By Paula Tuerk
 Soprano Lori Decter performs at Los Altos Morning Forum last week. |
Most people don’t think of San Jose, California as an incubator for aspiring opera stars. On May 17, Opera San Jose Managing Director Irene Dalis took the Los Altos Morning Forum behind the scenes of a regional opera company she founded in 1984 to nurture young singers and give them exposure on stage. To prove her point and highlight the quality of Opera San Jose, Dalis invited soprano Lori Decter and tenor Adam Flowers to perform several short pieces.
Decter and Flowers treated The Morning Forum to arias from a Dvozak work in Czech, Donazetti’s “The Elixir of Love,” an early opera by Verde, and “Eugene Onegin” by Tchaikovsky. The two ended with a delightful duet from Puccini’s “La Boheme” that sparkled with the excitement of young love.
With their wonderful round voices, Decter and Flowers didn’t need microphones and their stage presence and range of vocal expressions carried the message of each piece. As they talked about their history as performers, they created a more intimate view of opera professionals as ordinary people with a good sense of humor and a very special gift.
Part two of The Morning Forum presentation covered the professional evolution of Dalis from her San Jose childhood entertaining her Greek-born father with music to singing on the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Funded by her sister and brothers, at age 20 Irene left for New York to earn her master’s degree in music. She managed to connect with famous voice coach Edith Walker, who taught her never to put restrictions on herself and to always reach for a higher goal. Dalis applied for and won a Fulbright Award to study in Milan, where she took voice lessons twice a day, five days a week.
When Rudolf Bing of the Metropolitan Opera came to Milan to audition new voices, Dalis applied. Over the objections of her voice coach, Bing insisted that Irene begin performing on stage, even though she was early in her operatic training.
Dalis said this was a pivotal point in her career - the opportunity to perform on stage with a small company in Germany. She took this lesson to heart when she returned to San Jose after performing 44 roles with every major opera company.
Dalis became a full professor of music at San Jose State University. The programs she produced for entry-level performers were so successful that she took the next step and established a regional opera company.
Unlike other companies where recent graduates find homes in the chorus or in small roles, Opera San Jose keeps its residency holders on stage and singing throughout the year in principal roles and community outreach programs.
