Sopranos: Absolutely Priceless

The reviews that greeted Soprano Reri Grist in her debut with the San Francisco Opera company might well have been written by her mother. She was an “exquisite” Rosina in The Bar ber of Seville, an “absolutely priceless” Despina in Cosi Fan Tutte, “the very incarnation” of Sister Constance in Dialogues of the Carmelites. Last week, when the opera went on tour to Los Angeles, the critics sounded almost as infatuated—petite! graceful! enchantingly pretty! The last time a new singer so captured the San Francisco season, the object of affections was Leontyne Price.

Grist has none of Price’s sensuous power, either in voice or performance. She is a coloratura to the heart; her voice has a light, facile, May-wine beauty, and her acting is warmed by fluttery humor and grace. In opera’s endless supply of roles for frivolous coquettes, she could hardly be better off, but the buoyant ease of her voice is her main distinction: she stopped a performance of Ariadne auf Naxos in her La Scala debut with a crystalline rendition of Zerbinetta’s notoriously difficult aria.

Singing in the Fields. Reri (“Who ever heard of a name like Reri?” she says) grew up in Harlem. Her mother tugged her around to auditions when she was a child, as much to get her off the streets as onto the stage. She won a succession of small singing bits before she was 20. Her best Broadway role was Consuelo in the 1957 production of West Side Story, in which she sang Somewhere, the show’s most operatic song. Upon hearing her, Composer Leonard Bernstein invited her up the street to sing in Mahler’s Fourth with his New York Philharmonic. Since then she has sung only classical.

She forged the basis of her career during a camping tour of Europe. “I would wake up in the mornings and sing out into the fields,” she says, “then go into the towns for auditions.” In the past three years, she has been a regular at the Zurich Opera and has sung at the Vienna Opera and Covent Garden.

Where the Work Is. She long ago gave up on the U.S. as a place to live, and even her toast-of-the-town success in California is not likely to tempt her back from her home in Zurich. “People stare at me in Europe,” she says, “but out of curiosity. When I come back here, the stares have a malice in them. Besides, my life is in the opera now, and Europe is where the work is.”