Ravinia 2019, Issue 4, Week 7

Mind , Open Door By Kyle MacMillan Some opera SingerS might dabble in jazz or record a one-off Broadway album, but Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot has made musical variety the hallmark of his career. He has performed with Liza Minnelli and Marvin Hamlisch and appeared in prestigious New York cabaret rooms like the Café Carlyle and 54 Below. Most notably, he won a 2008 Tony Award for his portrayal of Emile de Becque in a revival of South Pacific —his Broadway debut—and won another major award later in London for the same role. “I was never a closed-genre person,” Szot says. “I was always open to everything.” The 50-year-old singer’s uncommon versatility will be on view this summer at Ravinia when he returns for a kind of mini-residency, appearing on four very different programs. All are part of the festival’s extended celebration of Leonard Bernstein, with internationally recognized conductor Marin Alsop con- tinuing in her role as artistic curator and leading each of those concerts. On July 20, Szot will reprise the central role of the Celebrant in the command encore presentation of Ber- nstein’s Mass with Alsop and the same participants as before, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chi- cago Children’s Choir, and Highland Park High School Marching Band. Last summer’s performance of the sweeping cross-genre work, which premiered at the 1971 opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, was named one of the best classical offerings of 2018 by the Chicago Tribune . “The reaction of the audience was just amazing.” Szot says. “Most people have never seen that before, and you get absorbed and shocked with so many el- ements that Bernstein introduces to us, along with this huge cast of musicians, actors, and singers. It’s just massive. It gets you in a way that is hard to experi- ence these days on stage.” Although he has achieved consider- able international success as a singer, the pursuit was not on Szot’s mind growing up in Ribeirão Pires, Brazil, the son of Polish immigrant parents. He began piano lessons at age 5 and later added violin, but his main interest was dance. When he was 17, he got a scholarship to continue his studies in the form at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, a country he had wanted to know better because of his parents’ ties. But once there, he injured his knee while executing a jump. “I was scared,” he says. “I was 17 in a foreign country. I didn’t even tell my parents because my mom would have liked me to return, and I didn’t want to return. I wanted to stay there.” For the next couple of weeks, he could hardly walk, let alone dance. While sidelined, he saw a notice for auditions for a university chorus and decided to give it a try. The ensemble’s leader told him that he had a good voice and should pursue singing. “That to me was the light at the end of the tunnel,” Szot says, “because I didn’t know what my future as a dancer could be. Of course, probably everything would be okay after a few months. But at that time, when you are 17, you want things to be [fixed] right away. I thought maybe this was a possibility too—I love music. So it was a slight change of plans.” He switched to vocal studies and nev- er returned to dance. His first teacher suggested that the operatic stage might be a possibility for him, and she started him on some beginning repertory. “I liked the way my voice was reacting to it,” he says, “and she was positive and motivating me toward that kind of expression, and I just followed. It was JULY 15 – JULY 28, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 21