Posted on Sun, Feb. 24, 2008

Does she look scared?

It took time for soprano to feel at home in opera world

By Rich Copley

RCOPLEY@HERALD-LEADER.COM

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IF YOU GO: Hansel and Gretel

Opera scared Amanda Balltrip.

Growing up in Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky, she figured out at a young age that she wanted to sing.

"It gave me a way to express myself," she says.

That all started nearly two decades ago for Balltrip, who will sing the role of Gretel in the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre's production of Hansel and Gretel this week. Although singing came naturally to Balltrip, she was a long way from opera when she started.

At age 3, when Amanda would put on shows for her friends and family, she told her mom that she wanted to be a rock 'n' roll singer.

During her school years, that desire would shift. At age 11, Amanda auditioned for Jenny Wiley Theatre in Prestonsburg.

"One day my dad said, 'There's this theater where they do musicals. Would you be interested in auditioning?'" Balltrip says. "I had written this little monologue all by myself for the audition, and I held the paper up in front of my face the entire time."

Not yet a teenager, she was cast in The Sound of Music -- as a nun.

It was kind of awkward for the tween to be mixed in with the college students and young adults who played the other sisters. But Balltrip loved it, came back for many subsequent seasons and thought the course of her life had been charted: musical theater.

Then came college.

Balltrip applied at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, the Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Va., and the University of Kentucky.

Cincinnati didn't accept her, so no issue there. Shenandoah did accept her, but she needed a scholarship.

And Balltrip really wanted to go.

"I really didn't think about UK," Balltrip says. "I wanted to get out of Kentucky, and Shenandoah had a great musical theater program. It was perfect."

Except that the scholarship didn't come through. Shenandoah needed to give the money to young men.

So UK, it was.

It was not a complete letdown. After all, UK had a burgeoning opera program with nationally recognized faculty, staging fully produced operas as Lexington's de facto opera company and sending singers into the upper rounds of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.

And Balltrip got assigned to the voice department's marquee teacher, Gail Robinson, a former Met star and director of the New York company's auditions and young artist program.

A girl from Hazard could do a lot worse.

But Balltrip wanted to be in musicals.

For a while, the soprano thought she could explore classical voice, developing a strong technique while singing the tunes she loved. As a freshman, she won an audition for Paws and Listen, the a capella women's group whose repertoire included pop and show tunes. She was excited to tell Robinson about her victory.

"She said I had to make a choice, basically between being in her studio and the group," Balltrip says. "I was really confused. I thought college was a place where you got to explore options."

She chose Robinson's studio.

Balltrip got into the chorus of UK's 2003 production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.

"All of a sudden, I'm trying to learn and understand Italian text, and move and be dramatic, all at the same time," Balltrip says.

The opera stuff started to grow on her. She began moving up the ranks, from chorus roles to supporting parts, including Suor Genovieffa in 2005's production of Giacomo Puccini's Suor Angelica, and Papagena in the 2006 production of Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Interesting thing about that Flute: It was presented during the same spring that UK produced a musical, Carousel. That, it would seem, was right in Balltrip's strike zone.

"I remember watching it but not missing it," Balltrip says of Carousel. She had a different experience with Flute. Most UK operas are double-cast, to give more singers a shot at singing big roles. The nights that Balltrip wasn't on stage as Papagena, she was in the audience, watching her counterpart, Kali Wilder.

"She was great," Balltrip says. "But I wanted to be up there."

In 2006 and 2007, she also won back-to-back encouragement awards in the Met auditions, and this season she shared the leading role in UK Opera Theatre's production of Thomas Pasatieri's Hotel Casablanca. By then, she was no longer intimidated by Robinson, instead embracing the way the teacher had nurtured and refined Balltrip's voice.

Playing Gretel could be her UK swan song: Balltrip, 22 and a senior is auditioning for several graduate schools, including Indiana University and the Manhattan School of Music. She also is auditioning for UK while pondering whether she needs to break out of a comfort zone or stay where she has grown.

Her focus now is Gretel. Balltrip knows the part is a challenge. It's a huge amount of music and a tall order dramatically: She has to sing with maturity while portraying an 8-year-old confronting kid fears such as abandonment and the unknown.

But one thing is certain: Balltrip isn't afraid of opera anymore.