Singer paying it forward at UCA

Alumna sets up opera contest, returns to help pick winner

Tressa Tiner, accompanied by her mother Janine Tiner, sings “Hello, Margaret, It’s You” from the opera The Telephone for judges Saturday at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. Tiner is from North Little Rock and is a student at the University of Memphis.
Tressa Tiner, accompanied by her mother Janine Tiner, sings “Hello, Margaret, It’s You” from the opera The Telephone for judges Saturday at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. Tiner is from North Little Rock and is a student at the University of Memphis.

CONWAY -- Kristin Lewis' job has taken her 6,000 miles from home to opera stages in Vienna and other European cities.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Kyle Forehand (left), a student at Crane School of Music in New York, and University of Central Arkansas student Sarah Cain wait to perform for judges Saturday.

But this weekend, the Little Rock native is back in her home state, where the Kristin Lewis Foundation is sponsoring the first scholarship competition at the University of Central Arkansas for 12 emerging opera singers between ages 18 and 23.

Lewis, a soprano who graduated from UCA in 1999, and three guest judges will be in UCA's Snow Fine Arts Recital Hall at 3 p.m. today, when each contestant will perform two arias -- solo vocal melodies -- as part of a concert to choose up to five scholarship recipients.

The men and women who are contestants come from colleges around the nation. Most are from Arkansas colleges, but there also are singers from colleges in New York, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

The first of those chosen will get an all-expenses paid, one-week program studying voice in Vienna. The others will get scholarships ranging from $750 to $2,000.

Lewis understands the value of such events and scholarships. When she was a junior at UCA, she won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions' regional contest and later competed in New York, where she reached the final round.

Since then, she said she has performed in three of the world's top-five opera houses. All three are in Europe, where opera is more popular than it is in the United States. Lewis didn't see her first opera until she was in college.

She said hard work alone won't make someone an opera performer.

"You can't really choose to be an opera singer," she said. "It's one of those things you're blessed with or not."

Even so, opera performers must study, work and take care of themselves physically, she noted.

"Our bodies are instruments," she said last week as she sipped a cup of soothing hot tea and fretted over the draft coming from an air-conditioning vent.

In Vienna, whenever she's outside, she takes along a scarf. She travels often and keeps a medical mask handy when she's on planes or trains, concerned that someone near her may have a cold.

Lewis has always loved music but started out as an English major when she enrolled at UCA.

"So many members of my family were musical that it wasn't deemed special," she said of her talents. Her mother did advise her, though, "to at least audition for the choir or take [more] piano lessons," she recalled.

As a sophomore, Lewis was taking a voice class when her teacher asked her to consider taking private lessons "because I had a nice voice." Lewis soon realized that she should study music because it had been such an important part of her life.

About a decade ago, Lewis moved to Vienna to study opera and later perform.

"My first year in Vienna, I studied harder than I probably had any of the years preceding it. ... And it continues," Lewis said.

She has learned German, Austria's national language, and has become fluent in Italian, the operatic language she has adopted.

She sings only Italian operas, with two exceptions -- one production of the French opera Carmen and a European production in English of Dead Man Walking in which she portrayed Sister Rose.

Her voice's range is such that she is considered a lyrico-spinto soprano, one whose voice -- like that of the legendary Maria Callas -- is lyrical but also can move toward the dramatic.

Lewis, who doesn't like to talk about her age, does not subscribe to the belief that singers who don't know the language can perform an opera effectively by simply memorizing the words. She believes they must know what the words mean.

"If it has no emotion, it's not believable," she said of a performance.

Among her favorite roles is Elisabetta from Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo.

"It's majestic, and the music is wonderful," she said.

She will perform that role again in Berlin in April.

"I don't take it lightly that I am living this dream," she said.

And, she is especially grateful to one of her music professors at UCA, Martha Antolik, who is working with Lewis on the competition this weekend.

"I was very fortunate that Dr. Antolik really laid a wonderful foundation from which I could build," Lewis said.

Antolik, a former opera performer, said she "absolutely" recognized Lewis' potential soon after they began working together.

But, "even I didn't expect her to win" the Metropolitan Opera's regional competition, Antolik said.

One of the contestants at this weekend's event, Veena Akama-Makia, a UCA performance major from Little Rock, said her family will be watching when she sings today.

"This is just a great opportunity, in general," Akama-Makia said. "[Lewis is] giving back to [Arkansas] and allowing us to spread our wings. I really appreciate the opportunity to do something like that."

Lewis hopes that the UCA-based competition will become an annual event and that other Arkansans will want to give back to their state and help make its cultural opportunities better known.

"My goal is to bring people to Arkansas, to shine this spotlight" on it, she said.

State Desk on 03/29/2015

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