A strict general.
A timid 14-year-old boy.
A static man.
All vastly different characters and personalities, and Senior Lukas Palys had to represent them all in perfect manner to the judges. As the curtain opened, he took a deep breath, readied his voice and the show began.
Palys is no stranger to singing. He has been emphatically participating in choirs since fifth-grade. After some years in the Children’s Choir of Dallas, he got an impressive audition request from the Dallas Opera.
“I just fell in love with opera while doing those productions in the Dallas opera and soon began to take private voice lessons,” Palys said.
After many years of practicing, Palys recently participated in the Schmidt Vocal Competition at Northwestern University. The competition allows highschool students to display their singing talents by performing various opera pieces.
“It’s a way for singers to practice singing and win cash prizes and then compete in regional competitions to go to a national competition in June,” Palys said.
The competition consists of two different rounds: the semi-final and the final. In the end, only ten competitors will make it to the final. In the final round, the competitors are asked to choose two different opera pieces that they’ll have to sing.
“I’m pretty confident in my vocal ability, especially because I’ve had so much experience,” Palys said, “But I was nervous, it’s obviously pretty nerve wracking to perform in the first place, and I was doing a set of harder repertoire that I hadn’t performed before.”
For the final, Palys sung the Italian piece Come Paride Vizzoso from The Elixir of Love by Donizetti and the French piece Beau Soir by Claude Debussy.
“The Italian piece was very hard to sing because in the style of that Italian repertoire, there’s a lot of runs,” Palys said, “The other piece requires a lot of breath support which requires that you’re singing on your breath fully, and it’s a very slow piece.”
Both pieces require an extensive amount of practice and preparation. Since they are in different languages, that too provides an extra challenge that Palys had to overcome in order to appease the judges.
“I don’t know all these languages, but there’s this very cool thing called the International Phonetic Alphabet,” Palys said.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is used to show people how to pronounce mimic words through symbols that each stand for a phonetic sound. It’s a helpful tool for opera singers since many times their pieces are sung in languages other than their native one.
“It’s really important in singing to try and mimic the language perfectly,” Palys said, “So if a speaker was watching my performance, they should be able to understand everything I’m saying, if an Italian speaker was watching it, they should understand everything I’m saying.”
Even though they are rigorous, choosing pieces with different style and different language proved to help Palys in the end.
“It shows your breath as a singer if you can do multiple styles and multiple techniques well,” Palys said, “So I was displaying the different techniques, techniques I could do, and also the storytelling in each of the pieces is very different.”
The final technique to conquer is that of movement. In a vocal competition, it is extremely important to not remain static as it can distract the audience from the actual show.
“I can’t just stand there like a robot and say stuff, I have to act,” Palys said, “There’s a character to portray, especially because it’s from an opera.”
In the end, Palys emerged as a winner through hard work and passion. The prize was $2500 in cash and a $4000 scholarship to the host school, Northwestern.