Soprano Patrice Michaels Bedi didn’t take up singing seriously until her senior year in college, a late start for any classical performer. Now, some 20 years later, she’s pleased with her career choice, though at times she bemoans her status as, she says, a “second-tier, regional singer” still looking for a lead role in a major opera. “I’m not losing sleep over this,” she quickly adds.
She wound up in Chicago in 1984 thanks to a misunderstanding. While at Banff she auditioned for Lee Schaenen, then the director of the Lyric Opera’s Center for American Artists, that company’s well-regarded apprenticeship arm. She thought she had a shot at a slot in the center’s incoming class, but when she showed up in town she learned there was no opening. “A singer already in the program was asked to stay another year, effectively bumping me off,” she explains. The consolation prize was the chance to understudy a coloratura role in that season’s production of Arabella starring Kiri Te Kanawa. Though disappointed, Michaels Bedi decided to stay and adopted Schaenen’s wife, Nell, a teacher of Italian diction, as a mentor.
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Ginsburg loves classical music–from Baroque to modern–knows its arcana, and he plays piano. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early 80s, he’d toyed with majoring in music, but abandoned the idea after lessons with DePaul University pianist Dmitry Paperno “failed to fix me.” He opted for the U. of C.’s law school instead, resigned to following his family’s legal tradition–Ginsburg’s mother is Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, his father is a tax lawyer, and his sister is a law professor at Columbia University. In his first year of studies, on a whim, he produced a CD featuring Paperno in solo pieces; the experience was so gratifying that he took a leave of absence to see if he could make it as a record producer. He founded Cedille in 1989 and several CDs later realized he’d found his calling. “I take the worries from the musicians,” he says. “I speak their language, and I have the patience and know-how to listen to all the tapes and find the best cut. Why should the talents waste their time slogging through the material when I can do it for them?”
At this stage in her career, Michaels Bedi is no longer burning with youthful ambitions. But her friends constantly ask her to perform with them “in works that are meaningful to me.” She can indulge herself with a variety of songs, ranging from Mozart to Bellini to Ellington. She’s been favorably recognized by national critics, and she records regularly, even on labels other than Cedille. And then there’s Ginsburg, for whom she’ll soon record arias from Mozart’s Vienna, including a newly discovered recitative. “I’ve chosen a road less traveled, picking family over New York,” she says. “I don’t regret a minute of it, and there’s always composing to fall back on. When my voice begins to decline–and I hope a long time from now–I can write for other singers.”
