Adriana González is a young soprano from Guatemala — an unusual place for a soprano, or any other classical musician, to be from. She is also a rising star. This year, she is a hit at the Salzburg Festival. Yesterday, I recorded a podcast with her, a Q&A: here. A wonderful conversationalist, this young woman is.
At the festival, she is singing the role of the Countess in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This is a famously murderous role — requiring long, seamless breaths and high pianos. Mozart in general is difficult for a singer. It exposes you. It separates the men from the boys (and the women from the girls).
Says Adriana, about the role of the Countess, “It’s a big responsibility, because the arias are written in a way that leaves you bare naked out there. You cannot commit one mistake, because it would be immediately audible.” You have to produce “this beautiful sound — a lace sound, where one thing goes into another. And everything is so delicate that if you push your voice, or do something that doesn’t work, everything falls apart.”
For sure.
In our conversation, we talk a fair amount about breathing — breathing in singing and even breathing in life (ordinary, daily life). “You need to learn how to breathe,” says Adriana. “It’s the basis of singing. If you don’t know how to breathe, you’re going to have a lot of problems.”
She further says, “If you learn how to breathe, you’re more at peace with yourself. True diaphragmatic breathing makes you be calm. It takes the nerves away.”
I should try it.
As we talked, I thought — when do I not? — of golf. I told Adriana something about Jack Nicklaus. He said that when he reached a particularly tense point in a tournament, he took care to do one thing: relax his jaw. This, he said, helped relax the rest of his body.
“Does that make sense to you?” I asked Adriana. She answered, “Completely.” She then gave a rather detailed explanation. She concluded with, “Everything in the body is connected. If you are aware of how your body works together as one complex mechanism, you can optimize it. Classical singing is, in a way, a high-performance sport.”
You will want to hear Adriana González when you can — hear her sing, I mean. In the meantime, enjoy her in our Q&A, which is, again, here.