Nell Snaidas: Connections All Around
Soprano Nell Snaidas, a soloist in Tempesta di Mare’s upcoming Hoshanna!
Hebrew Music of the High Baroque program, has a pretty impressive resume.
An early music specialist, she’s been featured in festivals all over Europe and
North America. She’s sung in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti and Monteverdi’s Coronation of
Poppea, she created the role of “Princess Olga” in the Boston Early Music Festivals’
production of Boris Goudenow, and she sings with Apollo’s Fire in Cleveland, Seattle
Baroque, and The NY Collegium.
She’s also sung on Broadway, in Hair. The cast included RuPaul.
And she sang in the movie version of The Producers.
She sang zarzuela (Spanish musical theater) with Repertorio Español. She sings
Sephardic song with the Gerard Edery Ensemble.
And she starred in the all-Yiddish musical Hold the Wedding! at The Joseph Papp
Yiddish Theater, and she’s one of the two soprano soloists in the Milken Archival
Recordings of American Yiddish Theater.
Among other things.
Clearly, Snaidas scorns conventional advice that you should to stick to one or two
activities so people are impressed with your seriousness. She doesn’t see anything
capricious about rehearsing zarzuela one night and singing Monteverdi the next. She’s
proud of the many hats she wears. They all have something in common: they allow her
to connect with the music.
“When you sing,” she says, “you fall in love with the music you sing and you
want to sing it as beautifully as possible. You want to be connected to the text, you want
to become that character.”
Falling in love with the music has made her a quick student. The Spanishspeaking daughter of an Uruguayan father, she applied to New York’s Repertorio
Español while studying opera at Mannes College of Music. It didn’t take more than a
couple of minutes for her to find out that you’re not really bilingual until you can follow
dance directions in both languages. “It was like going to another country. The other
performers were so psyched to be in a place where they didn’t have to speak English. I
really learned.”
She’s not afraid to take her connection with characters out on a limb, either. For a
while, she was a member of Rhoda Levine’s Play It By Ear, a troupe of musicians in
Soho who improvise like comedians, only with opera. They take ideas from the audience
and make up a scene on the spot, complete with music. Snaidas still does “improv” when
she works with school groups. She talks about ornamentation and improvisation in early
music, asks a kid what their day was like, and then improvs an aria about their experience
over a passacaglia.
But Sephardic song was something that connected with her on a very personal
level. “It’s like when you hear something and you think, this is the music of my heart.
I’d write little songs in my head when I was a kid, and it sounded like that. When I heard
it, I thought, ‘that’s mine.’” In the Gerard Edery Ensemble, she sings in more than seven
languages but mostly Ladino (the language of Sephardic Jews, i.e. Spanish and
Portueguese), Hebrew and Spanish.
Sephardic song, zarzuela, opera, Broadway, Baroque music, they all have that
characteristic of connection and engagement.
“Baroque music, well, what’s more over the top than Baroque music?” asks
Snaidas. “And it’s not even about being over the top. It’s about cutting through that wall
and connecting with your character and having the audience understand the story and the
music. It’s just about embodying the whole thing.”
“And wherever that takes me, if it’s something cool, I’ll do it,” says Nell Snaidas.
In Tempesta’s show, Snaidas plays an allegorical figure, the Accuser, arguing
humankind’s fate before God in the 17th-century Hebrew oratorio, God, Accuser, and
Defender (Elyon, Melits, u-Mastin).
Want to know what she was doing last summer? Workshopping Mel Brooks’s
new Broadway musical, Young Frankenstein.
Young Frankenstein and Old Testament.
Yup, that’s cool.