A leap of faith: Grand Tower native turned world-renowned opera singer returns to Southern Illinois for performance

By Brent Stewart, The Southern

Christine Brewer – 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Shryock Auditorium, SIUC Campus in Carbondale; post-concert reception in Altgeld Hall; $15 general admission , $6 students; call 453-2000 or go to SI Fest

The Southern Illinois Music Festival is known for exposing the area to the finer things in music, as performed by local and nationally known musicians.

This year, two very important figures in opera and classical music will appear at the fest; both have more than a slight connection to the region.

The first is Christine Brewer, a Grammy Award-winning, world-renowned soprano.

Brewer is originally from Grand Tower. After graduating from Shawnee High School, she attended McKendree College in Lebanon, where she now lives. Although she began a teaching career after college, her involvement with the Opera Theater of St. Louis led to her taking her singing career more seriously, winning a Metropolitan Opera audition in 1989 at the age of 33.

"I just met Christine two weeks ago, although we've been in e-mail contact for a year now," said Ed Benyas, artistic director of the festival. "I drove up to Lebanon to rehearse with her, and we had a great time. She is full of great stories about the professional world of opera and conductors, and she is just a great down-home, Southern Illinois woman."

Recently, Brewer has received great acclaim for her interpretations of Wagner, including the role of Isolde in "Tristan und Isolde." She has appeared with many of the world's great conductors and has performed her broad repertoire regularly with the world's leading orchestras.

In addition to her many appearances at Wigmore Hall in London, Brewer has been a part of Lincoln Center's "Art of the Song" series at Alice Tully Hall and made appearances in Washington, D.C., Vancouver, Santa Fe, Cleveland, St. Louis and Portland (Maine).

Her recordings include a contribution to Hyperion's prestigious Schubert series with pianist Graham Johnson, and its Strauss series with pianist Roger Vignoles; the Janacek Glagolitic Mass and Dvorak Te Deum with Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony (Telarc); two recital recordings titled "Saint Louis Woman" and "Music for a While" produced and released by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

Recent recordings include Strauss's "Four Last Songs," Wagner's Liebestod and Mozart's Requiem with Donald Runnicles and the Atlanta Symphony; Fidelio (in German) with Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra; "Tristan und Isolde" with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Donald Runnicles; and the Grammy Award-winning "Bolcom: Songs of Innocence and Experience," conducted by Leonard Slatkin.

In advance of Brewer's homecoming appearances in Carbondale and Lebanon as part of the SI Music Fest, Flipside sat down with the singer to talk about her career and the influence Southern Illinois has had on her life.

After leaving the area and going to college, you started out as a teacher.

I taught school in Marissa. I only taught for one year. I taught K through 12 music and then I was a substitute teacher for at least five years, while I was trying to decide if this was what I really wanted to do and if I could do it and if I could make a living doing it. Teaching, at that point, was sort of a way to pay the bills and pay for my voice lessons and stuff like that.

You probably got a lot of experience that way and learned things that were important in your later career.

Oh yeah. I always tell young singers that they shouldn't ever feel like, if they take a different job, if they aren't singing on the stage of the Met immediately after graduating from college, that they are a failure. We all have to do jobs that inform us as actors, as singers, as people. I never look back at the teaching part of my life as being anything other than just a wonderful experience.

I learned a lot about myself doing it, and also I think now I look at myself as a singing actor who was informed by all the things I did before I got to do this for real.

Even though you were singing while you were teaching, it's interesting to me that you started your career a little bit later on than what one would normally expect.

Actually, for the kind of voice I have, it wasn't so late. Bigger voices tend to develop later, but by most standards, people would say, 'Oh, you started kind of late; you were in your late 20s, early 30s before you really got going.' To tell you the truth, my voice didn't really come into its own until I was in my 30s. Even now, I'm 52, I feel like I'm in my prime right now.

How difficult was it for you to decide to pursue music full-time?

It was a tough decision. I have to be honest; I took the leap of faith later than other people did. The Opera Theater of St. Louis was very influential and very much a part of the reason I'm doing this today. I sang in the chorus there for a couple years in the early '80s. I really kind of got the bug then.

There was a part of me that also saw the competitive nature of this field and I thought, 'I don't know if I can do this.' The directors there and the conductors there sort of took the leap of faith before I did. They kept saying, 'Look, we'll find ways for you to do this.' They helped pay for voice lessons for me, they helped pay for trips to New York for auditions and things like that. I was probably one of the last ones to come around and say, 'I think I can do this.'

When I do master's classes with young singers, I don't beat around the bush about it. It's a highly competitive field, unless you are really, really driven to do it and you have a teacher who's saying, 'Yes, you do have the instrument to do this, the vocal technique to do this.' You can become very frustrated.

You've referred to your career as a leap of faith. I noticed in your background material that you began singing in church. How big a part does your faith play in your music?

I grew up in a Baptist church. For us, there was just no choice. We went to church three times a week. You went twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night. My mom was a good singer. It was never a question that I was going to sing in church, it was just a given.

I think what that gave me, though, was the sense that I could perform, because I was performing in church for people who loved me and were very supportive. I cannot tell you how many singers I run into and work with who also started out singing in the church.

I think there's got to be something to that.

What's it like for someone originally from a small town to travel the world and perform for so many audiences?

I write a little article for the weekly newspaper in our town, and it's titled 'Can You Imagine That?' That's a line from a song from a musical, 'Carnival.' The song is called 'Mira.' The girl in the song talks about how she misses her town. The thing she misses the most isn't the beautiful green trees or the blue skies, but she misses the fact that everybody knows her name.

I guess, because I grew up in a small town and I live in a small town and I really do live in a town where everybody knows your name and knows a little bit about your business, maybe more than you want them to know, but there's also something very comforting about that.

When I travel to these big places, I find myself always trying to form a community. Quite often, if I'm doing an opera, I'm in a city for two or three months at a time and I just rent an apartment and I know all the people that run the shops and the grocery stores and the cleaners.

I feel like I'm in a small town wherever I go, and that's what keeps me going.

brent.stewart@thesouthern.com

351-5074

Details

• Reception for Brewer, noon Monday, First Southern Bank in Grand Tower. Free admission .

• Orchestra concert: Schumann, Barber, Beethoven, Strauss with Christine Brewer, soloist; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Shryock Auditorium, SIUC campus in Carbondale; post-concert reception in Altgeld Hall; $15 general admission, $6 students; call 453-2000 or go to www.sifest.com.

• Orchestra concert: Schumann, Barber, Beethoven, Strauss with Christine Brewer, soloist, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Hettenhausen Center for the Arts, McKendree College in Lebanon; $12 general admission, $5 students; 537-6863 for tickets or order online at thehett@mckendree.edu.