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On the scene: Racette joins the Opera Company of Philadelphia's fall lineup.

Like many international opera stars, Patricia Racette tries out a new role on a Philly stage.

by David Shengold

Vocally, the Opera Company of Philadelphia is on a steady climb. The company is positioning itself internationally in terms of casting, by forming long-term relationships with world-class Americans (like Gregg Baker and Nathan Gunn) and attracting major operatic stars by offering chances to try out new roles (as with Denyce Gravesí La Périchole and Stephanie Blytheís Italian Girl in Algiers). This season ratchets things up a notch, with performers of international note in each of OCPís five productions: Verdi's Il Trovatore and Don Carlo, Bizetís The Pearl Fishers, Offenbachís The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, and Carlisle Floydís haunting Susannah. Don Carlo offers two "role debuts" the world will be watching: Canadian hunk du jour bass John Relyea as King Philip, and, as Princess Eboli, the phenomenal Ewa Podles, an astounding singer, as Orchestra and Chamber Society audiences know (think Cesaria Evora with four octaves and agility).

But OCP's season opener on Oct. 3 promises no less excitement: the first Trovatore on any stage of American soprano Patricia Racette, a consummate singing actress in constant demand by conductors and opera companies the world over. With Deborah Voigt (like Racette, trained at San Francisco Opera's Merola Program) and Renée Fleming, Racette's the most valued American soprano working in opera today. Born in New Hampshire, she retains a twang from her college years in Texas, where she majored in jazz and music ed and gave little thought to classical singing. Fortunately, she had a fateful encounter with a Renata Scotto record and began investigating new paths that have taken her to stardom in Milan, Vienna and Paris. She's appeared here once before, in 1996's Così Fan Tutte with Gunn and Graves, and looks forward to rejoining OCP's "wonderful professional atmosphere."

Highly skilled onstage, with a luminous, very personal timbre, the beautiful Racette radiates a kind of vulnerable strength that gives her interpretations the power to move audiences. She often finds backbone and dramatic complexity in characters others play as victims, including Boheme's Mimì, Otello's Desdemona and (her latest Met triumph) Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. Trovatore's Leonora, pursued to spectacularly catchy tunes across four acts by warring, unknown-to-one-another brothers (don't ask) marks Racette's sixth Verdi heroine (her seventh, Simon Boccanegra's Amelia, comes next summer in Santa Fe, where she and her partner, mezzo Beth Clayton, maintain a home). Racette has asked to sing Leonora's difficult, often-cut aria, "Tu vedrai," in what's already a marathon final act: "I always like being able to explore the extreme emotions of a character. Even more than the words, Verdi's music really shows the depth of her feeling there. His music -- so melodic and passionate -- really carries this opera."

Racette and Clayton met doing a Traviata production; they made public their relationship last year in an Opera News cover interview, a brave step in the still surprisingly skittish world of opera. The soprano reports no backlash and says the experience was greatly affirming for them, both as individual performers and as a couple.

Constantly searching for new dramatic challenges, Racette must be among the world's busiest singers. This summer in Santa Fe she took on a new role she adores, Janácek's intense, impassioned Katya Kabanová; in the months after Philly, she tackles Faust in Chicago, Janácek's Jenufa in Houston and more Katyas in San Diego. Plus she's posed herself a daunting if exciting new challenge: musical comedy (though comedy is hardly the word). Not Marian the Librarian, but one of the hardest, most bitter roles Broadway has afforded an actress, Fosca in Sondheim's Passion. Racette tackles this scorcher amidst February snows at Minnesota Opera, opposite another OCP favorite, tenor William Burden (awaited here in The Pearl Fishers). But for now, risk-taker Racette soars through Leonora's arching arias and trios, and lucky Philadelphia hears it first.

Il Trovatore, Oct. 3-21, $5-$155, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Academy of Music, Broad and Locust sts., 215 732-8400.