Andrew Garland seems like someone one might meet at a Fenway game. Wearing jeans and a dark t-shirt, he appears to be a typical New Englander.
"My grandfather, at the age of four, remembered the 1918 World Series. He passed away seven days after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 [points to the cap on his head] and this is his hat," Garland said, "I wear it!"
Yet this native of Kingston, Mass. is anything but the average Red Sox fan. Garland, at 30 years old, is an operatic baritone with a budding career who recently debuted in the Boston Lyric Opera's production of Giacomo Puccini's "La Bohème."
Already, he is a regional finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the winner of Washington International Music and the American Traditions competitions. The New York Times described him as a "distinctly American presence" - and distinctive he certainly is. At BLO rehearsal, Garland is poised, confident, relaxed; his voice sounds full and lyrical with an elegant upper range and a deep, meaningful timbre.
Still, some years ago, Garland would not have imagined singing Puccini for a job. "I guess I was always musically inclined," he said. "I took piano lessons for many years and enjoyed them," but he admitted that in high school he thought singing was for girls.
A chorus trip to Scotland got him interested. He had started dating a girl on the trip, and the choir director caught on. The director pressured Garland to come to rehearsals, if only to play the piano.
"I got approached from two different angles," Garland said. "The choir director kept coming up to me and being like, 'You should join chorus!' and at the same time the girl I was dating said, 'Well, you get to be in class with me every day.'"
"[I went to the rehearsal] ready to play, and [the director] said, 'Oh, you know, we don't need piano today. Just stand in the back with the rest of the guys.' So I never played piano in the chorus ever - and ended up marrying the girl."
Later, he went to college at UMass-Amherst and joined the choir there.
"The chorus director auditioned me." He was the first audition of the day. "He says, 'You're in!' And I'm like, 'Don't you have to hear all those other people?' He says, 'No, you're in - and you should take voice lessons. The next morning he calls my dorm at 8 a.m., a cardinal sin, you know, for a college student, and he says, 'Sign up for voice lessons!'"
Garland followed through.
"In a half hour of voice lessons, I learned more than in 11 years of piano."
So he changed his major to performance with a second major in music education. Now, Garland has a graduate degree from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and has collaborated with greats like William McGraw and Nathan Gunn. He even filled in for Gunn at a moment's notice at a Seattle Opera performance of "Florencia en el Amazonas," a modern work by Daniel Catán.
In Boston's "Bohème," he plays Schaunard, the musician in a group of 19th century Parisian friends who struggle with life, love and tuberculosis, the infectious disease of the day.
"There are four bohemians," Garland said, "Schaunard, my character, is the one who makes money. Whenever he's onstage, everyone's happy."
Although Schaunard is a secondary role, Garland has studied the character's subtleties and development. "It's interesting that at the end he's the one who discovers that Mimi dies first," he said, "for a couple of reasons: one is that he starts out seeming like the fun guy and he's the one that delivers the tragic news. ... My first line is like, 'Hey guys, we broke the bank for you. I just made you a lot of money.' My last line is, 'She's dead.'"
Garland cautions that the road to opera stardom is rocky: Practice is vital and novices need to work doubly hard in the beginning.
"I'm in the first five years of my career, so unless the role is vocally unfit for me to sing, I take the job," Garland said.
Rejection is normal, he cautions, so singers must constantly reassess their role. Still, he admits that that he is lucky to have secured a comfortable balance between opera, concerts and song recitals this early in his career.
Of the three, song recitals are his favorites, especially with work by living American composers such as Hoiby.
"It's a hard theme to sell," he said. "People react to modern music like, 'Oh, my God!' But someone always comes up to me afterwards and says, 'I didn't want to come to this, my so-and-so roped me into this, but I had so much fun and I loved it.'"
To be a great opera singer, Garland cites uniqueness as key.
"You have to have a type of sound and style that's distinct. If people just heard a recording of you, they could pick you out."
According to this baritone, opera as a genre is most certainly alive. "Many people just don't know; it's the same people that think it's fat women with breastplates and horns and spears singing in Italian," he said. "By the way, it's raven's wings, and they're singing in German."
Still, the feedback he has received has been largely positive.
"When I go to non-opera parties, people say 'Oh, you're an opera singer! I've never met an opera singer before!' Most people are fascinated, in a good way. But the typical reaction is, 'Oh, you're not fat.'"
