The theme of Vero Beach Opera’s all-Puccini concert this weekend is love and loss. For soprano Betsy Diaz, though, it will be more about lost loves found. Or at least some good career networking.
It will be another chance to visit with Vero Beach Opera artistic director Roman Ortega-Cowan, their fourth encounter since they met at the Metropolitan Opera district competition in Orlando four years ago; Diaz was one of three winners for Florida.
A month later, Diaz came to Vero to compete at the Marcello Giordani International Vocal Competition, where she was a semifinalist.
Along with seeing Ortega-Cowan, this weekend she’ll be working again with Bruce Stasyna, Vero Beach Opera’s music director. He was the principal coach of the Young Artists Program at Palm Beach Opera when she won a season-long spot in the program.
And fellow performer Jonathan Beyer, a lyric baritone with whom she will sing at Saturday’s concert, is the longtime partner of Brandon Cedel, a bass-baritone whom Diaz befriended at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West.
One more connection exists with Vero, albeit in absentia: In 2015, Diaz filled in at the last minute for Deborah Voigt, a longtime friend of Vero Beach Opera who now serves as artistic advisor. Voigt was scheduled to sing at the inaugural Miami Summer Music Festival when she fell ill three hours before the concert. “I ended up singing two Wagner arias and a Strauss song,” recalls Diaz. Other colleagues helped out with the showtunes Voigt was slated to sing.
If there is one true love she’ll be seeing again, it’s the town of Vero Beach. Through her prior competition and concert, Diaz fell hard for Vero. “It’s charming,” says the lifelong south Miami resident. “I love coming to Vero.”
Diaz spent two years studying voice at Miami’s prestigious New World School of the Arts College before leaving to study with well-known Miami opera coach Manny Perez.
It was Perez who allowed her to pursue the upper-range vocal roles that she most loved to sing. Diaz came to opera by chance when her high school drama teacher, Christine Chavers, plucked her from the covey of musical theater kids and introduced her to opera. “They always said that my voice was a little too classical for musicals, but they never kept me from it.”
One day in Diaz’s senior year, Chavers pulled the budding opera lover out of class to tell her about an important audition: a Florida Grand Opera scholarship for young opera scholars. The deadline for applying was imminent; her teacher went in person to file Diaz’s application. To her amazement, she was accepted. “I got to sit in on the whole rehearsal process and the performances,” recalls Diaz, still rapturous. “I’ll never forget it. I came home and told my mom, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
She rushed to get an application in to New World, an arts college that is part of the state university system but very difficult to get into. Singing two coloratura songs for her audition, she was accepted “on the spot” – and with a scholarship.
Once she began her studies with Perez, opportunities began rolling in. He quickly acknowledged that her instincts were right: She was not at her best in mezzo-soprano or even contralto repertoire, as the New World teachers had placed her. She was most certainly a soprano. Now 20, she was picked to go to a Madrid competition and master class with the legendary bel canto soprano Monserrat Caballé.
“I sang for her – it was absolutely incredible, and she asked me to stay for a concert in honor of Puccini,” she says.
On her own for two weeks, and abroad for the first time, it was a bold move in the Diaz daughter. “My mom almost flipped out,” she says.
On the other hand, she had prepared her daughter for just such an adventure. “My mom had me and my brother doing everything when we were growing up. Violin, piano, art, horseback riding. She wanted us to find our own hobby.”
Opera was not what her parents expected. Her dad and she have always shared a love of Frank Sinatra-style standards. Her mother doesn’t sing at all. “She can’t even carry a tune. We laugh about it all the time,” says Diaz, who is hoping her mother will drive up to see her Saturday performance.
The day will come, Diaz believes, when she will move to New York and break into a whole other level of opera. For now, Diaz continues to live in Miami and is grateful for the steady jobs she is getting with regional orchestra and opera companies. And she is already preparing for the summer festival of Colorado’s Central City Opera, where she will cover the role of Micaela in Georges Bizet’s “Carmen.” The role, sung in French, is the same she covered seven years ago – and for one performance, had the chance to sing – for Palm Beach Opera’s production, for which she trained with Bruce Stasyna.
For her concert in Vero Beach Sunday, where she will sing three solos, a duet and a quartet.
That quartet will include Diaz’s friend, baritone Beyer, who has an extensive resume of roles and awards, including performing at the Metropolitan Opera and sang Figaro with the Pittsburgh Opera, Marcello in La Boheme with the Boston Lyric Opera, and covered roles at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Florentine Opera. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music.
Cesar Sanchez is a rising tenor from northern Mexico who went from choir boy to the School of Sacred Music in Guadalajara, to winning won a full scholarship at the famed 175-year-old music academy Mozarteum University of Salzburg, Austria. His career has taken him to concert halls in Koln, Bucharest, and Los Angeles, where he has performed multiple times with L.A. Opera.
Winner of the Darclee International Voice Competition, Sanchez has been named an ambassador of the arts by the Mexican government. In April, Sanchez will sing the role of Cavaradossi in Puccini’s “Tosca” for Opera Tampa, wrapping up the season a month after the company celebrates the 100th birthday of founding conductor Anton Coppola, a past guest conductor of Vero Beach Opera.
As Daniel Lipton, the artistic director and conductor of Tampa Opera, remarked to the Tampa Bay Times last fall, “A very close friend of mine told me, ‘You have to hear this guy, he has a great future.’”
And, like Diaz, soprano Anush Avetisyan is another veteran of Vero vocal competitions. She won the first Deborah Voigt-Vero Beach Opera Foundation International Competition staged here last March. Born in Armenia, Avetisyan studied at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.
The concert begins at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center. Tickets are available on the Vero Beach Opera website.
