With the aid of a beautiful voice, good technique, intelligence, and a relentlessly positive attitude, young tenor Donald Kaasch is building a career. Through November 19, he’s facing one of the most challenging parts in the modern repertoire: the grueling title role in Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe at Lyric Opera.
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His is one of the most conspicuous success stories of the Lyric’s apprentice program, the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists. He spent three seasons with LOCAA, joining it after work on a doctorate at Northwestern University; his mainstage debut was the minuscule part of Giuseppe, the gardener in La Traviata. “It really meant a lot to me to be told that I made a complete character out of him,” he says. “No matter how small the role is, do it well. It’s a good way to build confidence: start with the small roles and work your way up. These days a lot of tenors start out in college doing leading roles; they do them in grad school, and then in small companies, and they think that’s all they should be doing. But it’s confidence-building to do small roles; it means you’re on the team–and you learn if you can produce.”
“I’m not going after the meat-and-potatoes repertoire. I’m a lighter voice, and that’s OK. My marketing chip is my top, in a day and age when a B-flat is enough for most tenors.” Kaasch revels in arias filled with high Cs, those daunting “money notes” that drive audiences wild. That’s good news for him, in an era when operatic fashion has brought back into favor the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Berlioz, and Gounod–all composers who wrote for tenors who could pop off high C after high C.
Kaasch enjoys performing a variety of opera works, and would like to do additional contemporary ones. “The problem is, many of them are not written well. Many 20th-century composers are incredibly naive about voices, especially high voices. Donizetti really understood what voices could do. Mozart really understood what voices could do. [Modern composers] haven’t done any studying of voices. They think a tenor can sing high As all night, and that sopranos can sing any vowel on any note. If they want it louder, they just go higher. So you have big orchestras, big choruses, everybody banging away, and you’re supposed to sing over it all with an impossibly high line. Compositionally, these people chuck the rules, and they get away with it. But they cannot chuck the rules when it comes to voices.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/J. Alexander Newberry.
