Singer to Watch

A Manhattan audience last week cheered a young soprano with a red-flaming mane of hair, a statuesque build and a voice of beauty. She was singing concert excerpts from Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, with the Symphony of the Air (conducted by Leonard Bernstein) in Carnegie Hall. Her part, the ingenue Sophie, is filled with some of the most ecstatic vocalization ever set on paper, and she followed it with a voice that had the rich but fine-drawn quality of a crystal goblet.

The soprano was Beverly Sills, 25. Some of her friends, who call her "Bubbles," have considered her Met material since her first appearance 22 years ago.

Manhattan-born Soprano Sills bowed at the age of three on a kiddy broadcast called Uncle Bob's Children's Hour, and even today is not above singing the tune she sang then (The Wedding of Jack and Jill). At seven she was performing such coloratura arias as the Bell Song from Lakme and Caro Nome from Rigoletto, and singing them with skill; at twelve she retired for further study, but three years later she was back in harness, ready for the long road ahead.

First came a spell with a Gilbert & Sullivan road show. Then she starred in a coast-to-coast Merry Widow company, moved on to a grand opera touring company (63 Micaelas in Carmen, 45 Violettas in Traviata), where, before long, she had to learn how to intercept passes from forward tenors without missing a note. For a while, she learned a role a month for TV's Opera Cameos, finally hit the big time two seasons ago when she sang Donna Elvira in the San Francisco Opera's Don Giovanni ("the most exquisitely sung aria of the evening," wrote one critic).

Though she yearned for the Metropolitan, Soprano Sills had to settle for the less prestigious New York City Opera, last fall sang two leading parts there (in Fledermaus and Golden Slippers). Last month with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company she sang the lead in Montemezzi's The Love of the Three Kings, and likes to recall that she literally brought down the house; during her final exit, part of the ceiling collapsed. All that remained was for her to be discovered by a big-time impresario. She was. Luben Vichey, Met basso lately turned concert manager, took her under his wing. "You will have a career, Beverly," he says sternly and prophetically. "No marriage for you. No children. Career!"

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