Part one began our interview, it continued with part two, and concludes here.

SB: Last night, for the first time in my life, I watched How Green Was My Valley. Oh my God, it’s a great movie. It takes place in a Welsh mining town and I sat there weeping through this film because I saw my mother in this movie, I saw my dad, I saw people I’ve known in my life. My family in the Pittsburgh area, of course, were all steel workers. I didn’t live it first hand but I had this experience watching this movie because I could see people that I knew and I saw myself in it. That is what it’s all about.

SDR: Do you think audiences put a barrier between themselves and opera characters because they don’t have that association?

SB: I think that most audience members never think of themselves as being intrinsically part of the performance, which they are. And I have actually said to audience members, thanked them for being such a good audience member. “What do you mean, you could see me?” Yeah I could see you, I was singing right at you, couldn’t you tell? That’s number one. When it comes to opera, I think that sometimes people don’t connect with the character perhaps because they are expressing themselves singing. Maybe that’s it.

I think that the theater can be a remarkable place to be if everything is open to everyone having an experience and to having an active experience. It’s the difference between showing and telling — very big difference. In all of the recitals I do, I keep the lights up and I don’t give any translations to texts. I do it because number one, an audience that can see one another becomes responsible to one another. I find that if the lights are up, they don’t talk as much, they’re much more active. Some people can’t take it. It really pisses them off. More often than not, they couldn’t care less if the lights were up.

But I don’t give them any texts anymore. If I’m doing something in English that is particularly difficult poetry then I recite the poetry first. I’ve been touring a recital where I sing twelve poems of Emily Dickinson, and Dickinson’s not the easiest poet. It’s the very first thing on the program and before I sing them, with my pianist, we recite all twelve poems. I want to give the audience an opportunity to react to the poetry before they hear how someone else reacted to it. In that respect they become an active audience. If you have an audience that’s just staring at the program and counting lines down to the end of the program, they’re not hearing the song. They’re just counting lines to the end of the song. I’m putting together a program that I’m going to be doing in May in San Francisco. The first half of the program’s all in French; before I sing those songs, I’m gonna recite the translations and then I’m gonna sing the song because I really believe that creates an active audience. A killer for me is a passive audience. And we, as a people, have become a passive audience.

SDR: Yeah. I mean there’s that great Tosca live from Parma with Corelli. The audience went nuts every time that dude sang. Apparently he was in good voice that night. I was kind of sad listening to it realizing I would never experience opera like that in the United States.

SB: What we’re feeding off now is sort of like the Three Tenor phenomenon, or the stadium phenomenon of opera; it’s not what it was. Now it’s about hits in a different way and audiences hear things in a different way. They are much more passive. It’s so much harder to really get to them because they’re used to information passing in front of them very quickly. They’re used to seeing a picture, anyone now can look at the TV and it doesn’t even register how many images you are seeing in one minute, any television show, I mean, you have between ten and twelve cameras?

SDR: Two or three seconds between frames.

SB: That’s it, I mean, my PBS special had twelve cameras. It looked beautiful and I was very happy it didn’t change position constantly. There was lots of beautiful fading in and it was gorgeous but you can’t look at opera that way. You can’t go into an art museum and look at art that way. You actually have to go into an art museum and stand there and look at it. To actually see a painting you have to look at it for a while. There’s so much in a piece of artwork. There’s so much that you can take from it. Opera moves at a relatively slow pace, it takes a lot longer to say something in opera than it normally does, and in some operas, even longer. We’re creating a society that needs everything to move very, very quickly. It’s like we’re all a bunch of children and if you don’t keep our attention, we’ll just move on to something else. And now that we all have smart phones and iPads and computers and God — how much multitasking are we doing?

SDR: It’s amazing what happens when we lose the power. We had a massive power loss here a few years ago. The atmosphere was so different. People came out of their homes and talked to each other and, of course, the ice cream had to be consumed before it melted.

SB: It was the same thing the last time we had a blackout in New York City. It happened just as the sun was going down, which isn’t the best time for a blackout. I was living on Central Park West at the time and I hadn’t seen that many people walking since 9/11. It was summertime and everybody was out in the park. Everybody. Mothers and aunts and uncles and everybody sitting out on their stoops, children running around the streets. Heaven!

The idea of a neighborhood of people is why I wanted to live out in the country. I mean, I actually have neighbors who look out for my house and who water my plants. That’s wonderful. That sense of community, it’s really important we don’t lose that. I think that music, to get back to the art form, is one of the best ways to maintain community. My next big project is actually to work on a sing-a-long recital which creates community through singing. When you sing as a part of an ensemble, it’s wonderful. We sing in church because not only is the element of praise there but the element of everyone doing something together, everyone working cooperatively to create something like that.

SDR: Even breathing together.

SB: That’s it! Art does that. It’s something that speaks to everyone and singing in particular allows everyone to be part of something that is working as a unit. It’s why it’s so important we don’t lose this in schools. The two things that teach children to have community are arts and sports. Yet those are the first two things that get hit when things have to be cut because money is scarce: arts and sports are always the ones that get hit. And first it’s arts. And these are two things that teach children to cooperate with each other and to work as a team to create something.

SDR: Music is also a safe environment to be with your peers. Just a couple months ago a woman on Facebook that I went to high school with sent out a message to a bunch of us from the choir about how important that was to her. She told us that there were days when the only thing that kept her from committing suicide was choir.

SB: Every time I go to a school and I do a master class, there’s always gonna be an opportunity for me to say “How many of you were saved by your music, by band, chorus, orchestra, how many?” and they all raise their hands. We have an epidemic of children committing suicide in this country, we have an epidemic of children turning to violence in this country and I think that there’s a direct correlation between that and the loss of arts education.

SDR: And bullying too, there’s no bullying in choir. Well, maybe a little but it’s different.

SB: It’s a place that people go to find release; not only do sports and arts teach kids how to cooperate, it also helps them to blow off the steam that is constantly — I mean these kids are kettles on the stove 24/7 and they have nothing to blow steam off. Playing a video game — believe me, I have lost many hours to Prince of Persia; I love video games. I finally had to stop playing them because I get so addicted so quickly, it gets my adrenaline really rushing, as it’s supposed to, which is why people want to play it, but it doesn’t burn energy like singing in a chorus or playing in a band. I had a girlfriend that I ran into at my 20th high school reunion and she’s a prosthodontist, very successful family and she said to me “you know Stephanie, I don’t feel that I’m really myself because I’m not playing my flute, I’m not making music and I really feel like I need to pick up that instrument and start playing again…” We played in band together, sitting next to each other in chairs, either first or second, for seven years.

I can tell you for a fact that music saved my life. I was never a popular kid. Never. Until I started being in the band and singing in the chorus and being in musical theater. I was a big kid; I was picked on mercilessly in high school. Mercilessly. And it’s so funny, some of these guys now, they get on Facebook and they ask to be my friend and I go “you’ve got to be kidding me” you made my life a misery. I had a guy come up to me once, I did a little concert at home, and he’s like, could you sign my program for my kid and if his kid hadn’t had been standing there, I would have punched him in the face. This guy used to chase me on his bicycle, pretend to try to run me down to scare me. He was a cruel kid. But you know children develop thicker skin and develop ways of coping when they are in a creative atmosphere and we are creating a generation of children who have no coping skills because rather than allowing them to be in a situation where they have to learn to cope, we tell them, “oh no no, we don’t want you to fall down, so wear this bubble around your body and that way you’ll never get cut.” That’s like the body never being allowed to develop antibodies for anything.

SDR: Or if you wore a neck brace your whole life — not being able to support your head.

SB: Exactly: And that’s what we’re teaching. I really want to go on to Facebook and I want to create a page that allows people to write their testimony or to create a link to a video or something telling people this is how being in band changed my life. So that we would have a gigantic database of testimonies. Which is kind of like evangelism, the most important part of evangelism is the testimony, it’s the only thing that no one can refute. No one can tell you you didn’t experience that.

SDR: That’s Tolstoy. That’s Anna Karenina. That’s Levin with the peasants cutting the grass, that’s why he believed in God, because of an experience in community working with his body instead of his mind. His reason, philosophy, theology, was getting him lost; he didn’t know what to do.

SB: And that’s the crux of religion. It is something that’s very, very personal and it hits home and it sticks in your heart. You know the rest of the stuff is important but the belief, the faith that comes from an action in your life, an experience — that’s where music is at.

I once had a conversation with James Levine about this. I said you know, when I was at Tanglewood as a student, I knew that not everybody in that program was going to be a professional singer and it didn’t matter because the process of learning what we did those two summers was going to affect the way everybody lived their lives from that day forward. If we lose this bit of teaching opportunity it will snowball into something that will go out of control. The way technology is going today, I can see very easily in the next 50 years, people will not have to go to offices, they won’t have to congregate, you’ll be able to get whatever you need in your house, and you can just sit there in your house and have food brought to you and your work brought to you and live very happily in a bubble. I think we have to fight that tooth and nail. And it all starts with education.

SDR: Well we should talk about Verdi just a bit, so I’ll ask you: is there a better quartet for the Verdi Requiem. Not is this the best, but is there a better one? This group is pretty badass.

SB: This is one of the most exciting quartets — across the board — I’ve ever worked with. I’ve worked on a lot of Verdi Requiems and, first of all the idea of singing with Furlanetto is about the most exciting thing I’ve experienced in a while when it comes to Verdi Requiem or concert singing in general. This is a very good group and I’m really enjoying singing with Stoyanova and with Piotr [Beczala] because I’ve never sung with either of these two singers nor have I ever sung with Furlanetto, I’ve only admired him, so this is a very exciting experience. It’s totally exciting. I love this piece I don’t think there’s …

SDR: — and you get the best tunes.

SB: Hahaha, yeah. But I don’t get the last tune. But the Verdi Requiem is the most exciting, other than the Mahler Eight, the most exciting, visceral experience to be sitting on stage for. I mean Mahler Eight is way up there. Have you sung in a Mahler Eight chorus? Oh man, when you sit in front of a Mahler Eight chorus and that orchestra, it’s life-changing. But you get the same kind of experience with the Dies irae. It’s really some of the best choral singing. For me, singing concert music like this — there’s always an element of sadness because I’m not able to sing in the chorus, and I really love it. I’ve never sung in the chorus for a big work, even in college, my freshman year I tried out for the solos for Israel in Egypt which is my favorite Handel work. I thought, well I’ll just try it and see what happens and I got it. I was the alto soloist. I had been rehearsing with the chorus and I continued to rehearse with the chorus every week and then when we got to the actual performances and I was told that I wasn’t singing with the chorus, that I was gonna have to sit out front and just do my parts. I was so disappointed because for me the most exciting stuff was in the chorus. That is such great writing!

SDR: The first time I saw the Verdi Requiem, when I was 19, I kept waiting for the chorus to stand up and then was like ahh, it’s that soprano again.

SB: Verdi is visceral. It’s exciting from the core and the end of the first act of Ballo. I mean, I’ve sung with some really big Verdi choruses at the end of acts and I mean it [Ballo] trumps Triumphal March [from Aida] for me, it’s shorter, it’s just economical. It feels great to be part of the texture. It’s another thing I learned as a kid being in an ensemble, and today, the work that I find the most rewarding and exciting is ensemble work.

The Verdi Requiem is on Thursday, March 20th. It has been sold out for weeks and there are rumors of people paying a premium for scalped tickets.