Runaway scales, spiked staccati, rippling triplets, and top notes skyrocketing to 10 stratospheric high F’s! All that in a grand total of just nine minutes onstage. Yes, Mozart’s Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute is quite the high-wire act. Since her Berlin debut in the role 13 years ago, the American soprano Kathryn Lewek, 41, has made “Queen” her own, chalking up a record-shattering 64 performances at the Metropolitan Opera alone. As the daughter of a Navy lieutenant aboard a Cold War nuclear submarine and the sister of a recently retired Coast Guard commander who flew rescue helicopters, she makes light of the challenges. “Compared to what my dad and brother did for a living, high notes aren’t that dangerous.”
Queen’s duplicity and thirst for vengeance make a stunning showcase for Lewek’s electric sense of drama, brilliant tone, and spitfire technique. But all that downtime! “I threw out that broad very quickly,” quoth the nonpareil American diva Beverly Sills a half-century ago. “I realized she wasn’t for me when I found I could address 250 Christmas cards in my dressing room between her first act aria and her second act aria.”
