For Richmond-born Matthew Burns, Friday’s opening of Virginia Opera’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at Richmond CenterStage will be a down-home family affair.
Burns, a bass-baritone, will be singing opposite his wife, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, as ladies’ maid Susanna, who becomes Figaro’s bride-to-be.
The two met in February 2008 in the same roles with Opera Grand Rapids in Michigan. They eloped 10 months later.
“Coming back to these roles with Anne-Carolyn is an absolute joy,” the deep-voiced Burns said recently during a chat in the Donors’ Lounge at the Carpenter Theatre. “Revisiting these roles with the woman I fell in love with means a lot.”
The Burnses and their 2½-year-old, Henry, will be staying with his parents, Bill and Cathy Burns, at their home in Powhatan County.
Burns grew up in Varina, graduated from Varina High School and went through the opera performance program at Virginia Commonwealth University before honing his operatic skills at the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado. He then moved to New York for more study at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard Opera Center.
Since Juilliard, Burns has become an American regional opera fixture and favorite in more than 40 roles.
So how did a baseball-cap-wearing kid from Varina end up singing in opera houses from Manhattan to Macao?
It all began in the seventh grade at John Rolfe Middle School.
“I got in the choir because a girl I had a crush on was joining the choir,” he recalled. “I stuck with it in high school. I’ve always been a ham, the choir director saw that, and she started giving me solos.”
Richmond audio engineer Keith Cable was Burns’ boyhood pal and high school and college classmate.
“Matt was the same light-hearted, fun, goofy guy in high school and college, but he was very focused,” Cable recalled. “We all had fun, but none of us were big partiers.
“When Matt would talk back then, it was like he was talking through a tuba.”
Burns sang and played guitar while Cable played drums in a band called Sound Solution.
“We had maybe two gigs, nothing to write home about,” Cable recalled.
But Sound Solution left Burns with a burning desire to be a rock singer.
Then a VCU music professor told him, “We don’t teach that kind of singing here. We only teach classical singing.”
“He made me feel small and big at the same time,” Burns recalled.
Cable is not surprised that Burns rose so high in opera — “Matthew won the lottery as a singer” — and neither is Melanie Day, the musical director of VCU Opera who was Burns’ vocal coach at VCU.
“From the outset, I knew this was a special voice and talent,” Day said. “In Matt’s case, the voice came first and the acting skills grew. He always had good rhythm, good sight-reading ability and a good ear for language.”
What if Burns had gone on to carve out a career as a rock singer?
“He probably wouldn’t have a voice anymore because he would have been singing incorrectly,” Day said.
Martin Hurt, a VCU classmate who went on to carve out a career as an actor, singer and voice teacher in New York, isn’t surprised at Burns’ success, either.
“When he entered VCU, Matt had no frame of reference in the opera world at all,” Hurt said. “He was fun, a jokester, laid-back, but he wasn’t just a cutup. He developed a very studious side.”
Burns was also, in Hurt’s telling, a VCU non-conformist.
“We used to have convocations and a master class once a week,” Hurt recalled. “We were supposed to dress up, but Matt would show up in jeans and a T-shirt.”
Burns doesn’t consider himself a Mozart specialist, but he’s in his fourth “Marriage of Figaro” and has sung in six Mozart operas, including all the bass-baritone roles in “Don Giovanni.”
“Figaro is very challenging and rewarding. It uses the whole bass-baritone range, and I get to sing two of the biggest hits,” he said. “There’s a moment in the fourth act that is absolutely brilliant. It’s really a gift to be able to sing such amazing music.
“You can never learn Mozart’s music as a vocal exercise. You must approach it as an emotional exercise. His operatic music would not exist if it were not for the words that his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, gave him. Mozart and Da Ponte conceived the music and the libretto at the same time. Mozart’s operas are so great because of their collaboration.”
Burns, who shares a house with his family in New York, stays on the road eight months a year. His wife is equally in demand.
“I’m really just hitting my stride,” he said. “Part of me thinks about settling in one place, but only a small part. We do have to start thinking about preschool for Henry. We’ll probably home-school him.”
Meanwhile, the Burnses find time to write a blog at www.momandpopera.blogspot.com.
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© Roy Proctor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2013