Word: ramey
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...Ramey's silken voice, which ranges high into traditional baritone territory, is worlds apart from the toneless barking and roaring that too often pass for singing among basses. A flexible, liquid instrument, it can scale the trickiest Rossini coloratura passages or rattle the rafters in triumph...
...sandy-haired, blue-eyed Ramey cuts a commanding figure onstage. Although shy in private life, he is physically fearless in front of an audience; the burst of acrobatic twisting, leaping and rolling with which Ramey depicts the devil's discomfiture at the end of Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele is one of the most breathtaking spectacles in contemporary opera performance. European companies clamor for his services; two summers ago, the Paris Opera staged a vivid production of Giacomo Meyerbeer's 19th century spectral curiosity, Robert le Diable, just...
...America, though, Ramey is only now getting full recognition. Like Beverly Sills, Ramey first came to prominence at the New York City Opera, where he zoomed to starring roles. And like Sills, he was long snubbed by the Metropolitan Opera, finally cracking the Met for a 1984 staging of Handel's Rinaldo. Ramey had little better luck at the country's other two major international opera houses, in Chicago and San Francisco...
...someone who never even saw an opera until he was in one. Ramey's first exposure to music was at home and in church. "By the time I was nine or ten, I knew my voice was different from everyone else's," the erstwhile boy soprano recalls. "My voice already had vibrato, and I stifled it when I sang solos. I didn't want to be made fun of." At that time his taste ran more to Pat Boone than to Robert Merrill. Young Sam was unimpressed by operatic singing: "It was such a foreign sound...
...chance encounter with an Ezio Pinza record changed his life. Thrilled by Pinza's rich, robust tone, Ramey later enrolled in a summer workshop at the Central City Opera in the Colorado Rockies. "This was fantastic!" he exclaims. "There was everything -- dancing, acting, singing -- all combined in one art form. I decided I would give it a shot." In time, he found his way to New York City, where he supported himself and his wife Carrie as an advertising copywriter for a book publisher...