By Cris Franco
Renown baritone Roberto Perlas Gómez will be joining the 60-member strong Verdi Chorus in their upcoming Spring Concert, L’Amore e la Vita (Love and Life). This program, which director Anne Ketchum humorously calls “ the Rom-Com of opera,” will feature selections from two Verdi operas – I vespri siciliani and Ernani, three Donizetti operas – Don Pasquale, La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) and L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love), as well as operatic sequences from Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers), Delibes’ Lakmé, and Puccini’s La rondine.
With over 100 professional roles to Perlas Gomez’s credit, the choristers are justifiably excited about working alongside the very busy opera star. Sarah Salazar says, “As a young professional, I believe it’s vital to be exposed to artists like Mr. Perlas Gómez who are established in their career. You get to see they are human.”
Longtime chorus member, Martín Olvera, shares a special affinity and personal history with Perlas Gómez, saying, “I have known and sung with Roberto for four decades. I sang with his talented and gifted musical family at the old Cathedral of Saint Vibiana adjacent to Little Tokyo for five years. Singing alongside his father, a fine spinto tenor, was an affirming and joyful experience. Our sounds matched. I never truly have had a tenor buddy to sing along with that was such a wonderful fit. About ten years ago Roberto told me how much his father truly loved me and missed me after we stopped singing together. So, Roberto made it even clearer that the art of making music forges friendships by extending musical families in remarkable ways.”
On what working with Perlas Gómez has taught him, Olvera replied, “Roberto taught me that being a musician requires one to reinvent themselves every five years be it with crossover experiences, new repertoire, or new genres to study and perform. Perhaps that concept of five-year cycles derives from our shared Mestizo heritage through the Spanish language. A five-year time span is called “un lustro” – a new time cycle to shine and enlighten.”
And creating thrilling music in concert with a talent such as Perlas Gómez is not the only reason these artists dedicate long hours of rehearsal. Now entering its 36th season, all the Verdi Chorus members expressed the wellbeing singing brings to their lives. Esteban Rivas commented, “Singing makes me a more complete person, more in touch with my spiritual, and emotional being.”
Sarah Salazar shared how singing might have even saved her life, “Singing has always been a safe haven for me. Especially during my life’s most difficult times. In 2005, I survived a traumatic illness which left me hospitalized in a medically induced coma. My parents made sure there was always music playing while I was in the ICU. There was a high possibility of brain damage, but I awoke with no brain damage despite the doctors’ warnings to the contrary. Music has always been my way of sharing myself with others. Singing brings me joy and peace.”
Senior Verdi Chorus member Martín Olvera described the positive impact music’s had on his life this way, “To keep up with younger singers one has to eat well, rest, try to exercise a bit more regularly, and most importantly, breath properly.”
For Gómez Perez, who’ll be 57 this year, singing is also a key to life. And his road to opera stardom wasn’t always an obvious one. He was 5 when his family moved from the Philippines to the United States, and they bounced around in California – Oxnard, Santa Monica, Cerritos – before heading east and bouncing around there for a while, too.
“As a kid I was always really good at math and science,” Gómez said. “So, it was logical for me to pursue a career in the sciences.”
He didn’t even consider a singing career.
“But that was also the heyday of (Luciano) Pavarotti, and one Sunday afternoon there was a broadcast of ‘La Gioconda,’ from San Francisco, and Pavarotti was there singing ‘Cielo e mar,’” he said. “It was an epiphany!”
If you are in search of a musical epiphany, catch The Verdi Chorus, Roberto Perlas Gómez and the program’s celebrated guest soloists: the gifted Jamie Chamberlin, the vocally ravishing tenor Nathan Granner, and virtuoso mezzo soprano Danielle Marcelle Bond at The First United Methodist Church in Santa Monica, located at 1008 11th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90403. Performances: Saturday, April 6 @ 7:30 pm & Sunday, April 7 @ 2 pm. Purchase tickets: www.verdichorus.org or (800) 838-3006. Priority seating: $40; general admission: $30; seniors: $25; students (aged 25 and under with a valid ID) are $10.
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