Mariusz Kwiecien and Barihunks in Wall Street Journal

Mariusz Kwiecien in The Met's Pearl Fishers

Barihunks made it into the Wall Street Journal's review of the Metropolitan Opera's Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) starring Mariusz Kwiecien as Zurga, Diana Damrau as Leïla, Nicolas Testé as Nourabad and Matthew Polenzani as Nadir. They wrote:

The Pearl Fishers” contains plenty of spectacle. There are roiling waves and ominous, inky skies, and, briefly, the bared torso of Mr. Kwiecien, a dashing baritone who has been dubbed an “über-barihunk” by the opera blog Barihunks.

You know, when I was 25, nobody asked me take my shirt off,” the singer said, adding that he was relieved to be done with the stress of opening night. “Now I am almost 45, and people ask me to do it.

 Mariusz Kwiecien & Matthew Polenzani sing"Au fond du temple saint":

Before the 2015–16 season, Les Pêcheurs de Perles had only received four performances at the Met. Three of them, in 1916, starred Enrico Caruso and Giuseppe De Luca. The opera will be broadcast to theaters across the country on January 16th and performances run through February 4th. Tickets are available online.

WSJ: "As Met's Fall Season Opens, Booming Basses Take Center Stage"

Ildar Abdrazakov (Julie Platner, The Wall Street Journal)

In opera, tenors are the men falling in love, singing their hearts out and basking in ovations after hitting the high notes.

But operatic basses, with low voices suited to kings, gods and villains, rarely get the girls—or popular attention. Which can lead to some friendly ribbing.

"Tenors always cry like babies," said Ildar Abdrazakov, a bass, who rolls his eyes at all the onstage whining from his artistic frenemies. "Wimps."

On Monday, Mr. Abdrazakov will hit a career milestone: He is the title character in the Metropolitan Opera's season opener, a new production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro. "

At age 37, the Russian-born Mr. Abdrazakov's relative youth makes his ascent atypical, since the bass voice typically reaches maturity later in life. He has already anchored major productions at the Met, including Verdi's "Attila" and Borodin's "Prince Igor," and he is now marketable enough that he was featured in the Met's advertising for the 2014-15 season.

"Ildar is unusual because he has been singing leading roles for years," said the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb. "With Ildar, you have the new great bass."

There will be plenty of opportunities for comparison, with several other basement-rattling voices featured this season. For the first time since 1984, the Met is presenting a bass in concert: the 50-year-old René Pape, who sings on Sept. 28 in addition to appearing in "Macbeth" and "The Magic Flute." Then in March comes "Don Carlo," which will include two basses: Ferruccio Furlanetto and James Morris, both in their 60s.

[CONTINUE AT WALL STREET JOURNAL]

Wall Street Journal feature on Teddy Tahu Rhodes' Workout Regimen

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece by Sarah Rose about barihunk Teddy Tahu Rhodes with the headline "Opera Singer Builds Up Stamina for 'Carmen.'" Here are some photos and the text.

Teddy Tahu Rhodes running (Photo: James Horan-Wall Street Journal)

When you sing for your supper, it's hard to keep weight on, says Teddy Tahu Rhodes, who takes a star turn as the bullfighter, Escamillo, in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Bizet's "Carmen" starting Saturday in New York. "I don't want to compare myself to an athlete, but it takes a lot of energy to perform for three hours," says the New Zealand-born bass-baritone.

At the Met, Mr. Rhodes's performance will include the showstopping aria in which he dances a mock bullfight with his cape and seduces the gypsy Carmen. "If you don't nail it then your night is really over," he says. "It's a very challenging role, vocally and physically."

Teddy Tahu Rhodes doing push-ups (Photo: James Horan-Wall Street Journal)

At 6-feet-4, the 46-year-old Mr. Rhodes isn't concerned about losing weight but rather keeping it on, and maintaining his stamina requires a 50-minute workout with a personal trainer three times a week.

He trained to be an opera singer at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama in the early 1990s, but after a year, he returned to New Zealand to be an accountant. Fifteen years ago, he was also singing with a local opera company when he got a call to substitute for a singer at the Sydney Opera House. With three weeks to prepare, he gave up accounting and followed his dream to sing.

He has been in many productions in Australia, Europe and the U.S. He has sung Escamillo in "Carmen" before, most notably in 2010, when he was called to fill in for a singer three hours before a global broadcast of a Metropolitan Opera performance. Among his recent roles are Emile de Becque in the Lincoln Center revival of "South Pacific" that recently toured Australia (a role that has been played by opera singers), and Stanley Kowalski in the coming modern-opera production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" at Chicago's Lyric Opera and New York's Carnegie Hall in March.

As a finance professional, he played rugby, tennis and cricket, but when he became an opera singer, his workouts changed radically, he says. "I made a conscious effort to hone my fitness as a way of presenting myself as a character on stage."

Teddy Tahu Rhodes working out (Photo: James Horan-Wall Street Journal)

The Workout
To play heartthrob leads, Mr. Rhodes works out with a Sydney-based personal trainer and bodybuilder, Steve Curran. His sessions focus on what bodybuilders call "large compound movements," exercises that use more than one joint or muscle group at the same time. Every major muscle group—legs, arms, back and shoulders—gets one day of devoted training per week. So on day one, Mr. Rhodes might work on his chest and triceps, doing bench presses and dips to the point of exhaustion.

For the second workout of the week, he might exercise his legs with lunges and squats. His third weekly workout could involve rows and chin-ups for his back, biceps and shoulders. When he is on the road, he checks out his hotel or apartment's gym upon arrival.

Mr. Rhodes avoids abdominal exercises out of concern they would interfere with his voice and breath control. "It's really important as a singer not to be tight in your core, to have flexibility around your diaphragm."

To prepare for the famous "Toreador Song," the first aria in the second act of "Carmen," Mr. Rhodes turned to his singing coach in Sydney, Sharolyn Kimmorley. Ms. Kimmorley helps him make physical adjustments to his technique by observing his breath or his posture to make sure the sound is resonating correctly. "It's like training any muscle, your voice gets used to a routine and if you let it slip for a while, it can get a bit lazy," he says.

The Gear
Sessions with his trainer and
vocal coach run about $100 each. He wears Asics running shoes during his workout, which typically cost him from $100 to $250. And rather than hitting the gym in running shorts or gym clothes, he prefers to wear board shorts by Billabong, which can range from $45 to $99.

The Diet
Mr. Rhodes is frequently on the road and puts in odd hours, which makes for an awkward diet, he says. "When performances don't finish until midnight, it's so late I don't want to eat and often go to bed not having had a meal," he says. He tries to keep snacks handy, like peanut butter on white or wheat toast.

For breakfast, he has toast, normally sourdough, with peanut butter or jam and butter, accompanied by a skinny latte. For lunch, he usually has a sandwich. Dinner is typically chicken or fish: He eats little red meat and very few carbs. He enjoys cheese as a starter and a glass of red wine.

Many singers avoid dairy products, which some believe can increase phlegm and damage the voice. Mr. Rhodes, who worked on a family farm as a child, says he drinks a great deal of milk at any time of day.

The Playlist
Mr. Rhodes doesn't listen to music while he works out. "Theater work is so collaborative, one of the things I love about exercise is the time to think, alone, by myself."

Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Escamillo at the Met (Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)

For Singing and Exercise, Breathing Better Can Help
The breath-control exercises that benefit opera singers also can help athletes, who need to consume more oxygen when they work out, says Bradford Chase, a high-school chorus teacher in Wellington, Fla., who trained in the New England Conservatory and has been teaching for 15 years. "Singers and athletes are the people who need to get the most out of every breath," he says.

Mr. Chase taught breathing exercises to the Wellington Wolverines high school football team in the 2012 season to help increase their stamina. The Wolverines' record improved to 4 wins in 10 games for the season, up from 1 win in 2011. To raise awareness of the mechanics of breathing, he uses a technique called "body mapping," which can increase how efficiently a person uses the oxygen he or she takes in. Here are some exercises:

Stand with your hands on your shoulders and breathe slowly. Focus on using your diaphragm, beneath the rib cage, to draw air into the lungs while keeping your shoulders still.
Place a hand over your rib cage as if you were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. As you breathe, notice the rib cage expand to make room for your lungs.

With hands just below the rib cage, feel your diaphragm expand to draw air in and contract to force air out. If you bend at the waist, you should feel the diaphragm expand and contract on your back too.

WSJ Bemoans Billy Budd Minus Sexual Tension

It looks like the American press wasn't quite as forgiving as the British press when it came to Michael Grandage's Billy Budd at Glyndebourne. Both the director and the Billy Budd - Jacques Ibrailo - talked openly before opening night about their desire to focus more on Billy's goodness than the sexual tension in the libretto. Howls erupted from some within the opera community, but the British press still gave the production polite if not favorable reviews. However, Paul Levy in the Wall Street Journal was pretty forthright in his criticism.

Mr. Grandage seems to have eliminated the homosexual theme from the piece. As Billy, who is so good-looking that he is nicknamed "Beauty," Jacques Imbrailo radiates goodness and innocence. Most productions rely on the dramatic tension created by the feelings both Captain Vere and the Master-at-Arms, Claggart, have for the handsome able seaman, Billy, who has been press-ganged from his passing merchant ship, Rights o' Man. Neither John Mark Ainsley's Vere nor Phillip Ens's Claggart seems to have any sexual desire for Billy. Though it feels deliberate, this could, of course, simply be a failing in their performances.

In any case, it exposes a real weakness in the work's first half, in which Billy, unjustly accused by Claggart of inciting mutiny, stammeringly fails to defend himself, and in frustration strikes him dead with a single blow. The only witness is the unfailingly just Captain Vere. As he wrote to literary critic Lionel Trilling, Forster was more interested in Vere's lapse from goodness than in Claggart's "natural depravity." The novelist thought he'd written Claggart's monologue along the lines of Iago's in Verdi's "Otello," but in the absence of the sexual chemistry that usually conceals the poverty of the text, Claggart's Act I aria is just a statement of an inexplicable hatred for Billy. Forster's words don't even support a Coleridgean analysis of Iago and Claggart's characters as pure, unmotivated evil.

Read the entire review HERE.

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WSJ: A Singer Keeps Fit for Roles

[Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal]


[Larry Merkle/San Francisco Opera]

The Wall Street Journal ran this feature on barihunk Nathan Gunn's workout routine. Nathan Gunn and the new age of singers who look as goos as they sound have given new meaning to the term, "You look like an opera singer." That comment once meant that you looked like a singing pachyderm with a set of horns, belting out a few ho-jo-to-ho's. Barihunks can't imagine Kirsten Flagstad or Luciano Pavarotti being featured in the Health section of the Wall Street Journal. This is an encouraging trend. Read on to find out how you can look like Nathan Gunn when you whip off your shirt.


As an Operatic Hero, Nathan Gunn Needs to Look the Part; Pull-Ups Help

By JAMES WAGNER

Nathan Gunn is an opera buff—quite literally. When the baritone is singing a passionate aria, he's often shirtless, showing off his sculpted chest.

As an opera singer, recording artist, father of five and voice instructor, Mr. Gunn, 39 years old, has little time to be a gym rat. To make sure he looks the part of the strapping hero he often plays, he relies on whatever he can squeeze in, from 45 minutes of riding a stationary bicycle to a few dozen push-ups and pull-ups.
Nathan Gunn's Workout

Cick on the graphic to see more about Gunn's workout
[WORKOUT1] Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Gunn's physique sparked attention in 1997, when he played mythical Greek hero Orestes in Christoph Gluck's "Iphigenia in Tauris" at the Glimmerglass Opera near Cooperstown, N.Y. As part of the performance, he was on stage soaking wet and stripped to a loincloth, garnering interest from audience members and critics alike, he says. Mr. Gunn has been singing since he was eight years old, and has performed at such houses as the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Paris Opera.

"The great thing about opera, and most people don't realize it, is that it is all about sex and violence most of the time," says Mr. Gunn, who is 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds.

In addition to performing, Mr. Gunn is a professor of voice at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also performs recitals across the country with his pianist wife, Julie Jordan, who teaches music at the same college.

The Workout

During the 10-month opera season, Mr. Gunn is mostly away from his Champaign, Ill., home. This month, Mr. Gunn performs as Figaro in Gioachino Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" at the L.A. Opera. In February he will be in "Don Pasquale" at the Dallas Opera and in April he stars in "The Magic Flute" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

As a result, his workout is a blend of whatever he feels like doing and is dependent on available equipment. But Mr. Gunn will always try to perform a series of strength exercises for about 20 minutes, five times a week. He says he doesn't want to get bulky on free weights, so he uses them only occasionally.

Mr. Gunn will do a series of push-ups, incline push-ups, handstand push-ups, handstand holds and pull-ups. He does his push-ups and pull-ups until failure, which is usually about 50 of them. He normally does three sets of handstand push-ups—15 repetitions for the first set, 10 for the second and eight for the last. For the handstand holds, an exercise he learned from his young gymnast daughter, he holds a handstand against a wall as long as possible to work his shoulders and arms. His top time: 90 seconds.

Mr. Gunn's knees have weakened over the years, so he will do short sprints instead of long-distance running about twice a week. He will sprint in short intervals for 30 minutes at a time. If he doesn't run, he will do a 45-minute stint on a stationary bicycle. It helps him sweat out the toxins he accumulates from constant traveling, he says. He tries to either run or bike five times a week.

Mr. Gunn has tried boxing, hiking, various martial arts to supplement his workout over the years. His current favorite is the Japanese martial art Aikido, a low-impact grappling sport. When he is home, Mr. Gunn attends a 6 a.m. eight-person class three times a week. "It suits singing well because you breathe in the same way," he says.

The Diet

During his performance season, Mr. Gunn generally eats only one big meal a day, usually dinner. His favorite dish is grilled steak with onions and zucchini accompanied by a glass of red wine. He rarely eats breakfast but if he does, it's usually a cup of yogurt or piece of bread. "I only eat when I'm hungry," he says.

At home, Mr. Gunn's eating habits are generally the same, but his wife cooks dinner, and they will sometimes have chicken-noodle soup, a bag of potato chips and a cup of black coffee for lunch. Mr. Gunn says he will eat fries and potato chips once in a while. "If I'm too strict, then I'll want it too much," he says.

Cost and Gear

When he's home, Mr. Gunn goes to a university gym to work out and run. Membership costs about $25 a month, he says. Otherwise, he relies on whatever equipment is available at his rented apartment complex or hotel. During a recent stay in Los Angeles, his housing compound had a pool, so Mr. Gunn swam some laps.

For his daily strength routine, which often occurs in his apartment or hotel room, Mr. Gunn works out only in a pair of athletic shorts because he sweats "like crazy," he says. On runs and bike rides, he wears shorts and a T-shirt. He says a good pair of running shoes is important (Asics is one of his favorite brands), but he relies on the shoe store for help choosing them. "I just go to the shoe store and say I have bad knees," he says.

Fitness Tip

Mr. Gunn's best advice to staying in shape is to listen to your body. He knows he has weak knees and his body wasn't built for long runs, so he resigns himself to shorter bursts of running. "Stay within the limits of your ability, and don't push too hard," he says. "If you come to terms with that, you'll be healthy."

Quick Fix

Mr. Gunn does a short round of favorite exercises: push-ups, handstand push-ups and sit-ups. To release pent-up adrenaline before a performance, he'll do a set of incline push-ups in his dressing room "I do just enough to tire my muscles out," he says.

The Playlist

Mr. Gunn is around music so much that when he works out, he prefers reading. On the stationary bike, he opts for historical fiction by Steven Pressfield or Bernard Cornwell. But when Mr. Gunn needs an intense workout, he'll tune his iPod to hard rock, such as Rammstein or System of a Down. "It gets your blood pumping," he says.

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