ARIA CODE: Christine Teeters sings with Boston Opera Collaborative. |
Perched on the lid of a lace-draped baby grand, a bobblehead quivers along with Christine Teeters's vibrato as she powers through a Tuesday-night voice lesson in the Steinway Piano Building on Boylston Street. Teeters and her younger sister, Rebecca, are Oklahoma natives, both music-school graduates (Christine, 29, from Boston Conservatory; Rebecca, 25, from New England Conservatory) pursuing careers as opera professionals. Their teacher, Kevin Wilson, is a faculty member of Boston Conservatory (and also a native of the Sooner State, who met Christine while they were students at the University of Central Oklahoma). Wilson's face is cherubic. His mouth, less so.
"You got to geweint and you shit the bed!" he laughs at Rebecca, who is struggling to wrap her lips around a phrase in a German aria.
"Technical term," Christine whispers.
Both Teeters sisters are sopranos, the most divalicious of voice parts, but so far, they've held sibling rivalry and general prima-donna conduct at bay. "We were at undergrad together for two years," says Christine. "We studied with the same teacher, we sang together in a few shows. We even shared the same role once. But it's kind of amazing — I get really excited for her. I've never felt terribly competitive. I've never lost out to her, but that might change soon. She's really coming into her own."
Coming into your own as a classical singer involves an extraordinary hustle and flow, a constant whirlwind of voice lessons, auditions all over the country, character and text interpretation, and applications to Young Artists Programs (YAPs) — highly competitive development and performance residences with professional opera companies — all in an effort to get that first juicy role under your belt, which can help lead to big breaks.
"It's a complicated cycle," says Christine. "You go to grad school, then you're supposed to get into a YAP. We, as singers, go through a year-long process to learn our 'pocket five' — five arias we can sing at the drop of a hat. Applications for YAPs cost a lot of money. You have to apply every year, sometimes to more than 40 programs. But these are things you have to get on your résumé."
Christine has yet to be accepted into a YAP.
"Two years ago, I would have said that there was nothing in Boston for young singers," she says. "Because of the economy, a lot of companies that people depended on for work, such as Cape Cod Opera, are shutting their doors. That's scary."
That cursed economy has many young professionals singing the blues, especially the soon-to-be-ex-students who will be greeted by a barren job market come commencement. And singers? Opera singers, looking to build a career in an art form that was already on life support before this whole international fiscal debacle? Most of them were already resigning themselves to a life of ramen noodles and financial sorrows before things reached rock bottom.
