Catriona Barr in the role of Cherubino, from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro

Fabulous mezzo-soprano Kimberly Barber was in town the other day to do a recital and masterclass.  I couldn’t make it to the recital (I’d have to miss choir practice), so I went to the masterclass.  I went hoping to take away some tidbits of vocal technique, but the participants were all excellent singers already so that wasn’t the focus at all.  (Although she did make the singers do some of the same exercises my choir directors make us do, and for the same stated reasons.) 

Instead, the class was mainly about conveying personality and emotion while singing.  This year, the U of A opera students are performing Handel’s Serce, which is an excellent choice in a program where women significantly outnumber men.   While the dramatis personae are only slightly biased in favour of men, a good proportion of them are “trouser” roles: once upon a time they might have been sung by castrati, but these days they’re sung by women.  As an experienced performer, Barber has sung plenty of the mezzo-soprano’s trifecta of “witches, bitches, and britches“, but britches were very new to the students.  A good proportion of each student’s segment, as well as the question period after, was dedicated to “how do you portray masculinity”. 

It was a radfem reality check moment for me: these highly-educated, artistically and emotionally sensitive women lacked the language and underlying concepts to communicate about what they were doing, and were pretty much re-inventing the wheel. Read more