Home » Member Page
Gian-Carla Tisera
Vanguardist Operatic World Music Diva
About Me
Any true fusion in music represents a delicate negotiation. It
requires both respect for the different genres in play, their
traditions and codes and a 'why not?' attitude. Cutting-and-pasting
is one thing, translating the approach, technique and sensibility of
one tradition to another demands a special talent and commitment.
On Nora La Bella, her debut recording, New York-based Bolivian soprano
Gian-Carla Tisera makes bold, daring crossings between opera, jazz and
Latin American folk music, art song and political song,
experimentation and roots music.
Throughout the recording, she sings in English, Spanish, Italian and
Quechua. Co-produced by Tisera and Grammy-nominated Cuban pianist Elio
Villafranca, Nora La Bella includes original songs, provocative
versions of two works from the classical vocal repertoire and several
pieces from the Latin American songbook, including a couple from the
socially committed Nueva Canción.
But this is not a lab project. Rather, it's an expression of her
experience and her personal search.
I had this idea for a new kind of opera, something different,
accessible and fresh, says Tisera. I love opera and that's my
training, and while I am not a jazz singer or a traditional folk
singer, both genres have been an integral part of my life and my
musical experience. And I also thought: how can I express my immigrant
experience? How can I speak of my perspective as a Bolivian woman, as
an American woman looking back at my country from a distance? All of
that came into play when working on Nora La Bella.
Accompanied by a quartet featuring Villafranca at the piano and guest
artists such as trumpeter Diego Urcola and five-time Grammy Award-
winning bassist John Benitez, Tisera's music includes nods to Bolivian
folklore (her original Señora Chichera and Cueca Lejanía) and her
own versions of the aria Tu che le vanita from Giuseppe Verdi's Don
Carlo, appearing here as the source for Ernesto in the tomb, and the
madrigal Amarilli from Giulio Caccini's Le Nuove Musiche.
She offers a very personal take, often celebrating at once vanguard
and tradition, of the folk song La Llorona and folk based pieces
such as Alfonsina y El Mar and Mujer, Niña y Amiga.
As for her social and political ideals, Tisera draws her lines in
broad strokes with her classically-tinged re-interpretations of the
Chilean folk group Quilapayún's The people united, and Carlos
Puebla's Hasta Siempre, an ode to Che Guevara and his revolutionary
principles that Tisera personalizes with a musical quote inspired by
Puccini.
These songs carry deep social messages, and I chose them for how they
inspired broken societies and gave hope to generations with powerful
ideals of love and unity, she says. They transcend time, culture and
race and through them I express my artistic and political thoughts
using my classical voice. Also, these choices help me challenge the
perceptions that separate artists, especially classically trained
artists, from their communities and from the music that speaks to the
modern world.
Born to a Bolivian mother and Italo-Argentine father, Tisera was
raised in Cochabamba, a city surrounded by mountains located in the
center of Bolivia. She studied at the Instituto Eduardo Laredo, in
Cochabamba, and later moved to Los Angeles, CA, where she completed
her Masters Degree in Opera Performance at the University of Southern
California.
I moved to New York in 2008, and I arrived here as an opera singer
and with the dream of being an opera singer. That was it, she says.
I've loved Latin American folk music all my life, I've been intrigued
and inspired by jazz and I'm very socially conscious. But as a
musician, my choice had always been opera and the classical stage.
That was my posture for my first three years in New York and, frankly,
I started to feel empty. In the opera world it's very hard to have
your own project and your own ideas. There is a repertoire, you are a
performer, and that's that.
She worked in the United States and Bolivia, performing with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Bolivia and
the Pasadena Symphony, among others, and for five years she toured
with the Bolivian Baroque Project, performing 17th century music found
in the Jesuit missions of the Bolivian jungle - a project that
showcased her voice on the world's greatest concert halls. But once in
New York, she also started collaborating with visual artists and
dipping her toes in the murky waters of jam sessions. Of course, many
looked at me like an odd duck and I would tell them: 'Yes, I am an
opera singer. No, I don't know jazz standards, but I do know Latin
American music, I sing boleros and I can improvise so, why not?' And
that's how I met Elio.
Fittingly, their first musical encounter was in the baroque style -
the improvisatory nature of baroque being an area of contact between
jazz and classical music.
As Tisera began working on the recording she chose pieces based on how
they affected her vocally and for the possibilities they offered for
reinvention. I tried many, many songs and ideas. It took me a year of
trial and error, to polish the arrangements, create new pieces and let
them grow, she says.
For those who see her approach as avant-garde, Tisera says she is
pushing the vanguard but to bring audiences to experience the
greatness of opera as it relates to modern themes of love, politics
and culture. I long to present opera not like an old, precious form
but instead, as a vibrant, contemporary style that speaks to our
concerns now. That's why there are operatic moments in Nora La Bella -
but they might include improvisation, or the musical treatment might
include Bolivian or Afro-Latin rhythms, and elements of Rock or Spoken
Word. I remember during the recording we were listening to the second
take of 'Ernesto in the Tomb,' with its Afro-Cuban groove and my
operatic voice soaring above the music. The musicians heard it and
said 'Wow, it works!' and I had to laugh. 'Yes guys, of course it
works'.
Through her music and her role as a performer, producer and citizen of
the world, Gian-Carla strives to serve as an artistic ambassador by
challenging the perceptions that separate artists, communities and
nations – with the greater purpose of finding an equal and beautiful
language in the music of all people.