It takes one listen to be smitten with Claycomb

BYLINE: Michael Barnes, AMERICAN STATESMAN ARTS WRITER     
DATE: February 7, 2003
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
SECTION: Lifestyle

Let's be candid: I've lost my head for Laura Claycomb .

The Texas-born soprano, who makes her Austin debut with cellist Nina Kotova and pianist Jose Feghali at One World Theatre on Sunday, is exactly what every opera aficionado craves. Her lithe features and ever-expanding acting range allow her to play tender ingenues, comic servants and feisty temptresses with equal aplomb. Her impossibly high, unblemished voice elicits swoons of praise from critics and audiences, while her natural Texan ease dispels any concern that Claycomb , who made her first big splash at the Geneva Opera in 1994, will succumb to "spoiled diva" syndrome.

Doubt the fervor of my idolatry? After hearing the newly established star sing just once in Houston in 2001, my partner and I planned an entire weeklong vacation around Claycomb 's performance as Zerbinetta in San Francisco Opera's "Ariadne auf Naxos" in 2002.

I mean, what's the point of opera's pleasurable excesses without a touch of obsession?

My first contact with the singer was hardly promising. A little more than a year ago, an American-Statesman copy editor, who knew Claycomb from her intern days with San Francisco Opera, tipped me that the Dallas-raised singer was to sing Gilda for the first time in Houston Grand Opera's "Rigoletto." Would I consider interviewing her?

The more obvious news angle that October 2001 was the Houston premiere of handsome Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. So what if Claycomb grew up in Texas? So did hundreds of thousands of other artists. Not really that newsworthy, right?

Wrong. Here's a sample from my review of Claycomb show-stealing performance: "The singer, willowy and pale, a stranger to almost everyone in attendance, barely opened her lips to produce a tiny, incredibly pure sound. . . . While she sang, not a whisper was heard from the full house, and when she finished, the delirious applause seemed to last for several long minutes."

Claycomb had kidnapped my heart. A old friend, who had accompanied me to the opera periodically since college days in the 1970s, said immediately after her Houston performance: "Now I get it. This is what opera can be."

Prior to her Houston triumph, Claycomb and I had exchanged a few polite e-mails about a possible future profile in the American-Statesman. As soon as I returned to Austin after "Rigoletto," I ransacked her Web site (lauraclaycomb.com), sought out her recordings, then made plans for a 3,000-mile round trip to hear "Ariadne" in California a few months later.

For such a special occasion, a Chicago friend and opera fan met us in San Francisco. We took along yet another old friend, this one an opera virgin, to what turned out to be a red-letter night at the War Memorial Opera House.

Claycomb was merely good in the first act, flexing her singing muscles while stretching her limbs and comic timing as the actress Zerbinetta. But her big second-act aria, "Grossmaechtige Prinzessin," produced clouds of shimmering notes that held an audience of normally reserved San Franciscans in virtual thrall.

The next day, the singer and I met for an interview at a coffee shop in the basement of the nearby City Hall. She snarled, she laughed, she dissed other sopranos like a schoolgirl. Her keen intelligence and stubborn professionalism persisted as we discussed the equilibrium between acting and singing in opera.

"I have tried certain things that might actually impede good singing to help acting in past performances, I must admit, to test my limits," she says. "There is a fine balance between conveying emotion with your voice and letting emotion take hold of and ruin your voice. There are places to feel and there are places to act and sing, and I have to pull myself together for the singing points, and know when I need to pull back from the emotions. It's so gratifying, but so funny that my acting is now why people cause such a fuss over me! I think the main thing is I'm now willing to risk with my training behind me -- risk looking stupid, sounding not so hot, running out of breath because I'd rather have risked and failed than never have tried for greatness."

And we caught up on her history: all about her piano studies and finger injury which led to a concentration on training the voice, about her surprising solo performances at Lovers Lane United Methodist Church in Dallas, then her study under Barbara Hill Moore at Southern Methodist University.

Two stints at the summertime Merola Program led to the San Francisco Opera fellowship and a chance to back up the stars in major roles. She was supposed to being doing just that -- "covering" Guilietta in Geneva's "I Capuleti e i Montecchi" -- in 1994 when one star took sick, then a replacement suffered a minor car accident.

"It is a veritable miracle!" shouted the (Geneva) Le Courrier critic Andre Hunziker in response to her surprise debut.

"Young, slender and beautiful, Laura Claycomb is stunning, her high notes are invigorating and her pianissimi, stupefying," concurred Le Monde's Renaud Machart when she repeated the role under similar circumstances at Paris' Bastille in 1995.

After her Geneva conquest, she won competitions and sang at operatic meccas such as La Scala in Milan. She recorded Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre" at the Salzburg Festival, among several collaborations with Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Handel's "Arcadian Duets" with Emmanuelle Haim and her group Le Concert D'Astree. Claycomb moved from Rome to Brussels with her Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Tullio, three years ago, and has been romantically involved with Jan Goossens, the artistic director of the Royal Flemish Theater in Brussels.

One thing: She still hasn't sung professionally in her hometown, Dallas. Last month, however, she returned to Houston for the title role in "Lucia di Lammermoor." My published response: "Singing 'O giusto cielo!' Claycomb trilled and spilled like nobody's business, but her most breathtaking moments were of absolutely controlled micro-notes that hushed the audience, before cries of 'bravissima' and extended applause."

The One World appearance is an outgrowth of her friendship with Kotova, who devised the program of mostly Russian music that includes a new composition by the cellist. And it is something of a coup for the eclectic West Austin venue to present Claycomb before she has returned to her hometown of Dallas.

It will give Austinites a chance to test the grandiose claim made in my "Lucia" review: " Claycomb might very well be the greatest operatic artist Texas has ever produced."

mbarnes@statesman.com; 445-3647

(from box)

Laura Claycomb

When: 4:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: One World Theatre, 7701 Bee Cave Road

Tickets: $29-$70

Information: 329-6753, 469-SHOW