Hannah De Priest/Photo: Joe Mazza

“When I first moved to Chicago,” says soprano Hannah De Priest, “I started with ensemble singing, and Bella Voce was there for me. Music of the Baroque, too, I joined the chorus. It’s just been really in the past few years that my solo career has really taken off.”

De Priest will sing the role of Dido in Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” in a semi-staged single performance of the opera given by Bella Voce with its Chorus and Sinfonia, conducted by artistic director Andrew Lewis with WFMT’s Oliver Camacho directing.

She will also make her Music of the Baroque solo debut as Amore this September when Music of the Baroque performs its first-ever “Orfeo ed Euridice” by Gluck under music director Dame Jane Glover.

Haymarket Opera, which has featured De Priest twice—including in last summer’s stunning performance of Handel’s “La resurrezione” as Mary Magdalene—will feature her as Proserpina in Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice” this October.

“Andy [Lewis] was one of the very first people to hire me when we moved here, so it feels like a major moment to do this title role of Dido now, within an organization that has always been really supportive of local musicians and giving solo opportunities to really great ensemble singers. Bella Voce pulls its soloists from the chorus of singers. So for example, when we did Mozart’s ‘Requiem,’ all of the solo moments were divided amongst all of the singers in the choir. That gives this great textural variety to any show that you go to, and ‘Dido’ will be the same.

“So while I’m not singing any of the chorus numbers as Dido, I think in that way, ‘Dido and Aeneas’ is actually the perfect opera because it has all these really beautiful little vignettes and step-out parts, and the choruses are just absolutely beautiful. They’re transcendent. So I think it’s kind of the perfect show for an organization like Bella Voce, really.”

Will De Priest be tempted to join in on the choruses during “Dido and Aeneas” out of old habit? She laughs at the thought.

“Honestly, it’s like per note, I feel like Dido is one of the shortest roles that you can still call a title role. It’s not that much music, it’s just that everything she sings feels really iconic because it’s such a famous and such a beautiful opera. But I think even if somebody doesn’t know it from anything else, it’s still a great show to hear.

“The thing with Dido specifically is creating a character arc can feel like a challenge because she spends the whole opera feeling like a portent of doom. She feels like something bad is going to happen really the whole time. But at the same time, there are varying incredible emotional depths to what she says. I just think trying to pace it so that her flashes of anger in her last interaction with Aeneas, for example, when she calls him a crocodile and sends him on his way. When that happens, it needs to feel like it’s come from the same woman who starts the opera by singing this beautiful first lament, but then later, she sings, of course, the final one at the end.

“But the great thing about Dido, it being in English, I love the verse, the rhyming verse. It’s set so perfectly. For me, it’s Purcell and Benjamin Britten who really knew how to set English operatically in a way that is just so satisfying to sing, but also just makes so much sense from the listener’s perspective. And everything just flows so beautifully in this opera, from Dido’s recitatives to then Belinda’s beautiful airs and the choruses and then the witches come in. I mean, it’s just a great variety show, really.

“I’ve done the opera a few times. I’ve sung Belinda, which I loved. And then I did my first Dido last year in Atlanta. It was such a great experience. It feels like a natural fit for me. I really love these sort of roles. Mary Magdalene was honestly quite similar in that I would call it a lyric-soprano role, but it’s quite low, really, compared to a lot of high, flutey coloratura roles. It’s really that you’re calling on your sense of line. You’re using your chest voice. You are embracing darker colors and I love roles like this. And it’s a great joy to kind of flex into this territory more and more as I go through my thirties.”

How often has De Priest had a chance to return to a role, especially so close together?

“It’s really rare, I find, because I do so much work in this Baroque opera space. A lot of that I find myself doing is either modern premieres or very rarely performed works. So I feel like I’m constantly learning all-new roles with the understanding that I might not get to do a revival anytime soon. And I love that.

“The one exception is ‘Messiah,’ which I return to quite happily, very regularly. Dido is a really rare opportunity to grow. And even though it’s only been one year, that’s a year of vocal development and life experience. Taking out my score, the choices I made last time won’t be a one-to-one sort of transference. And that’s exciting, too. You get to reevaluate. You get to make new choices.

“One of the main things that always attracted me to the space of Baroque opera was that there was a little bit more kind of flexibility around casting. Most of my vocal development has happened kind of at the tail end of my twenties, during the pandemic, when nobody was asking me to sing anything. And so consequently, I tried out lots of different kinds of repertoire, lots of different roles from Baroque to things like Puccini and Verdi. I opened up my voice in ways that I think I had kind of put myself in a little bit of a box in terms of what I thought an early music sound was. And now increasingly, lots of companies around the world have a more expansive view of what a soprano who sings Baroque opera can sound like. And then consequently, casting an opera is really about creating and casting different vocal colors and vocal weights rather than having everyone sound like Emma Kirkby, who I love and admire deeply.

“Sopranos can be told a lot of messed-up things that can lead to them having underdeveloped voices because they’re trying to achieve a feminine sound or they’re trying to achieve a sweet sound. But I think that anyone who is an adult woman, as many of these characters that we’re portraying on stage are, even teenage women, we’re capable of lots of different kinds of sound, and I think embracing the fullest possible palette is just a really important thing. As singers, we have to have the most tools, like the widest range of colors and timbres available to us to pluck at any moment. Otherwise, where’s the drama?”

How did De Priest come to be involved in early music?

“I was always a musical theater kid, and I loved doing musicals. I did a lot of musicals. I grew up in a small town in Missouri, but they treated us like we were a professional theater troupe at age fourteen. It was the biggest gift! And then I came to classical singing through choir and then fell in love with it.

“When I got to college, like many eighteen-year-old sopranos, I had a very small, light voice that sounded very good doing Baroque arias. So I was told really early, ‘This is a direction you might want to be aware of because this could work for you.’ And it did for a long time. And thankfully, as my voice has developed, my space in the industry has just opened up in a beautiful way, and I’m really grateful for that early instruction and also grateful for the ways in which it’s continued to be true, even though my voice has changed quite a lot since I first got that advice.

“I was very selective about the kinds of choral singing I wanted to do, and it all kind of worked out well for me, I have to say, because you learn a lot singing in choirs. And you get a front row seat to a lot of incredible performances, I was sitting in the Music of the Baroque Chorus, listening to Yulia Van Doren, who’s one of my idols and now a friend of mine, and numerous others. Your proximity to the front of the stage is so tantalizingly close. And I still love ensemble singing. I think it’s one of the most beautiful kinds of music making. But increasingly, it’s a rarer thing for me now to sing in a choir. And I treasure those experiences all the more.

“In a chorus, it’s really more about you being part of a section, so you have to get comfortable being yoked to other voices. And thankfully, especially in the case of Bella Voce, Andy always seems to have a really great sense of voices that’ll work well together in a singing context. And when that’s the case and you feel really comfortable and you know your other section mates really well, there isn’t really a huge amount of thought that has to go into, ‘Oh, I need to do this to my voice to make it, you know, fit better here.’ You just can really sing. I mean, sing sensitively, but sing with your voice and trust that the sound will get balanced out with the voices that you’re surrounded by. It’s kind of a magical alchemic thing. I’m not really sure how choral conductors do that, but through seating in a certain way and programming sensitively and dividing up the voices, it works great.”

Coming full circle and singing a title role with the Bella Voce chorus she was once a part of represents a “mountaintop moment” for De Priest. Does she see a moral in “Dido and Aeneas?”

“I think the story of Dido is the story of a woman who’s been wronged. That’s something that resonates forever. You know, what is fate? What is free will? These are questions that will always be tantalizing to people to think over and mull. And Dido offers a really cathartic way to do that. How much is fate a real thing and how much of it is just a trap that women build for themselves? Does she have another choice? Could it have gone another way or was she really doomed to die like that? I don’t know. And I don’t think you have to know the answer to that question, but just that it makes you think.

“I love Turner Classic Movies, and we were watching an early Hitchcock movie last night, ‘Suspicion.’ It’s about this woman who finds herself in this marriage that she eagerly jumps into and then realizes that she has married a con man, basically. It was Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant, who was very much playing against type. It’s very creepy, but the insidiousness of love. I’m happily married, in fact, my husband watched it with me! But there it is.

“Is Aeneas strong, or is he very weak? Is Dido strong? Is it her sense of faith in her love? Is she noble in her grief or is it just sad? I don’t know. But that’s the great thing about art. It’s like a prism and depending on who you are on Sunday, you’ll walk away from it with a different opinion. But I do think it’s a beautiful story and the music is truly stunning.”

Hannah De Priest performs in “Dido and Aeneas” on Sunday, May 4, 4pm, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 939 Hinman Avenue, Evanston. Tickets are $35-$70 ($20 for children and $15 for students), available at bellavoce.org.