How a Fast-Rising Opera Singer Prepared for Her Met Debut

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/t-magazine/jnai-bridges.html

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On a Monday evening in early November, the singer J’Nai Bridges, 32, is standing at the piano in the front room of her Harlem apartment. In just four days, she will make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she will sing the part of Nefertiti in Philip Glass’s 1983 opera “Akhnaten,” but tonight she is practicing runs from the 19th-century French opera “Samson and Delilah,” which she will perform at the Washington National Opera in the spring. Opera singers perform unamplified, and their voices must be strong enough to project to every seat in a cavernous auditorium like the Met. So when Bridges begins to sing in the small space, the sound of her mezzo-soprano voice seems to shake the walls. Often, when she’s practicing, passers-by on the street will stop and listen. “I wasn’t able to do that in undergrad,” she says of her resonance. “It’s just a lot of years of training your muscles.” She read that Beyoncé used to jog on a treadmill and sing in order to improve her live performance, so now, she says, “Sometimes I literally run around the room.”

Bridges, who has had a year of professional triumphs, including singing the title role in “Carmen” at the San Francisco Opera and performing for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Kennedy Center, has an athletic approach to music that is deeply ingrained. As a high school student in Lakewood, Wash., she ran track and played basketball at the state championship level. She might have gone on to a professional career in basketball, in fact, had she not found opera during her senior year as a chorus member in Puccini’s “Tosca.” When a rehearsal fell on the same day as a finals game, her basketball coach made it clear she had to choose between the two activities. She never played competitive basketball again. Still, she says, “I’m thankful for my athletic background. It wasn’t such a shocker that I had to practice all the time.”

After squeezing in a few more bars of “Samson and Delilah,” Bridges walks from her apartment to the nearby restaurant Red Rooster, where she meets her parents, Pamela and Paris, who have flown in from Washington for a celebratory dinner before the final “Akhnaten” dress rehearsal. Bridges orders a burger (“When I eat protein the night before a performance, I sing so well”), and her mother explains the strange twist of fate that led Bridges to classical music. “We never ever went to the opera,” says Pamela. “We didn’t think it was for us.” In 1987, when Bridges was just a few months old, the family moved from Hawaii — where’d they’d been stationed for Paris’s military job — to Lakewood, a suburb of Tacoma. In the living room, they found a baby grand piano that did not belong to them. It had been left there, it seemed, by the previous owner. A week went by, then a month. No one came to collect it. Soon, it had been two years. “It was taking up space,” says Pamela. By then, Bridges was 2, and though she was too small to crawl onto the stool without her parents’ help, she was constantly at the piano. “It never sounded like random notes,” says Pamela. “It sounded melodic.” Shortly after, they signed her up for lessons.

Backstage at the Met the following day, Bridges sits patiently while a makeup artist applies gold leaf to her hands and feet — part of her transformation into Queen Nefertiti. “I’m freaking out,” Bridges says. “But I’m ready.” On the day of her first rehearsal for “Akhnaten,” in September, Bridges tells me, she got a notification on her phone that Jessye Norman, the legendary African-American soprano, had died. Bridges will sing at Norman’s memorial service later this month at the Met, which feels “like a passing of the torch.”

During a costume change, Bridges reflects on what lies ahead. Though she has a full schedule of appearances in classical operas at various theaters across the States, she’s thinking about ways to push the boundaries — and exposure — of the genre. “I’d love to see an opera about Harriet Tubman,” she says. Sharing the stage with Beyoncé is also a dream. “She’ll do her ‘Ave Maria’ thing, then I do my thing,” she says, playfully. “I imagine a big fan blowing in my hair.” It’s a fantasy rooted in Bridges’s serious desire to increase access to opera and change who gets to see it. “Opera is for all. It’s a way to feel, and now more than ever we need to be feeling more,” she says. “But the opera house has to look more like America.”

Monday, Nov. 4, 11 a.m.

Several days before the premiere of “Akhnaten,” Bridges gets together with a few of the production’s cast members and musicians for a game of basketball. She still plays casually, with friends or in pickup games, even when she’s traveling.

11:15 a.m.

On the court at the Equinox around the corner from Lincoln Center, Bridges dribbles past her friend Burt Mason, the principal trombonist with the Chamber Orchestra of New York.

12 p.m.

After the game, Bridges runs her teammates through a series of suicide sprints. “J’Nai is a low-key sadist when it comes to exercise,” says her best friend, Sakura Myers, a classical pianist who also played state championship basketball in high school. “I don’t feel like I’ve gotten a workout in unless I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” says Bridges. Afterward, she recovers with an almond-butter and banana smoothie.

5:30 p.m.

After a few hours of solo practice at her apartment, Bridges heads out to meet her parents, who have just flown in from Tacoma, for dinner at Marcus Samuelsson’s acclaimed Harlem restaurant Red Rooster. She lived in nearby Morningside Heights during college at the Manhattan School of Music but, she says, “I’d always dreamed of living in Harlem.”

6:15 p.m.

Pamela and Paris Bridges not only attend all of Bridges’s performances but they often bring a crowd. Two hundred and fifty of their friends — part of a large network that Pamela calls her “village” — came to see Bridges when she made her debut as Carmen at the San Francisco Opera this past summer.

Tuesday, Nov. 5, 9:15 a.m.

Bridges enters the stage door of the Met for the final dress rehearsal. “I walk in every day and I’m just like, ‘Is this real?!’” she says. “I’ve worked my ass off, so I deserve to be here. But it’s kind of astonishing.”

10:10 a.m.

“I feel so ready and good,” says Bridges of the final rehearsal. “I didn’t sleep super well last night, but I sang a little this morning and it’s there.” Though she says she doesn’t get overly nervous before a show, she manages anxiety with meditation and prayer. “I kind of just mash up the two.”

10:45 a.m.

In Bridges’s dressing room, a makeup artist applies gold leaf to the singer’s feet. “This is real gold leaf,” she says. “They do ’em big at the Met.”

11:10 a.m.

Bridges does a quick vocal exercise as she gets in costume as Nefertiti. “I grew up seeing her a lot in my house,” says Bridges of the Egyptian queen. “There weren’t a lot of positive black images at that time, so my mom kept pictures of her around as a reminder that we’re queens and we come from queens.”

12:20 p.m.

Bridges performs a scene alongside her co-star, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. “This is the one and only love scene. It’s a very beautiful moment because the music is unlike anything else in the opera,” says Bridges. “Anthony and I share the same notes, so the audience doesn’t know who’s singing when. Glass wanted to show how intertwined our love is.”

1:45 p.m.

The climactic scene of the opera, in which Akhnaten’s kingdom is overthrown, is particularly mesmerizing. Choreographed in slow motion, the characters onstage collide and spin away from each other as the intensity of the music builds. “This is the only way you can move in Philip Glass music,” says Bridges. “If you do any fast movements, it’s too much.”

2:15 p.m.

Glass, who has told Bridges that she was “meant for this role,” makes a surprise appearance onstage for the bow.

6:30 p.m.

After the rehearsal, Bridges gathers with her parents and close friends for a dinner party at the Bronx apartment of her friend, the composer Willie Alexander.

7:15 p.m.

Bridges gives a toast and thanks her guests, who include the “Akhnaten” cast member and baritone Will Liverman and Bridges’s friend and fellow mezzo-soprano Olivia Vote. “I want to surround myself with people who are at my level or higher, or at least striving toward something,” she says. “That’s all of the people in this room.”