Youngstown’s opera star cleared hurdles to reach the heights From East to Met

May 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Staff/wire report

NEW YORK

The curtain on the Metropolitan Opera stage is about to rise for the 8 p.m. show.

In his dressing room, Lawrence Brownlee dives to the floor in his white undershirt. And the 37-year-old tenor, a Youngstown native, starts pumping push-ups, “to get the blood flowing.”

Then it’s costume time. He drops his blue jeans — “Do you mind?” — to don the elegant black-and-red, floor-length coat of an 11th-century Christian crusader in Jerusalem. His role in Rossini’s “Armida” is devilishly difficult, sprinkled with high C’s and even D’s over almost four hours.

At 8:30 p.m., Brownlee strides briskly to the stage wings. “I strike up conversations with some of the chorus, the technicians, the extras — to channel the nervous energy before I step onstage.”

And then comes the challenge: singing the romantic lead opposite famed soprano Renee Fleming.

The evening was so exhilarating that one spectator mouthed “wow!” under her breath as Brownlee’s voice blended like honey with Fleming’s in the rapturous Act 1 love duet.

The tenor made his debut at the Met only three years ago. But he’s already a star at the world’s biggest opera house.

On Saturday, he and Fleming again will showcase their vocal genius in “Armida” to a sold-out house of nearly 4,000 spectators and broadcast live in high definition to about 250,000 people in more than 1,000 movie theaters in 44 countries. About 7 million more will hear the opera on Sirius XM satellite radio, local stations and live streaming audio on the Met Web site.

GROWING UP IN YOUNGSTOWN

Brownlee, one of six children, grew up on the East Side of Youngstown.

As a youth, Brownlee had to sing at a church where the choir director was his father, a GM-Lords- town worker.

“I hated it,” says Brownlee. “I would have ... the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach all week, if I knew I had to sing solo in church the next Sunday.”

But he was a child steeped in music, making drums out of oatmeal boxes and even singing in his sleep. “One night, it was ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ at the top of my lungs — and I never woke up!” he says, repeating family lore.

He also joined the East High School choir and The Youngstown Connection, though he didn’t consider a career until his senior year in a program for gifted music students at Youngstown State University. A coach there told him he had an operatic voice.

“I was not convinced, but I decided to give it a try,” he says, first as an undergraduate at Indiana’s Anderson University, then polishing his voice as an Indiana University graduate student in Bloomington.

Now, he tosses off the nine high C’s in “Fille” that first won Pavarotti fame in the 1960s.

But for Brownlee, fame doesn’t mean playing the glamorous opera “divo.” He prefers, instead, to fly home just outside Atlanta where his wife, Kendra, is expecting their first child.

FROM UNKNOWN TO LEADING MAN

In the past half-dozen years or so, Brownlee has gone from being a vastly talented but little-known singer with a master’s degree in music to top stages in leading roles.

“He has a terrific technique, and the color of his voice is so unique that you recognize it instantly if you switch on the radio, exactly as you do Pavarotti or Domingo,” says Riccardo Frizza, who conducted the Met orchestra for “Armida.”

“That’s what makes a singer great, versus someone with a good voice and technique, but you don’t recognize the sound. It’s like different birds — each one has its own special sound.”

Brownlee can deliver the high F — 21/2 tones above a high C — in Bellini’s “I Puritani.” A 20-second YouTube clip is proof of his vocal acrobatics in that single daunting note, part of the moving aria “Credeasi, misera!” (meaning “the poor one believes” her lover, the tenor, betrayed her).

Even Luciano Pavarotti couldn’t achieve that; he mostly sang the note in falsetto.

Though high notes are thrilling, they’re no proof of the artistry that has earned Brownlee major roles in recent years at Milan’s La Scala, London’s Royal Opera House, Vienna’s Staatsoper, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper and the Washington National Opera.

When he first stood on the Met stage in 2001, winning the company’s prestigious national competition, he looked out at the resplendent red-and-gold theater thinking, “Gosh, this has been my dream for years — to be here.” And when he started singing, he says, “I just had the time of my life.”

But he also recalls the racism that dogged him as he tried to build his career.

An agent told him that he’d never succeed “because you’re short and you’re black,” the 5-foot-6 singer says with a wry smile. Then, when he hoped to be hired by a second-rate American opera company he won’t name, “they said, ‘We can’t, because you’re black.’” (The company changed its mind after La Scala offered him the same part.)