Kathryn Lewek is a soprano from Connecticut — a dramatic coloratura (a rare and special kind of soprano). She is a famous Queen of the Night (the Queen being a character in Mozart’s Magic Flute). This summer at the Salzburg Festival, she sang the Four Heroines in The Tales of Hoffmann (Offenbach). She is delightful and interesting to talk to. In Salzburg, we recorded a Q&A, found here.
Katie Lewek can sing high, high, high. But she started out low. “I worked with a teacher who was known for his work with low voices,” she says. That was Robert McIver, at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, N.Y. “And my grandmother was a contralto who worked with Louise Homer.” Louise Homer was a famous contralto (1871–1947) who was the aunt of Samuel Barber.
At her first lesson with Dr. McIver, Katie said, “We have to get one thing straight: I don’t sing high and I don’t sing fast.” In the fulness of time, there was no one higher or faster.
“I always had these sort of stratospheric high notes,” Katie says, “but I thought they were similar to a male falsetto” — not real notes, not substantial ones, sort of fake ones. “I had no idea this was something I was supposed to be developing, and no one else knew” — no one else knew she had this odd “extension.”
One summer, she was at the Music Academy of the West, outside Santa Barbara. Running the voice program was Marilyn Horne, the legendary mezzo-soprano.
Katie was in a practice room, warming up before a rehearsal. She was doing a mezzo role in an opera. One of the voice coaches walked by. She (the coach) thought, “I know we have two coloratura sopranos here at the Academy, and that voice is neither one of them.” She peeked through the window of the practice room. Then she went to Horne, saying, “Do you realize that Katie Lewek has ridiculous high notes?”
Either that day or the next, Katie had a lesson with Horne — who said to her, “You haven’t been honest with me.” “No, no!” Katie protested. “I have these notes, sure, but no one wants to hear them. They’re really ugly. They sound like a cat screeching or dying.” Horne said, “Well, why don’t we explore?”
And they did.
Katie calls the Queen of the Night her “passport role.” She has stamps from countries all over the world, because she has been invited to sing the Queen. She sings many other things as well, of course. But Mozart is “my sugar daddy,” she quips. “He’s given me everything I’ve got. He bought my car, he bought my house, he feeds my kids . . .”
I could say much more, but it is better simply to listen to Kathryn Lewek. Again, our Q&A is here. And for a different kind of listening: sample her Queen, here.