Sound Bites spotlights up-and-coming singers and conductors in the world of opera.
Sound Bites: Erin Morley
Photographed in New York by Dario Acosta
Makeup and hair by Affan Malik / Gown by Christopher Schramm
Jewelry by Miriam Haskell at Christopher 19, NYC
© Dario Acosta 2010
© Dario Acosta 2010
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Erin Morley has a quirky sense of humor. It's a valuable trait that sets her apart from the lyric-coloratura pack, allowing her to inhabit her characters down to their toes with a fierce concentration that feels both honest and ecstatic. "Performing is showing the world who you are," says the soprano. "Because you cannot hide it, even if you try. You want the audience to see things that they can identify with."
Morley's "year of the Queen," as she calls it, begins with the Queen of the Night in Tim Albery's production of The Magic Flute this month at Santa Fe Opera. But before she takes the role to Frankfurt and Dresden, she sings the part of Woglinde next month in the Metropolitan Opera's season-opening production of Das Rheingold, the first installment of the company's new Ring cycle directed by Robert Lepage.
Asked whether she feels nervous about participating in the first new Met production of Wagner's tetralogy in more than twenty years, Morley laughs, "Well, when you put it that way, sure." She first learned the part when she covered it two seasons ago during the last run of the Otto Schenk staging at the Met. ("I got to be there while Levine coached the Rhinemaidens on it. These are experiences that I'll never forget.") She recalls being surprised by how much she enjoyed the music. "I used to be the one who said, 'I hate Wagner.' And when I took this home and I started learning it and I got into it, I said to my husband — and I remember this moment — I said, 'Why does anyone listen to anything else?'"
The soprano from Salt Lake City, Utah, studied at the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School before joining the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, which she finished last May. She has had an impressive run over the past year, in roles that have taken advantage of her strikingly pretty voice — an instrument that is agile, feminine and somehow filled with light. She won rave reviews last summer at Bard for her high-flying Marguerite in the Meyerbeer rarity Les Huguenots. At the Met, she made a vivid character of the Dew Fairy in Hansel and Gretel, scrubbing the china with bright-eyed, compulsive charm, and she soared above the circus-like din of Shostakovich's The Nose in an enchanting turn as the Cathedral Voice/Madame Podtochina's daughter.
Morley lists Maria Callas, Natalie Dessay and Diana Damrau — singers for whom acting and musicianship are "organic" and "inseparable" — as her influences. "My voice teacher at Eastman used to say to me, 'Erin, nobody wants to hear a singer with bad technique. But more than that, nobody, nobody, nobody wants to hear a singer with great technique who has nothing to say.'" 
OUSSAMA ZAHR
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