Page 45 - Classical Singer Magazine November/December 2019

Marante (center standing) as Daniela in Westport Country Playhouse’s production of In the Heights, 2019
Marante and Jesse Malgieri
as Aldonza/Dulcinea and Don Quixote/Alonso Quijano in the Princeton Festival’s production of Man of La Mancha, 2017
I had second- and third-degree burns over 40 percent of my body. I ended up in intensive care and then rehab for over a year.
Although my pop music world halted abruptly, I discovered a new passion while flipping through television channels in my hospital room—opera. I became fascinated with opera documentaries and decided to earn my bachelor’s
in vocal performance once I was medically cleared.
Fast forward five years later. During my last year of graduate school at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, I suffered another major setback. In the middle of rehearsal for Cendrillon, in which I was singing the title role, I had a grand mal seizure. I had never
Sandra Marante
experienced seizures before and this was a terrifying moment.
The paramedics rushed me to Northwestern [Memorial] Hospital. My CT scans showed I had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) the size of a golf ball in my brain. An AVM is a tangled mass of arteries and veins which had probably been there since birth but had grown and pressed on the temporal lobe where music, memory, language, and behavior were located.
My options were not great.
No surgery meant fatality, and removal of the mass meant I may not be able to sing or speak. My surgeon never had an opera singer as a patient before, someone who studied many languages and memorized so much information, so he decided to do a study on my brain.
I listened to a wide variety of arias in different languages in a functional MRI for over six weeks. The study showed that my brain lit up all over and not just in the right temporal lobe where music registers. My surgeon said that because of this he was confident that other areas in my brain would compensate after the surgical resection. He was right!
www.csmusic.net 45
photo by Jessi Franco Designs LLC photo by Carol Roses