “because of the weapons. I don’t like weapons, but the rationale (stage director) Bernard Uzan brings is very interesting and engages you from the start. The story develops clearly and without disturbing the work of the singers.”

She is happy to be back here. “It’s always a pleasure to come to Seattle. I like the theater and the way the theater works and the trust (general director) Speight Jenkins has in all of us. I like the orchestra a lot, and the chorus, and the public and the city!”

García goes on from here to sing Odabella again in San Francisco, and just as she feels she brings to this production more depth, more nuance to her Odabella than she had at La Scala, so she expects to bring yet more in San Francisco. This is a young woman whose voice, already notable, is likely to scale still more heights.