A soprano channels women’s experiences in song
Last month, Phillips sang the principal role of Clémence at the Met to an audience of thousands, both in the opera house and via live HD broadcast — including her grandmother, watching from a Mississippi movie theater. On Feb. 4, Phillips and pianist Myra Huang, a longtime collaborator, will present a program of songs focused on women’s experiences at Jordan Hall, presented by Celebrity Series of Boston. Their selections include Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben” and Libby Larsen’s “Try Me, Good King,” a song cycle on the last documented words by each of Henry VIII’s wives.
Q. What do you two think about when you’re choosing the programs?
A. For this particular program, we batted ideas back and forth for months. ... We started with Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben,” which is very famous, very popular. Everybody does it. I’ve actually never performed the piece before, and I really wanted to explore it with her. So we found some other pieces that really show different sides of the experience of being a woman. We’re starting with three Schubert songs, and one of them is very rarely done. “Viola.” It’s a 12-minute song about a little flower that blooms too soon, and it’s quite beautiful. In the second half we’re doing the Hugo Wolf “Mignon Lieder”.... The whole story of Mignon is very intoxicating for artists. And then, of course, the Tudors, it doesn’t get more dramatic than that.
Q. Is there anything in particular you do to get inside the head of all these characters?
A. The great Elly Ameling, a wonderful lieder singer, told me once that every song has to have its own perspective and its own voice, and you need to find the voice for each song. It’s kind of like pearls or beads on a necklace. Alone it’s quite small, but together it creates one cohesive unit.
Q. I saw that you just had a first child, so congratulations on that! How long has it been?
A. Six months. My husband and I have three kids together; he had two from a previous marriage, and we just had a baby six months ago.
Q. Were you rehearsing for L’Amour de Loin well into your pregnancy?
A. I began learning it well before my pregnancy, and he was born in June. But when it premiered he was 4½ months old! It was definitely a huge shift, because when you’re expecting and also postpartum, your body’s different. Your voice is different, your muscles are different, your mind is different ... everything is different. And it’s a lot, every day, trying to find your bearings. Slowly but surely things are coming back into play in a more reliable way, but for the first couple months after he was born, it was quite touch and go figuring out the way things would work. Which I think also might have influenced why Myra and I decided on this kind of program. She has two children of her own, and it kind of changes your perspective in a way that I think is pretty magical. So that experience, the mother’s experience, is a fascinating one, and one that we wanted to explore some.
Q. Can you tell me more about the adjustments you had to make? I can imagine for a vocalist the adjustments are even more radical than for an instrumentalist, because your instrument is your body.
A. Exactly. Any woman who’s had a pregnancy knows it wreaks havoc on your body physically, but also your hormones go crazy. Everything kind of goes a little wonky. It all comes back — it reshapes and reforms — but it takes time, and I think allowing your body to heal is one of the harder things for me to have done. Certainly your support system, physically, for singing is exactly what is stretched and pulled during the pregnancy, so that’s something that you have to retrain. I did a lot of Pilates, and a lot of cardiovascular activity to get my body to feel a little more together.
Q. Does the baby seem to like the music or does he fall asleep?
A. He loves the music! Whenever he hears something he stops and listens. I think it was probably because he heard a lot of music in the womb, and he smiles a lot, unless it’s bad, and then he really hates it!
Q. He can tell if it’s bad?
A. If I’m warming up and I do a phrase correctly he’ll be happy and smiling, and if I do a phrase incorrectly, he will cry. It’s strange having that kind of bellwether at home, but I guess helpful. The other thing that wreaks havoc is the lack of sleep. In order to sing, you have to sleep, and my husband took a hit quite a bit when I first began performing, taking the night feedings and early morning feedings to let me get enough sleep so I could have a fresh instrument. You have to plan that really well, and he was a wonderful partner in that regard.