Matt Fried Photo
(Note to Reader: If, generally, you don’t make it a point to attend student concerts, I hope what follows lures you to Yale’s Morse Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday March 27, not only because the price is right — free — but because what you’ll hear may put you in the lilting mood I have enjoyed since first experiencing the work of the scheduled performer.)
Question: What chance would a girl have who grows up on her family’s sheep farm in Scotland to become an opera singer who dazzles audiences in, among other places, Moscow, Sulmona, Italy, and New Haven, U.S.A.?
Answer: No chance. That is, unless she not only grows into a young woman of natural talent, but along the way demonstrates iron will, embraces risk as necessity, and is open to life-affirming surprise.
For Lauren McQuistin, the inspiration for the mini-quiz above, farming was in her blood, going back eight generations in the tiny and remote town of Stranraer. (To pronounce the name the way its citizens do, McQuistin advised, “Take out the vowels and mash the rest together.”)
She was the eldest of three children, at least one of whom, it was hoped by their parents, would develop fascination with ovine and bovine behavior.
However, 21st century dreams and word of widespread opportunities reached, as she described it, “an expansive and wild and untamed place,” where the closest city is Belfast, across the Irish Sea.
Lauren McQuistin, it turned out, had a natural ear.
In a sense, this wasn’t surprising. “Both of my grandmothers sang in church. They had gorgeous if untrained voices.”
At first, she used her passion for music as a piano student. By the time she was 14, she was good at it, but in her view, not good enough. “I wanted to be a concert pianist,” she recalled, “but I realized that’s not for me, as I would never reach that level.”
But because of her interest in all things artistic, including poetry, theater, history, and acting, her piano teacher had an idea. “She told me, ‘Everything you love you find in opera.”
Lauren’s mother took her on the three-hour car trip to the Edinburgh Playhouse to see Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
“Everything was elevated. For any teenager who is experiencing big emotions for the first time, to hear people singing about their emotions put me in tears.” So did hearing a live orchestra for the first time.
“It never occurred to me that the musicians were full time. I thought they had work. That they were bankers or something in the daytime. I didn’t know that opera was a job.” Afterward, she went to see all the operas she could, and when local school days ended, she made the big announcement that she would be going to the conservatory in Glasgow to become an opera singer.
“Yeah, right,” was the response from many who, Lauren recalled, “thought it was the flavor of the month. But my family was wonderfully supportive.”
Synthia Steiman Photo
By the time she finished in Glasgow, she had an undergraduate degree, more confidence as a budding soprano, but also a warning. One of her teachers talked of the highly competitive nature of the opera world -– a lot of would-be divas out there waiting tables – and that she ought to have a back-up plan.
This advice, easily interpreted as, “You’re not quite good enough,” might have crushed the spirit of another student not named Lauren McQuistin, who had no interest in a back-up plan. Well, then, the teacher advised, “You’d better go to America” to get a graduate degree.
She applied to Indiana University’s music school, known for its opera master’s program, and was invited to perform for the dean. With money she earned from work in a department store and as recipient of local grants that support artists, she bought a one-way airline ticket, and, as it turned out, largely stayed in the States ever since, even as her international career has taken off.
Two years ago, having earned her degree at Indiana, she applied to Yale, and, to her surprise, was quickly invited in the school’s post-master’s program.
Even with all of this education, and with her skills, she knew she needed an edge. An opera singer, traditionally receives training in the traditional languages of opera: Italian, French, and German. But, betting everything on an agenda that included no back-up, she wanted to become competitive for other productions, and so studied Russian on her own. That’s what led her eventually to Moscow, and, at the age of 26, to a role she had not imagined for herself, on the stage of the historic Shubert Theater on College Street.
I saw her work in the final performance of Yale Opera’s production in February of Tchaikovsky’s dramatic Eugene Onegin. McQuistin had the lead female role of Tatyana, the Russian peasant girl who falls desperately in love with an older man, Onegin, who crudely brushes her off and lives to regret it.
Her power and presence on stage was something the audience quickly noted. She saud the results were only natural, “because the music is so intuitive. It almost sang itself.”
That’s not what I thought. What I thought was here was an extraordinary talent, with a powerful stage presence, and in subtle ways, displaying a sense of poetry and sensuality even in scenes in which she was alone on stage.
A similar view was held not only by most audience members, who plied her with enthusiastic curtain calls, but by a special attendee on opening night. Sir Jonathan Mills, a composer and the former director of the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival, happened to be in town to work with Yale students on a new piece that will debut in New York City. When he learned of the Yale Opera production of Eugene Onegin, he bought a ticket. It was only from the program that he learned that the lead female role was a Scot.
After the show, he was among the many well-wishers who went to a reception. When the soprano arrived, she was astonished to see such a famous figure from home waiting for her. He told her that she and her fellow cast members had made the characters very human, with “a Russian edge.” And, “I didn’t expect to find such Scottish talent in America.”
But then, he’d never met a Lauren McQuistin, who never took nae for an answer.
Lary Bloom’s books include the biography, Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas, to be released this spring by Wesleyan University Press.