The Music City Review

In celebration of the approaching production of Carmen at Nashville Opera, Music City Review Journalist Sarah Featherston had the chance to sit down with Soprano Kathryn Lewek and chat about her experiences performing central roles in the repertoire, balancing a growing family with a career as an international opera star, and the production in Nashville. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Sarah Featherston (SF)
You are a renowned international operatic soprano who performed Mozart’s Queen of the Night [from Die Zauberflöte] many a time.

Kathryn Lewek

It’s over 300 now.

SF
Is that right?

KL

Yeah, I’ve lost the official count, but my agent, I don’t know, maybe she over blows things, but she thinks it’s around 350 times.

SF
Wow, wow. Is it different like every time? How do you keep it fresh for yourself just as you go through that?

KL

Well, it’s helpful that I’ve done something like 35 different productions. And so when it’s a different production, it’s a different set of people, it’s a different director, it’s a different conductor who has different ideas, you know, and there’s different costumes, different sets. And there’s also there’s always a little bit of a difference in the way that a director feels about how the queen should be represented.

There really are plenty of different takes on her, whether she is really this, you know, two-dimensional, sort of Disney villainous, just pure evil through and through, or if, or if she’s just more of a genuinely, just terribly hurting woman. And so, you know, there’s and there’s everything in between. So I think it helps that it keeps changing for me.

And yeah, I mean, I, I think at this point I’ve kind of done it and I’m ready to move on. But I still, I’m so grateful for, for the so many different opportunities for travelling the world that I’ve had, I call her my passport role because she’s just taking me everywhere–I’ve been all over the place and worked with so many amazing artists. it’s been truly a, a gift to have my first phase of my international career be primarily with a role that I feel so confident and comfortable with.

The other upside of singing Queen is that basically every other role that I’ve done has been a new learn for me, which takes a lot of time, and that is something that you have on your hands quite a bit as a queen because you spend a lot of time in your dressing room. Nobody ever believes me when I tell them this, but it’s really 12 1/2 minutes on stage and you’re working the whole time, though.

SF

I understand that you just got back from the Salzburg Festival and you played all four of the heroines, all four of the heroines in the Tales of Hoffman!  How, how was that?

KL
That was incredible. It was the third time that I tackled all four of them and I was very happy to have two other experiences, one in the Deutsche Oprah in Berlin and one I, it was actually kind of a last-minute surprise. I went down to Palm Beach last season last winter and sang it there. I was happy to have the other experiences under my belt and slightly lower pressure situations because the Salzburg festival is, you know, all eyes are on you.

SF
As someone who does travel internationally for performances, how do you stay relaxed? What are some of your methods or techniques that you might have to relax?

KL
I spend a lot of time in nature. I grew up with a father who really was very outdoorsy, grew up in upstate New York and he just did a lot of outdoors things when I was a kid. And so I’m very attached to my nature time. In fact, I, you know, just went on a four mile hike this morning. And it’s the way that I like to spend my time, not only for my mental wellness, but also my physical wellness. And it’s my way of keeping my kids active. I have a three-year-old and a 5-year-old and it’s enormously important to me that they develop a healthy connection with nature and also with physical activity.

So it’s just, it’s kind of perfect in my mind, it’s the perfect form of exercise and movement because you can hike or walk anywhere. You can hike and walk in a city or in a forest or in a field or in a town or wherever you are on the beach. It’s something that requires no equipment except a good pair of sneakers, and you can do it everywhere in the world. You know, it’s something you can do with the whole family, which is great, too.

SF
Do you think that it also benefits your singing in any way?

KL

Oh, absolutely. I mean, staying, staying strong is a really important part of, of, you know, maintaining my instrument, but also yoga that actually is, I think even more beneficial to my singing. I do a type of yoga called Vinyasa, which is linked with breath constantly. And I find that this is, I mean, I’m always telling my singer friends who know that I have a long yoga practice. And when they ask me questions, I always point them in the direction of Vinyasa yoga because of that link, that linkage with the breath. It’s easy in some other styles of yoga to hold your breath without thinking, but in Vinyasa, you know that with every posture change that you’re inhaling and exhaling. I just find that fluidity to be really healthy for singing.

SF
I know in your role with Micaëla here [as part of Nashville’s production of Carmen] that your husband is also playing Don Jose, how is that? Is it fun to be in the same kind of creative space?

KL
I mean, to be totally honest, it’s like the number one reason I’m here is the fact that he’s debuting the role of Don Jose because we’ve been together for 10 years. And I think on our first date, I probably said to him that he needed to sing Don Jose because I think that it’s just going to be a fantastic role for him, one of the top roles that will be just like perfect for his voice, and I know John Holmes from singing here at the beginning of my career. In 2013, I sang Queen of the Night here, it was actually my American debut of the role.

I’ve known John [Director Hoomes] for a long time and not that we’ve, you know, really kept in touch a lot, but you know, he invited both Zach and I to come sing Rigoletto in 2020. That should be easy to remember because it was our first COVID cancellation. We were getting ready to come down here with our baby daughter in March of 2020, and just a week before we started rehearsals, the whole country shut down, the whole world shut down. We tried to reschedule a time when we could come back and do that Rigoletto, but it just wasn’t going to work with our schedules.

But then Zach came back two seasons later to sing Rodolfo in their production of La Boheme and we’ve always just been like looking for an opportunity to come down here as a couple because there are few companies around the world that just kind of love the idea of having us as a package deal.

The fact that Nashville opera is so supportive of us as a couple is really wonderful, we obviously love to sing together. We fell in love together on the stage singing Lucia di Lammermoor together in 2015. Not so far from here in North Carolina.

Let’s see, we did La Traviata together and we did Romeo and Juliet together. So yeah, it’s lovely when we have a chance to co-locate, It’s lovely for us as a couple and it’s lovely for our family. This is kind of a unique situation that we’re in right now because we were in Austria for 2 1/2 months over the summer and we had our kids there with us. We felt like, I mean, my parents who are, are just the most amazing grandparents in the universe. They volunteered to stay with our kids at our house in Connecticut because they felt it’d be nice if the kids have just like a little more routine after being away abroad all summer long. So of course, it’s hard to be away from our two kids for a couple of weeks, but at the same time as a tremendous gift to have this sort of time of reconnection and do anything that we love to do together.

SF
Returning back to earlier when we were talking about all the different roles and everything that we’ve done, especially with the four different heroines, how do you approach that technically? Do you think about them all the same way? Do you use the same warmups for the same roles, or how do you go about that?

KL
I definitely approach each of those heroines in a different vocal way. And I would say the closest thing to Micaëla is the role of Antonia, which is this warm, sweet, lyrical, full voice, passionate sound. Olympia, of course, is much closer to what I’ve spent much of my career doing, which is coloratura. It’s a really kind of different style of coloratura than the Queen of the Night is, but it’s still closer than anything else. And then Julieta, it’s interesting because so many people cast Julieta as a mezzo when they when they cast all four of the roles with different singers.  And I can see why they do it because it is really middle voiced, low voiced. You need you need a lot of strength and a lot of power in the in the low voice and the middle voice. But what’s interesting is that Offenbach wrote this fantastic Aria, which most of the time is cut, called “L’amour lui dit: la belle.” It’s also coloratura, but it’s a different, totally different style of coloratura. It’s much more like singing Rossini or something. It’s very florid which is closer to the Queen. I am uniquely well suited to singing all four of the roles because I have a voice that just likes to do the coloratura thing, but I’m a dramatic coloratura. So, I have a really big lower and middle register sound as well. [exclusive performance, interview continues below!]

SF
I was just wondering; did you start out as a soprano? I know that a lot of people, they start out as a mezzo or something and then they realize they’re a dramatic soprano?

KL

Yeah! I mean, my teacher from college, he talks about how he knew that I had kind of a lot going on, but he was like, it was really anybody’s guess to see where you would land and my grandmother was contralto so I really just felt like I was following her footsteps with the low voice. I kind of always knew that I had these weird high notes, but I thought that they were really ugly and I didn’t think anybody would want to hear them, so I didn’t spend a lot of time developing that.

Also, when you’re a young singer, sometimes you’re exploring your technique and you’re still figuring things out, it’s not all connected. And I had sort of a gap at the top of the staff, just above the top of the staff, where I thought my legitimate voice ended, which indicated to me and to many other people to recommend that I was a mezzo soprano. That’s the kind of stuff that I worked on very early on when I was at Eastman.

Pretty soon after I arrived, my teacher said to me, I’m pretty sure you’re a soprano, but you know, we’re just going to take it slow and we’re going to explore and there’s no need to put you in a box right now. So that was the greatest gift that he possibly could have given me is that. In fact, he flew to Austria to see one of my shows, one of my Hoffman’s there and we were just talking about my early days at Eastman. And he just, he just laughs and laughs about when I walked into his studio for the first time. I said something flippant to him, like: “Now I just want to get one thing straight: I don’t sing high and I don’t sing fast.”

And he was like, yeah, we’ll see about that, and, you know, he was just a firm believer that he needed to develop my instrument in a natural way and not pigeonhole it or not categorize it, which I think was a really healthy approach to me as an 18-year-old singer. I was 18 years old and he said he had never heard someone that young with that color instrument and with that range. So he knew from the beginning that I had a unique and rare voice type.

Now, I’m having a blast singing Micaëla, it’s such beautiful music. It is not a dramatic, dramatic coloratora role, it’s more of a lyric soprano role but it takes that warm color and I’m just having a blast singing it because it feels a little bit like a vacation. It’s not, super challenging for me because there’s no coloratora in it. I can just sing beautiful music and watch my husband tear it up on stage and enjoy this beautiful sunshine that we’re having in Nashville in September.

SF

I guess I think that’s also really good advice for young singers starting out–not to box themselves in.

KL
Absolutely. There is no rush to categorize yourself because the voice will change into until, I mean, it depends on who you are, but the voice really doesn’t mature until you’re like in your early 30s. And that’s just some voice parts, you know, I mean, for a bass baritone, it’s even longer, or for a really, truly dramatic voice, it’s even longer.

Also, for the ladies out there who are thinking about having children, eventually, your voice really can change a lot with childbirth. My voice changed drastically with both of my pregnancies and with both of my childbirths. You know, the first one, my voice sort of widened in the middle and, and changed in color. And then with the second one, I found this power that I had never had before.

SF

Interesting. You were pregnant while actually performing the role of the queen?

KL

Quite a bit, yes, quite a bit. I sang mostly queen the year I was pregnant with my first baby, and I was pregnant with her for over 10 months. I had a couple other things, but I sang mostly queen because it’s also something that, you know, dramatically within the opera, it’s OK if the queen is pregnant.

Although I do have to say I had to cancel. It was the most disappointing cancellation that I ever had to do. It was supposed to be my debut as the Four heroines in Hoffman in Berlin but I cancelled it because I would have literally been on stage having the baby. It was the same month that I was due, but they invited me back a couple seasons later to do it.

I sang Queen until I was approximately 8 1/2 months pregnant, until I could no longer be in Europe and they wouldn’t let me fly home if I was any more pregnant. And when I checked in at the airport on the way back, they’re sort of like, how pregnant are you? Because I’m just a little thing. I am 5 feet tall and, you know, very petite and my husband is 6’6”. He’s a very large man and I had big babies. I just blew up like a balloon with both my pregnancies.

So yeah, there was no hiding it at all, which was OK for queen as I was seeing a lot of queen. And then of course, my second pregnancy was during COVID. So I had one like good, sturdy, solid traveling gig, which was as the queen.

I went back to work six weeks after I had a Cesarean section with my first baby and it was, I think, the the worst decision I’ve ever made for myself, for my well-being. My daughter will be 6 in October, and I look back on that and I think the last six years of my life would have been a lot healthier had I taken, oh, just a little bit more time to, to heal. But you can never, you can never tell what things are going to be like, what your experience is going to be like. So it’s, you know, pregnancy and childbirth were, were huge in my vocal journey and in my vocal development really changed a lot of my voice and obviously in my, my mental wellness as well.

SF

So, yeah, did having a C-section, I know you say it just the whole process of pregnancy when you change the color with your first one, how did that affect your breath support or did it affect your voice?

KL
Yes, it did, quite a bit.  I mean, I had two C-sections, so I can’t speak to what it would have been like coming back from a vaginal birth. But I had an interesting conversation with Erin Morley about this very topic because she had two C sections, but her middle child was a vaginal birth. So, the first job that I had back that I mentioned was six weeks, six weeks after I had my C-section and that was singing Queen of the Night at the Met, and Erin Morley was my Pamina and she had had her third baby, Luke, approximately 6 days after I had Mackenzie.

So, she was coming back, you know, 5 or 6 weeks, and as we were performing, you know, we, we had our newborn babies backstage and we were nursing them in between our, our entrances on stage. We were in the same boat. She’s such a sweet and supportive person. and we were talking about the differences between and she said that coming back to singing after a C-section was incredibly difficult in comparison to vaginal birth. Because, with any kind of style of childbirth, it’s going to be hard to reconfigure yourself and you’ve really kind of lost a lot of the muscle mass in the lower abdominals and everything gets stretched out. You have this quick return of having something to support against, and then all of a sudden there’s like nothing there; you’re just deflated.

But with a C-section, you have the added complication of the fact that you’ve had major abdominal surgery and there’s a lot of pain that is associated with recovering. I mean, I couldn’t walk for a couple of days very well and there’s a lot of drugs that go into your body but I was super lucky, super lucky. I had big babys

I guess it shows that looking after yourself and your family is 100% and that’s, you know, that’s still something that I have to figure out for myself. I’m a work in progress. You know, it may look like on Instagram that I got it all together, but I don’t and nobody does. You know, we’re all works in progress, and I try to show a pretty genuine view of what my life is like because it’s not all glamorous.

You know, the travelling, especially with the family, is difficult, and those days I feel like it’s just, you know, like hell on wheels or wings. But you know, keeping the family together as much as possible is so much more important to me. We have an incredible opportunity to have the skills and patience to homeschool our kids for the foreseeable future. Who knows how long that’s going to last and if it’s going to continue to seem like it’s the right thing for our kids. We take things sort of one year at a time. So far it seems like the best thing for our family and the best thing for our kids is to stay together as a family and to do the homeschooling on the road.

SF

Yeah, that’s wonderful and now you get to come here to Nashville and have a little bit of a vacation while your parents are taking care of the kids?

KL

Yeah, it’s great! The next couple of weeks I’m really going to be, aside from my couple of moments on stage, which are beautiful and fulfilling and wonderful, I am really going to be taking this time to focus on myself and to kind of reset after such an intense summer because it really was just like the summer of a lifetime and a constant going, going, going.

SF

So I know that you’re looking forward to seeing your husband on stage. I’m sure everyone who’s going to be there is. Are there any other moments in the opera that you think that the audience should look out for?

KL

Yes! I mean, you’ve got to look out for Marina Costa Jackson’s debut as Carmen. This girl is tearing it up, and it feels a little bit like she has taken some really wonderful notes from her sister, who sings Carmen all the time, Ginger Costa Jackson. It’s sort of like they have family familiarity there, of the sense of the role, and Marina has done such an amazing job.

You know, we’ve only had a few rehearsals, but the, the phrasing that she does in the Habanera and some of her other Arias is really musical, and I love her tone quality on this. The color of her voice in this role is really fantastic! The audience is really in for a treat, this whole cast is fantastic.

SF
Well, thank you so much for just spending time with us today.

KL

Thank you so much.