Natalia's 'miracle'

Natalia Dopwell received the May Johnstone Commemoration Shield for the Most Outstanding Performer when adjudicators Dr D Douglas Miller and Professor Melvin James Hurst presented their awards on the Gala Closing Night of the 26th Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival at Queen’s Hall. The 22-year-old lyric soprano had caught the eye of Dr Miller, the adjudicator for north Trinidad, from the first round of the competition when she sang the operatic aria “Les Oiseaux Dans La Charmill” (In the woods the birds are singing), the doll song from the Tales of Hoffman. Dr Miller’s notes on her performance were: “very doll-like, lovely coloratura colour, very nice handling of the cadenza-like material, very nice presentation, nice smile, very fine performance, brava!!!.” So it was not surprising when Natalia again placed first in the Open Championships last week Monday and received the Havelock Nelson Cup, contested by north and south winners of Classes 51a and b Operatic Aria — Ladies and Gents. She was the only guest performer at last Sunday night’s Gala to receive unending, tumultuous applause. But there were no “encores” taken that night.

Natalia’s other appearances in the biennial Festival included an operatic duet with Vanessa Bushe, “The Presentation of the Rose” from the opera Rosen Kavlier, which won them the Rochford Cup at the Championships. Singing Bach’s “Mein Glaubiges Herze”: (My heart ever faithful”) Natalia was second to Bushe, who tied with Jacqueline Smith in the Oratario class. Bushe eventually won The Jean Abdool Memorial Trophy for the Most Outstanding Vocalist in the Festival. Dopwell also performed in the Vocal Recital and Broadway Musical Songs classes. To Natalia, it was a miracle that she placed “in anything” having came down with laryngitis, which prevented her from speaking for two days in the week before the festival.

However, she says: “I was really happy when I got the Most Outstanding Performer because I believe that on stage you should be able to act and move and not just sing, to make it a full performance, so the fact that they gave me that award means they thought I was a good all-round performer, it was more than just singing so I am really glad to have gotten that award.” It was while attending Vocal Technique and Interpretation Workshops at the Academie Internationale D’Ete De Nice in France last July/August, that Natalia first heard the doll song being performed by a singer from Iceland in the Masters’ Class. But she didn’t think it would be possible for her to sing it: “It was a difficult song” she says. Undaunted, on her return she started working on trying to reach the standard of coloratura, needed for that song. “As time passed my voice started to reach to it, and I started to learn it at the end of last year under June Nathaniel, my tutor for the past seven years. To sing a coloratura, you have to be able to take very quick breaths and stay in pitch when you come back in to a new passage, so your body has to be very flexible and breathing has to be very disciplined. Like any muscle the more you work it the better it gets and more you can control it.”

Earlier this year, Natalia attended two auditions in New York, at the Eastman School of Music in New York at the end of January and at the Manhattan School of Music at the end of February. She is grateful to the Ministry of Community Development for all the support they gave, which allowed her to travel twice to New York rather than incur expenses of staying there for a month between auditions. “I couldn’t have gone to second audition if they hadn’t helped me.” Natalia now waits with crossed fingers and toes as hopefully, one of these auditions will lead to scholarships. Last Sunday night, she also received one year’s worth of voice lessons from the Key Academy at Alexandra Street, where Nathaniel is the principal. Natalia, the fifth of Christopher and Annette Dopwell’s six children, sings in English, French, German, Italian and Latin the major languages of opera — which she says “at first really liked me more than I liked it. Now I just don’t find anything else challenging anymore. Yes, I love Broadway and modern music, but they just do not challenge me anymore.”