At 80, concert singer finds herself a hot commodity

NEW YORK – When soprano Lucy Shelton opened a recital at Merkin Hall in 2019 with “Adieu à la vie,” a song by Gioachino Rossini, she was about to turn 75. And though she was not bidding farewell to life as the song’s title suggests, she felt she was done with performing. For decades, she had been one of the most sought-after interpreters of contemporary vocal music. But she had reached a point where “I couldn’t sing the things that I used to sing,” she said in an interview. “And that’s depressing.”

“I figured I was probably winding down,” she added. “But then I got wound up again.”

Last month, Shelton, 80, took center stage at the Abrons Arts Center in the world premiere of “Lucidity,” an opera about identity and dementia, composed by Laura Kaminsky, with a libretto by David Cote. With a score that calls for a multitude of expressive registers, including floated lyricism and sprechstimme, musically notated recitation, the work is tailored to Shelton’s undiminished dramatic strengths. It’s also a testament to her continuing dedication to her craft. (From New York, where the production is presented by On Site Opera, it travels to Seattle Opera.)

After five decades making her name primarily on the concert scene, Shelton finds her engagement calendar increasingly filled with opera. In 2021, she performed in the critically acclaimed premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence” in Aix-en-Provence, France. Next season, she will reprise the role at the Metropolitan Opera, making her house debut at 82. “It’s kind of a riot,” she said. “It probably thrills everybody else more than it thrills me.”

Shelton, who has premiered more than 100 works by composers including Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen and Gérard Grisey, is unusual in classical music, where few female singers perform past their 60s.

One challenge of staged roles is memorization, which can be made harder by age. In discussing “Lucidity” with Kaminsky, she raised her concerns that she might not be able to perform the whole show from memory. In this production, she will always have either a newspaper or sheet music to hold (her character is an aging musician), so that she has all her lines at hand.

As it is, Kaminsky said in an interview that Shelton appeared to have the sharpest mind of anyone in the cast. The composer noted how few roles there are for singers above a certain age and said the bias appeared to be particularly entrenched in opera.

“An 80-year-old voice is not a 38-year-old voice, but it has 42 more years of life experience and craft and depth,” Kaminsky said. For an older singer in jazz, “you’re embraced even if your voice isn’t perfect,” she added. “But in opera you’re thrown away.”

Opera, though, was never the focus of Shelton’s ambitions. Growing up in Claremont, Calif., she developed a love for playfully experimental singing at home with her siblings and parents, who had met in an amateur choir. “We would do crazy things with our rounds or Christmas carols or Bach chorales,” she said. “We might slide from tone to tone and wait until everybody got to the chord and then hold it and slurp around.” Along the way, she said she developed a taste for “the thrill of dissonances.”

She was drawn into contemporary music when she studied with Jan DeGaetani, a champion of the avant-garde known for her virtuosic facility with unorthodox techniques. Among those was DeGaetani’s dramatic use of sprechstimme in Schoenberg’s expressionist chamber drama “Pierrot Lunaire,” which would also become a signature role for Shelton.

Working primarily in contemporary music, Shelton developed an instrument that prized rhetorical impact and sound color over the high gloss favored by opera. She often performed with a microphone (including in Saariaho’s “Innocence”), saving her voice from the strain of projecting full-throttle to the last row of a large auditorium.

She worries that concentrating too much on opera can stymie young singers’ curiosity about the full spectrum of expressive colors in their voices. She said she often reinvented her technique to match the dramatic demands of a given piece. By contrast, an aspiring opera singer hustling for work is forced into a loop of preparing for and performing at auditions. “That’s not making music,” Shelton said. “It’s making an impression.”

As a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, she passes on to her students a maxim she learned from DeGaetani: “There’s no such thing as a beautiful sound. What is beautiful is what is appropriate.”

Still, Shelton knew she needed help with her singing when her 75th birthday came and went and the invitations to perform kept coming. She had lost some of her upper extension, and struggled to keep her tone even across her range. Her intuitive approach to technique no longer served her.

For the past two years, she has been taking lessons from Michael Kelly, a baritone she met at the Tanglewood Institute when she was his mentor. He remembers being in awe of her. “She was probably the vocalist who had collaborated with the most composers ever,” he said in a video interview. “If you were looking at doing a modern piece, chances were that Lucy had done it.”

Kelly said that aside from helping Shelton unlearn some habits that had crept into her technique in reaction to physical changes, there was a psychological dimension that had to be addressed. “Not being able to do what she could do at one point in her career made her hesitant,” he said. “A lot of it was getting her out of her head about it and saying: ‘You don’t have to sing this the way you would have when you were 25 years old. This is the voice you have which is still very beautiful and capable.’ ”

Shelton said that free play remains as important to maintaining her vocal gifts as the detailed work in Kelly’s studio. In 2022, she recorded free improvisations with cellist Anssi Karttunen and noticed her voice producing the kind of fluid and airy sound in the high register she had given up for lost.

“I can’t float high anymore, except when I improvise,” she said. “So really what holds me back is fear of not sounding good.” But in an improvisation, she added, “I’m totally free, and you never make a mistake. Whatever you do, you repeat it, and it’s right.”