On November 8, singer Anthony Roth Costanzo will take center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, debuting as the star of a new production of Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten.
It’s an outstanding flip for a celebrated singer UN agency nearly lost his voice to thyroid cancer.
Ten years ago, Costanzo required surgery to excise cancerous tissue from the nerves that management vocal functioning a task he was told was like “getting gum out of hair.”
His surgeon warned him that a vocal nerve could get nicked throughout the operation, that may injury his voice. Costanzo began to contemplate alternate career paths.
“I had to actually supposed to myself, ‘OK, well what’s my identity?’ ” Costanzo says. “I’d spent my whole life singing and that I completed that. I like manufacturing, and that I may figure one thing out.”
But once 2 surgeries, Costanzo was eased to seek out he still had a voice. He began operating along with his vocal coach, starting with simply 2 minutes daily for 6 weeks. “We designed up to singing Associate in Nursing aria,” he says “And the ensuing year I won the Metropolitan Opera Competition and that I had a career.”
On making his entrance in Akhnaten:
“I enter fully bare-assed most likely the primary full-frontal male condition at the Met. And it goes on for quite a whereas in picture six minutes. You see this terribly male figure emerges so, over the course of the opera, I kind of transform into someone with these more feminine features.
I wear this transparent Egyptian linen folded robes and beneath them, the fashion designer Kevin Pollard and also the director Phelim McDermott have chosen this slip that has written on a female body, a sort of painted female body, but from far away and even from 10 feet away it looks like breasts and women’s genitals.
It’s not graphic in any method, but it is rather very beautiful. And you see this mechanical phenomenon of Aknhaten’s transformation of thought and additionally body.”
