Meet Our Artists
A conversation with Dorabella, Brenda Patterson
The holidays are right around the corner, and so is our newly-revamped production of Così fan tutte! To kick off the start of another fantastic production, we're letting our FGOpera Blog readers take a peek behind-the-curtain with our "Meet Our Artists" interview series—where we ask our artists a series of informative yet entertaining questions about their personal and performance lives.
This week we were lucky to sit down with Brenda Patterson before the holiday rush began. Brenda will be making her FGO debut in the role of Dorabella on January 24, 27, 31, and February 12. Keep reading to check out the full interview.
I'm Brenda Patterson; I'm a lyric mezzo and I'm playing Dorabella. I grew up in Washington, D.C., and currently live in Berlin and New York. What I love about opera is that it does and says things no other art form can do or say—and how!
Very true! On the flip side: What is one opera cliché that drives you crazy?
I think as long as one approaches opera with love, honesty, and respect, anything goes! So, I suppose the overarching "cliché" that I reject is that any opera has to be presented a certain way, telling the expected story about the expected characters. After all, an opera only exists as it is channeled and created anew by the singers and instrumentalists performing it live.
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| Dorabella in Così fan tutte, Hamburgische Staatsoper 2005 |
I sang Dorabella at the Hamburg State Opera 10 years ago. What I love most about the role is the "journey" Dorabella takes, from the idealism and surety of youth to something much more real, ambivalent, and based in lived experience. And I love that the ending is such a question mark.
I believe Mozart was literally a prophet, bringing us messages from the Beyond. Singing his music is always an honor and a pleasure.
Having sung Dorabella before: If you were in a similar situation that she finds herself in, how do you think you’d react when all is revealed?
Well, I think Così should be read as a fable, not as a true or realistic story, even as the characters are real people. To me it has much in common with A Midsummer Night's Dream, and can be viewed as a mirror to that story. As with that play, it deals with love as a projection, and a spell, and illustrates comically how men and women don't really see or hear each other fully, especially when they're falling in love.
And also as with that play, there is an eventual awakening, as the girls realize for the first time that they know nothing of real life, or of their own hearts . . . and this leap into maturity, this breakdown of their safe, childish world, is what I find most riveting. So, seeing it that way, I think we've all been in a Così-type situation, especially in our youths: where we realize we've been deceived, or have deceived ourselves, with the willing blindness of love.
That being said, in my first Così production, the young tenor singing Ferrando (Saimir Pirgu) was actually from Albania, which added a layer of irony. ; )
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| Soprano Sari Gruber |
Why should people come to see this production of Così fan tutte?
[Note to Readers: at the time of this interview,
rehearsals had not yet begun]
I can't really answer that yet, except to say that I have known Sari (Fiordiligi) since I was 19, and I'm sure there will be some hijinks on stage with the two of us up there clowning around.
Just for fun: If you could trade places with any other person for a week (famous or not, living or dead, real or fictional), with whom would it be and why?
...I can't come up with one answer to this question, except to say that as an opera singer, you realize any of us can trade places with anyone at any time, through an act of imagination. This is one of the joys of acting!
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| Soprano Miriam Gordon-Stewart |
We've saved the most important for last...
What would we find in your refrigerator right now?
You would find the makings of the best cocktail in the world, my variation of the "Sloe Gin Wibble": the ingredients include no less than three different fruits I have foraged (sloe plum liqueur; elderberry syrup; blackberry jam), among other things. The sloe plums, which my wife (Australian soprano Miriam Gordon-Stewart) and I gather from the banks of the Spree River in Berlin in September, steep in gin for three months, so it is a cocktail long in the making that I look forward to each year come Christmas.
Thank you, Brenda, for taking time out of your busy day to answer our questions! And Happy Holidays from our FGO family to yours!
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