Preview: Il Trovatore at Houston Grand Opera

“She’s the crux of where bel canto beautiful singing meets drama,” is how mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis describes her role as Azucena, the Romani woman whose tragic life has only been made worse by her relentless drive for revenge in Il Trovatore (The Troubadour).

In this newly commissioned staging for the classic, Houston Grand Opera audiences will see a more contemporary Spain with castles sitting by skyscrapers, and monuments next to street art. The cast is exceptional and also includes baritenor Michael Spyres (Romeo in Romeo and Juliet) as Manrico, soprano Ailyn Pérez (Cio-Cio-San in Madame Butterfly) as Leonora and baritone Lucas Meachem (Figaro in The Barber of Seville) as Count di Luna. Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers conducts and it is directed by Stephen Wadsworth.

As the opera opens, Count di Luna is pacing, worried that his hopes of winning Leonora, lady-in-waiting to the Princess, will be derailed by a rival whose name he doesn’t know, only that he is called a troubadour. The captain of the guards, Ferrando, fills in the back story about how a Romani woman was accused of being a witch when one of the di Luna children fell sick and was burnt alive. Her daughter Azucena has been charged with avenging her and steals the di Luna baby, brother to the Count..

To avenge her mother, Azucena decides to burn the di Luna young son but becomes confused and instead throws her own son into the fire. She decides to raise Manrico as her own, and is a devoted mother.

Manrico and the Count are from rival political factions, extending their divide beyond the merely personal. Manrico mounts an unsuccessful army excursion to save Azucena; Leonora offers herself up to the Count to save Manrico — nothing works out particularly well for anyone as it ends in a blaze of fratricide, Azucena looking on as the son she has come to love dies. Irony upon irony with glorious music.

Still, asked to describe her character, Bryce-Davis, who has sung this role several times, brings out nuances that many audience members may have missed, even devoted opera lovers.

“She’s a thoughtful woman. She’s a strategic woman. She obviously has a lot of trauma that she’s sorting through but she has an end goal that her whole life is working towards. And so as a singing actor it gives you a lot to work with. Yes, she’s a mother. She’s a leader; especially in our production she’s a leader of this revolution. And so it’s a battle of living her inner, vulnerable shameful past while presenting strength to the people around her and she kind of flips between those two things and tries to motivate her son into doing the same.

“She’s just a character rich of so many complexities and beautiful things that we can all relate to. People normally think of Trovatore and they’re like ‘That’s the one when she throws the wrong baby in the fire,. ha, ha, ha.’ But at the center of it she’s a woman who made a mistake and we can all relate to that. Because she spends the rest of her life trying to make up for that mistake. She loves her mother and she wants to make her mother proud.

“As a singing actor it gives you a lot to work with, says Bryce-Davis who has sung this role several times.

“Oddly enough I had one season where I did four of them,” she says. “But it feels new since it’s been about two years since I’ve sung her and I’ve been doing really different things since then.”

Productions of this opera tend to lean more toward the bel canto side and the drama side. This one is veering more toward bel canto, she says. “It’s a good experience for me. I’m the youngest person in the room in a cast of real superstars. Fortunately they’re lovely superstars.”

Opera singers always have to learn to pace themselves, something that’s less of a danger in this production, Bryce-Davis says, because of its focus on the singing. However, “There’s still Act III when she’s kind of roughed up. That always is the pacing adventure. And at the very end of it we’ve put in a high C which for a mezzo is adventurous always.

“And so you know that like you’re going to get slapped here, you’re going to get slapped there. You’re going to have to throw yourself on the ground over here and you have to pick yourself back up. You have to do this and then there’s like a huge line and then at the end there’s a high C.”

“And so you know that like you’re going to get slapped here, you’re going to get slapped there. You’re going to have to throw yourself on the ground over here and you have to pick yourself back up. You have to do this and then there’s like a huge line and then at the end there’s a high C.”

Like many singers who’ve gone into opera, Bryce-Davis was in choir growing up and was a soprano. Her dream was to sing the role of Carlota in Phantom of the Opera. “I went to my very first voice lesson and she said ‘Honey, you’re a mezzo.'”

She’s made her peace with that. There’s so much more competition for soprano roles than mezzo, particularly for dramatic mezzo roles, she says. Also, she says, she probably wouldn’t have stayed in opera if she’d had only light soprano roles available to her. “Just because I don’t want to spend my days ‘Oh, I have tuberculosis and I’m goin to die for a very long time.’ The mezzos tend to be the thoughtful characters. The ones who have something to prove. The outsiders of society. The ‘villains’. Of course, I never see my ladies as villains. We’re people who make decisions that aren’t always the right decisions but they’re more interesting characters, I think.”

Verdi was thinking about these mezzo roles differently, she says. “He wanted to name the opera Azucena. Azucena actually is a much more interesting character than Leonora. Leonora has beautiful music and it can’t be more beautiful than when Ailyn Pérez sings it. And she does take some matters into her own hands but Azucena drives the plot. It’s Azucena’s story. Perhaps I’m biased,” she says laughing.

She grew up in North Texas and when she was in high school her Jamaican mother went back to college and would take her along to the University of Texas at Arlington’s fine arts library, where she fell in love with opera while listening to a classical CDs. A self-described practical person, Bryce-Davis was a business major at Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas. At her mother’s urging, then took some voice lessons and went on to the Manhattan School of Music.

Bryce-Davis is also a model for an artist who would not give up. At 29 she refigured her technique determining if something didn’t work out by age 30, she’d be done with opera She got a tour of Porgy and Bess in Europe. “During that tour, I saved every dollar that I earned. I ate like peanut butter and bread. And sat in my hotel room and planned every competition that was happening for the next few months. Stayed in Europe. Did all the competitions. Won a few of them. And that’s how I got my work for the next three years.”

Joshua Winograde, now the director of opera and professor of Opera Studies at Rice University, was responsible for getting her back to the United States, Bryce-Davis says. At that time he was in Los Angeles where he was senior director of artistic programs for LA Opera.. She arrived right before COVID-19 hit and spent the pandemic making videos that attracted a lot of attention. Now she says her career is half in Europe and half in the United States.

Asked why this opera continues to draw in audiences, she says:

“It’s the music that drives this. Just in the intro, the aria where I’m telling my son what happened, you hear the heartbeat and the pains in just two measures. You hear the whole world of the song. You hear her pain, you hear her nerves, you hear her hesitation, you hear her love, you hear everything in just those beats. That’s crazy! And he’s done that and he’s captured that. So how could folks not have fallen in love with these characters, with the story with the music?”

Performances are scheduled for October 18 through November 3 at 7 p.m. Friday, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Tuesday and 2 p.m. Sundays at Wortham Center, 501 Texas. Sung in Italian with projected English. For more information, call 713-228-6737 or visit houstongrandopera.org.$25-$280.