OPERA NEWS magazine
Sound Bites spotlights up-and-coming singers and conductors in the world of opera.
by TIMOTHY MANGAN
![]() © Marty Umans |
Caroline Worra is game. Taking the lead role in Long Beach Opera's June production of Handel's Semele, set by director Isabel Milenski in a modern-day Texas of seedy motels and big-money barbecues, the brave soprano set her eyes on Jupiter (Benjamin Brecher in a ten-gallon hat), then sneaked off with him to his parked convertible. To the strains of "Endless Pleasure, Endless Love," the couple got to know each other in the Biblical sense, Worra's silvery rendition of the da capo ornamentation coming across as an expression of her ever-increasing sensual enjoyment.
"It certainly would have been a lot easier to stand there and sing it," Worra says, laughing. But if a director asks, she'll give it a shot. "I try not to say no to anything, because I think it's just my responsibility to figure out how to be able to do it." This attitude extends to the parts she chooses to sing as well, making her repertoire difficult to summarize. More and more, it's both the old and the new - parts such as the mad Jenny in Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur (recently released on a Chandos recording), Curley's Wife in Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men, Amy in Mark Adamo's Little Women and the title heroines Semele, Arianna and Agrippina. "I think for me it's especially healthy if I can always go back and be singing early music between twentieth-century [works] or between operettas," she says. "Because I think that it always brings it back to make sure that I'm staying on that pure line."
After stints in San Francisco Opera's Merola Opera and Pittsburgh Opera's young artists program, Worra cut her teeth singing small roles and covering big ones at Glimmerglass Opera and New York City Opera. Though she was never asked to go on, the experience of covering honed her work ethic and taught her psychological fortitude. 2006 sees her as Donna Elvira in NYCO's Don Giovanni, as Mabel in Glimmerglass's Pirates of Penzance and in a Weill Hall recital debut (with a fellow University of Missouri alum, tenor Ryan MacPherson).
The Wisconsin native, a runner-up in her state beauty contest, intended to be a pianist, and the technique still informs her singing. "When I do lots of fioritura, lots of fast runs, I feel like they're on the piano and I'm just thinking them." She calls a quiet corner in the Bronx home now. The call of regional opera is increasingly taking her away from this idyll, but Worra doesn't mind. She likes the challenges of travel, of unknown companies, new parts and directors asking her to do who-knows-what. "I try to always be a student," she says. "I'm constantly in a state of improving."
TIMOTHY MANGAN
Copyright 2010 Caroline Worra. All rights reserved.