Harmonious Choices : For Soprano Kallen Esperian, Like Her Desdemona, the Challenge Is in Finding the Balance

COSTA MESA —  Kallen Esperian isn’t one to drop names. But she could. A winner of the 1985 Opera Company of Philadelphia/Luciano Pavarotti Voice Competition, the soprano has since sung regularly in major opera houses with the Great One himself, as well as with his colleague-competitor Placido Domingo and recently also with Jose Carreras. Bingo, all three tenorissimos.

But the 34-year-old Midwesterner, who sings Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” for Opera Pacific beginning Saturday, keeps a level head and maintains a friendly modesty.

She’ll tell you, for instance, that she didn’t grow up in a musical household. She didn’t listen to Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts in her childhood home of Barrington, Ill., outside Chicago. She tried out for the high school chorus “only because my friends did.” When she decided to major in voice at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she had never even seen an opera and didn’t much like studying it either.

“I didn’t understand all these different foreign languages and all these different kinds of songs that I was not used to,” Esperian said over lunch recently at a hotel near the Performing Arts Center. “So I was going to switch my major to theater.”

But out of the blue, she was awarded a full scholarship to the school, which meant the financially strapped young woman could continue her studies without worrying about how to pay for them.

There was a catch: “I had to stay in voice. And you know, fate is a very strange thing because, right after that, suddenly singing began clicking.”

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She was cast as Octavia in a college production of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea” and as the understudy to Carmen, “still having never yet seen an opera.” Both are mezzo roles. Esperian thought she was a mezzo.

The director was a student named Tom Machen, who was working on his doctorate. “Well, it ends up, he’s my husband now,” Esperian said. “So I met my first husband with my first opera. My first husband? My only husband,” she laughed.

The two were married in 1982, before she graduated. They even delayed the wedding so that Esperian could make her debut with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

“I said, ‘Tom, I think this is important, because it’s my first professional offer, and I think I need to take it.’ And he agreed with me, so we postponed our wedding.”

When her husband got a teaching job at then-Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis), they moved to the city that was Elvis’ home. It’s been their home, too, for 13 years.

The University of Illinois mailed her her diploma. “Believe me, I was just glad to get it after years of trying to combine rehearsals with classes and the dean calling me in and saying, ‘Miss Esperian, we all want to see our name up in lights someday, but this is an academic institution, and you have to go to class.’ He was right, but that’s how the whole opera thing started.”

She entered the regional Metropolitan Opera auditions and went to the finals in New York as the Mid-South regional winner, but she didn’t win any of the prizes there. “[Mezzo] Rise Stevens told me, ‘We think you’re a soprano,’ ” she said. So I went home and started training as that.”

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In fact, it wasn’t long before she won the Pavarotti competition as a soprano and landed the role of Mimi in his production of “La Boheme.”

“It was my first full role in Italian and as a soprano, and talk about frightening. It was very scary. I was very naive and very inexperienced. I was 24, just newly married and hadn’t been around that much. But that started everything. We took the production on tour to Italy for the 25th anniversary of his career in Modena. Things happened very quickly after that.”

She went on to sing in Buenos Aires and at the Met with Pavarotti, and she was cast as Mimi opposite Domingo at the Met and in a production Domingo conducted in Los Angeles. She sang with Carreras in Verdi’s “Stiffelio” at La Scala in February.

These are only a sampling of her roles and appearances.

“I was having to play catch-up very quickly,” she said. “But I’m a fairly quick study, which has really helped me. And I haven’t added roles that quickly. I’ve stuck to one or the other for quite a while, and it’s only been in the last couple of years where actually I’ve been adding a lot of things, and I think it’s time now.”

Desdemona is one of her main roles. The challenge, she said, “is to find the balance between strength and kindness” in the character.

“If she doesn’t show some sort of character herself, who cares if she’s killed? The audience needs to see this is a person in her own right. She doesn’t just exist because of him. She had a life before him. A man like that would not be drawn to a weak woman.

“Also, the audience needs to see from the beginning that this relationship is extremely passionate and physical, and there’s a reason he’s crazy about her, and there’s a reason he goes just crazy when he thinks she may have been with another man. If you don’t see all that before the last act, then killing her just comes out of nowhere.”

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The challenge in recent years for Esperian and her husband has been balancing careers with parenthood. They have a 2 1/2-year-old son, Mark. “It’s very difficult combining a career with motherhood, especially a career when you’re on the road all the time and one that requires a lot of rest and concentration,” she said.

“For the first year and a half, it was difficult adjusting because you want to be a mother, and if I hear him crying, I want to go to him, and I do go to him.

“I can’t just go close the door and say, ‘Excuse me, I have to sing now or I need my rest.’ So it’s been difficult,” she said. “He’s 2 now, and he’s getting to an age when he’s extremely active. But he’s sleeping! Which is a positive sign, and he is communicating, so he can let you know things.

“Yes, he’s telling me ‘No’ a lot. We’re getting into the whole discipline thing, which is so hard because he’s so adorable, and he’s so funny,” she said. “Daddy has to be more the disciplinarian because I’m not very good at it.”

* Kallen Esperian will sing Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” opposite Vladimir Atlantov for Opera Pacific on Saturday, Wednesday, Jan. 27 and 31 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 4 and 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $18 to $85. (714) 474-4488.