Paul Appleby Tries to Strike a Balance in Opera and Recital

The young tenor (Photo: Dario Acosta)

"Up to this point, I've spent more time onstage singing with a piano than with an orchestra in an opera," he says. "When you're a song singer, you've got a big responsibility to use every tool at your disposal to grab that audience and get them to engage with you and totally immerse themselves in the world of the song or piece you're singing at that moment. You know, that's why I obsess about my languages more and more as I get older. You think that all this grammar stuff is soooooooo unimportant during your first year at Juilliard — but now I'm grabbing out my old notebooks and textbooks and things from four years ago and really thinking about the language, trying to understand how a French person's brain works in relation to what he's saying. In opera, you need to do just as much work with text and with lines and phrases and consonants and understanding all those things you need to communicate something to an audience. The public deserves your best. You can't rely on sets or anything else to do it for you — you just have to reach inside yourself and not rely on any other thing. Not to diminish a great costume or a great set or a great director, but your responsibility as an artist is exactly the same, regardless of what stage you're standing on." [Source]

Check out the full interview in Opera News, which feature another Dario Costa portrait, by clicking here.