A Contralto’s Odyssey Is Littered With Obstacles

In the operatic pantheon, there is no shortage of role models for aspiring sopranos, from the legendary Maria Callas to Monserrat Caballe.

And mezzos can look to the vocal achievements of Dame Janet Baker and Marilyn Horne. But pity the poor contralto. With no standard-bearer, she pursues the career of a musical orphan.

“People just don’t understand what I do--sometimes even the opera directors don’t know how to cast a contralto,” said former San Diegan Martha Jane Howe. “Either I’m hired to sing my Rocky Stallone low notes or to play some psychotic. Then, when I sing a character role, they pay more attention to how I act than to how I sing.”

Despite her contralto handicap, Howe left San Diego eight years ago for New York City. Having sung in three San Diego Opera productions in the late 1970s, she hoped she would make her musical mark in the Big Apple. If she did not exactly take the city by storm, at least she has been offered more choice operatic roles working with a New York management.

In recent years, she has sung several operas with Long Beach Grand Opera and last season made her debut with Santa Fe Opera. Her career took a favorable upswing last month when she made her debut in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s season-opening production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula.” According to Howe, her Chicago debut had a double bonus: Not only was she singing with one of the country’s top houses, but also her comprimario role as mother of the title singer was not just another offbeat character role.

“At least I have some real singing to do in ‘La Sonnambula.’ I get to sing Gs below the staff as well as high Gs above the staff. Of course, much of what I do in the opera falls into the category of soprano maintenance--taking care of prima donna Cecilia Gasdia when she is on stage.”

Howe explained that, in this production, “soprano maintenance” included giving the lead singer ample nonverbal reassurances and unobtrusively re-securing portions of the soprano’s costume when the Velcro bindings popped open during extravagant coloratura display.

After her Lyric Opera performances, Howe will go to Minneapolis to perform in a concert version of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” with Edo de Waart and the Minnesota Symphony. A San Diego booking, alas, is not in the cards at the moment.

Required attendance. From the looks of the most recently updated 1988-89 symphony concert schedule, San Diego Symphony executive director Wesley Brustad could learn a few things by attending conductor Murry Sidlin’s first young people’s concert next month, the program titled “What Makes Music American?”

An inspection of the local symphony’s 1988-89 subscription concerts reveals only one piece by an American composer, Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Although we owe German conductor Bernhard Klee a vote of thanks for adding an American composition to his early-November program, this schmaltzy reverie is no more typical of 20th-Century American music than a Norman Rockwell illustration is representative of American visual art of this century.

By contrast, over the season that opens this Friday night, San Diego Symphony audiences will have the opportunity to hear three major works by Dmitri Shostakovich, two concertos and his Symphony No. 10 (1953). If the local orchestra can lavish such attention to a distinguished Soviet composer from this century--surely a worthy musical cause--why should it not display equal enthusiasm for comparable American composers? What about Aaron Copland’s later orchestral works, the symphonies of Roger Sessions, or even the more challenging works of Elliot Carter? And then there is a newer generation of accessible American composers, such as David Del Tredici, Stephen Paulus and Joan Tower, to list but a few.

When The Times asked Brustad why the 1988-89 season featured so little American music, he replied, “I don’t know if there is any good answer to that question.” He placed the blame on the choices of the guest conductors, difficulties in communication with European-based conductors and the press of time.

“Life will be a lot easier with a music director,” he acknowledged.

Because the orchestra has been without a music director for the past year and a half, and because music adviser Lynn Harrell was added to the staff after the new season was announced, the burden of balancing a season’s programming has fallen on Brustad’s desk. The executive director did promise that San Diego Symphony audiences will hear more American music in the 1989-90 season. After all, if American orchestras don’t play the music of American composers, who will?

Under the microscope. The San Diego Symphony’s December offering of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti has been altered to give the orchestra a chance to look at guest conductor and potential new music director Jahja Ling, according to symphony executive director Wesley Brustad. He explained that he had only recently signed Ling to conduct the orchestra and that the previously scheduled program of six Bach works was too limited to give an adequate picture of Ling’s skills. Ling is now scheduled to conduct two of the Brandenburgs, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and one more concerto to be announced.

Ling is music director of the Florida Orchestra and has been featured recently with the Cleveland and San Francisco symphonies. He not only conducts but frequently appears as piano soloist, according to a program biography from the Tampa-based Florida Orchestra.

Noting that the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra had successfully marketed an annual December concert of all six Brandenburg Concerti here--it’s one of those programs that regularly sells out in advance--the local orchestra mounted its own all-Brandenburg program last season and had scheduled a repeat of the format this year. If Ling performs as well in person as he sounds in radio broadcasts of the Cleveland Symphony, the four Brandenburgs will not be missed.

Time for the Gustavo watch. Although our neighbors to the north wait until spring for the fabled swallows to return to Capistrano, local musical aficionados watch for the return of pianist Gustavo Romero every fall.

The Chula Vista-born pianist--in his earlier years everybody’s favorite prodigy--can be sighted on several concert series this season. On Monday, he will play a Mozart concerto with the San Diego Chamber Orchestra at Sherwood Hall. On Nov. 6, he will give a solo recital at San Diego’s First United Methodist Church, a feat he will repeat in January at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

No doubt there will be further Gustavo sightings.