Page 56 - Classical Singer Magazine November/December 2019

Honest Emotion with Kamal Khan
I watched him sing a lot. I never saw him lift anything. He stayed
at speech level and that’s why his Italian was so beautiful, and his technique was so Italian despite his being Russian. He made the Russian language as beautiful to sing in as the Italian. He didn’t over open, yet his singing was never constricted.
The word “economy” has a
bad rep because to be economical could be seen as being stingy or parsimonious, and I don’t mean that at all. It’s a state of balance. Some
of the overdoing in singing comes from thinking, “We must really convince people; we must get this across!” Forcing for emotion is just as dangerous as forcing for tone. The emotion has to be organic. This is where it gets back to that honest expression in your mother language.
Any other advice for singers?
The story of opera in the 21st century is all about the globalization of the art form. Keeping an open mind and listening to what your international colleagues bring to the rehearsal room is incredibly useful to your development as an individual artist. It takes a lot to make a career.
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how everyone who is gifted at something, in some crucial period of their training, put in 10,000 hours of hard work. One could say, “But singers can’t sing
all day!” No, but singers can study languages and learn music. Imagine if you do six hours a day of all the related work for ve years—you’ve done your 10,000 hours!
T o nd out more, please visit www.kamalkhan.com.
Maria-Cristina N ecula is a N ew York-based writer whose published work includes the book Life in Opera: Truth, Tempo, and Soul and
articles in Das Opernglas, Studies in European Cinema, and Opera News. A classically trained singer, she gives presentations on opera for colleges and has presented at Baruch College, the Graduate Center, the City College of N ew York, UCLA, and others.
She has recently obtained her PhD
in comparative literature from the Graduate Center. Get in touch at www.mariacristinanecula.com.
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56 Classical Singer | November/December 2019