“I’m not very good at living in the past”
It was Hollywood (via London, Ontario) that gave Michele Capalbo her first, fateful push towards opera.
“I was about sixteen, I think, when the film Amadeus came out,” the youthfully apple-cheeked soprano recalls, “and I went by myself to a movie theatre in downtown London”—she was living slightly north of there, in Lucan—“and watched it and was fascinated. I needed to sing the Queen of the Night! Because who doesn’t need to sing it?” She looks at me with a burst of playful insight. “You wanted to, too—totally!”
I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that yes, I actually did.
We’re sitting on barstools at a small window table at a restaurant near Lincoln Center, uncrowded and quiet on an early-January midafternoon. We’d never met before, but there’s something about her presence and manner that exudes an infectious ease.
I’d been asking her to trace her unorthodox in May.) “I’m not very good at living in the past,” she confesses as preamble, but she proves a charming chronicler of her early days. “I always loved singing, though I was painfully shy. Then one day at school an announcement came about participating in the Kiwanis Festival, so I stayed on after classes—and wound up in the festival. ‘Okay,’ they said, ‘the girl’s got talent!’ I was eight, and that’s how I got turned on to this life, and to the dichotomy of it—my sheer love of it versus the pressure and the demands. Suddenly I had a new dress and new shoes and was standing up on a stage. I absolutely froze—there’s no other way to say it.
