Sonia Gariaeff appears to be a normal 30-year-old woman, though
she looks a bit younger. She’s well-dressed, with an air of
excitement and youthful energy. She flashes me a bright smile as
she takes off her coat and slides into a chair at a Starbucks in
the upper west side of New York City. I am here on vacation;
Gariaeff is here to work.
By Jen Penkethman Special to the Dispatch
New York – Sonia Gariaeff appears to be a normal 30-year-old woman, though she looks a bit younger. She’s well-dressed, with an air of excitement and youthful energy. She flashes me a bright smile as she takes off her coat and slides into a chair at a Starbucks in the upper west side of New York City. I am here on vacation; Gariaeff is here to work.
“This is audition season,” Gariaeff says. “All the opera singers come to New York.”
Gariaeff is a professional opera singer, a mezzo-soprano, to be exact. From her roots as a piano student and chamber singer in Gilroy, her hometown, she has gone on to sing in dozens of operas. Most recently, she played Stefano in Opera San Jose’s “Romeo and Juliet.” She is in New York for 10 weeks, auditioning for roles that might debut anywhere in the country.
“I’m really trying to stop performing only on the west coast,” Gariaeff says. “I don’t want to get into a rut.”
In a highly competitive business, Gariaeff’s success is significant. She has been interested in music since early childhood when, as legend goes, she became obsessed with the musical “Annie.” After that she auditioned for a talent show, and caught the attention of a community theater director, who cast her in the musical “Cinderella.”
“I was cast as one of the stepsisters,” Gariaeff recalls. “I was upset about that. But I just got hooked on musical theater. I got the theater bug.”
Her mother supported her interest, enrolling her in piano lessons and ballet. She remembers her teachers: Gilroy music educators Carol Harris, Faith Peterman, Susie Roberts, and, in junior high, Phil Robb.
“When she first sang with me in junior high, she was lower, usually an alto,” Robb said. “I remember the early days, working on intonation with her.”
Though she knew she was ambitious, and wanted to do something “awesome,” Gariaeff says she didn’t quite hit on the idea of singing opera until college, at University of California Santa Cruz. There, it occurred to her that she could sing classical music – which she had already decided she loved – and act at the same time.
“I hadn’t seen an opera until I was on the way to being a singer,” says Gariaeff.
Her first opera was “Turano,” by Puccini, which concerns an evil seductress, a role Gariaeff says doesn’t appeal to her very much. She wasn’t sure she liked opera until she started taking opera workshops.
“I like to be onstage, to create a character, to explore someone’s inner workings,” Gariaeff says. It is this aspect of creating a character that continues to fuel her love for her profession. Most opera singers perfect 10 or so roles, playing them three or four times in their careers, and Gariaeff has her own favorite role.
“I love playing the sassy pageboys'” says Gariaeff. “They’re always the ones to wreak havoc in the show. It’s so much fun.”
As a mezzo-soprano, Gariaeff is well-suited to play adolescents, and has garnered excellent reviews for her performances as Cherubino, in “The Marriage of Figaro.” She has followed the role from West Bay Opera, to Berkeley Opera, to Avenue Opera in Missouri. Though the part requires plenty of acting, Gariaeff says she focuses most of the theatrics into her music.
“There’s so much going on technically, with the singing,” Gariaeff says. “If you try too hard to act, to really feel sadness or hate or whatever, you’ll screw up your throat.”
After college, Gariaeff earned a master’s degree in vocal performance at the San Francisco Conservatory, and became a Young Artist at the Portland Opera. The rest is history – mostly great reviews and awards, including Grand Prize at the Carmel Music Society Vocal Competition in 2002. Although the business is cutthroat (“it’s not the romper room anymore”), Gariaeff says she has nevertheless loved the people opera has led her to meet, and picked up some German, Italian and French through singing.
“All my knowledge of foreign languages has to do with love, birds, war,” Gariaeff laughs. “Not how to get directions or ask where the bathroom is.”
She has sung in southern France and Spain as part of a choir tour, and spent a month in England for a job. Her best audiences, she says, are in the Bay Area.
Gariaeff will be performing for the United Nations in March.
“When you work in an opera, you live somewhere that’s not home for three or four weeks, doing intense work, basically singing in someone’s face,” said Gariaeff. “You have to find people in the cast and become friends with them in three days.”
Gariaeff’s home base is San Francisco, “where my stuff lives.” She remembers fondly a Gilroy before the outlets, and remarks that when she comes home now she has to navigate through freeway exits that didn’t exist when she grew up here. Her parents, Nick and Polly Gariaeff, still live in Gilroy.
“We knew she could do this,” Polly Gariaeff says of her daughter. “She could get up and sing in front of a group of people at age 5.”
Polly Gariaeff says Gilroy was an excellent place for her daughter to develop her skills, and that Sonia was happy with the choir program at Gilroy High, which “kept her focused.”
“We’re so happy for her, because how many of us are able to go after our passion?” said Gariaeff. “She’s taking risks, and has to be brave, because it’s not an easy business.”
“It’s very competitive,” Robb agreed. “It really takes a certain kind of person to sing opera. Most people think opera is just a fat lady with horns. They don’t understand that opera is drama, death, blood, everything in the movies.”
Before the interview ends, Gariaeff mentions that she’ll be flying off to Chicago the next day for an audition. Since opera singers’ careers can last past retirement age, Gariaeff sees a long, successful career ahead of her.
“I just want to keep singing, and be the best artist I can be,” Gariaeff gushes, and for a second becomes the spirited adolescent she has won so much praise for playing.
