Opera hopefuls aiming for Met glory to compete Saturday at Laffont vocal competition in La Jolla

Next weekend in La Jolla, 25 up-and-coming opera singers will compete in a daylong vocal competition with the hope of earning a regional title that could catapult them to the Metropolitan Opera stage.

The singers are all contestants in the San Diego District finals for the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition (formerly known as the Met’s National Council Auditions).

Opera hopefuls ages 20 to 30 have been singing their hearts out in the San Diego district competition for each of the past 65 years. But last year’s winning singer — Mexican American mezzo-soprano Sarah Saturnino — was special. She was the first local winner to ever make it to the national finals and win the top prize.

Born in the small town of Grass Valley in Northern California, Saturnino now lives in Los Angeles and is in her second year in LA Opera’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program. She said the win at the San Diego District finals last year was a tremendous blessing for her career.

“The Met competition has opened up a whole new world for me,” Saturnino said in a phone interview last week. “It introduced me to a larger demographic of people, including the bigger opera companies like the Met … and getting to walk out on the Met stage and see how vast it was can be a little daunting but it was such a great experience. It really helps to prepare young singers for what they could be experiencing in the real world.”

This week, Saturnino will be one of just 34 hand-picked singers from around the world competing in Operalia, the international opera competition founded by Placido Domingo 35 years ago. The competition will take place Monday through Nov. 5 in Cape Town, South Africa.

The 2023 San Diego District Competition takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. next Saturday at the Baker-Baum Concert Hall in La Jolla. Twenty-five singers will compete. Each singer is given 10 minutes to compete in the first round, after which finalists will be announced to represent the San Diego District in the Western Regional Finals on Feb. 10, 2024, at Zipper Hall in L.A.. The regional finals feature the winners of the San Diego, L.A. and San Francisco districts. The national finals will take place in March.

Awards will be given to the District winners, as well as encouragement and audience choice awards. Almost as valuable to the contestants is the one-on-one feedback sessions the competitors receive from the judges at the end of the day.

Back in 1994, one of the competitors of the San Diego District competition was soprano Priti Gandhi, who grew up in Encinitas. After a 20-year singing career, Gandhi transitioned into opera administration with San Diego Opera, Minnesota Opera and Portland Opera. In September, Gandhi was hired by the Metropolitan Opera in New York to serve as the national associate director of the Laffont Competition.

As part of her new responsibilities, Gandhi will fly out from New York next weekend to attend the San Diego District competition. Gandhi said the competition had a huge impact on her early days as a singer.

“Though I was so green in my knowledge of the world of opera — and just starting the journey into vocal technique — I received an encouragement award that very first year. I’ll never forget how that affected me,” Gandhi said. “I recall that I had entered a crazy repertoire list that year as well. This didn’t stop the judges at the time from seeing that I had an instrument to explore. That validation to ‘keep going’ gave me a new layer of confidence and courage to keep stepping out in to the outer opera world.”

Priti Gandhi has joined the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Saturnino started her own opera training at age 16. She earned her undergraduate degree in vocal performance from UC Los Angeles in 2016 and then her graduate degree from Yale University in 2018.

Sinc then, she said she has “lived out of a suitcase,” performing with regional opera companies around the U.S. in New York, Maryland, Texas, California, New Mexico and Louisiana. Despite the challenges the opera industry has endured in recent years, Saturnino said there are plenty of opportunities out there.

“Opera is not dead. You just have to know where to look for it. There are opera companies all over the country in towns that even the people that live there don’t know about it,” she said. “I was a young artist in Shreveport (Louisiana) during the pandemic and I would drive around in a van that said Shreveport Opera on the side. People would stop me and say ‘what’s that?” It introduced opera to a community that had never heard of that before.”

Saturnino joined LA Opera’s young artist program in 2022. She said the coaching and lessons the program offers young singers to develop their talent, as well as the opportunity to perform on the huge Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage in L.A., have been invaluable.

Saturnino entered the Met’s Laffont Competition for the first time in 2020, but because of the pandemic it was conducted online. “It was a completely different experience. Like everything with the pandemic, it was extremely difficult and demoralizing to be singing to a computer.”

Last year she was able to compete in the Laffont competition in front of a live audience and said it made a big difference.

“As an artist you feed off the energy of the audience. I will say that having the opportunity to sing live in front of people was just the best experience in San Diego,” she said. “The audience there was so warm and giving and they were really into it. It was really fun for me to come out and sing some of my favorite arias for them.”

Saturnino also praised the San Diego District Competition’s all-volunteer staff.

“Sometimes when you do these competitions, there are nerves going in. But San Diego was so organized and their team members so welcoming and just very on top of everything. When you’re that comfortable, you really can perform at your best. I can’t say enough about how awesome the district people are. They’re the most lovely humans.”

Last month, nearly 20 of the San Diego District’s board member and volunteers traveled north to see Saturnino sing the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen” with Santa Barbara Opera.

“There was a huge crowd of people waiting for me backstage,” Saturnino said of the experience. “You don’t get that very often in a business where you’re moving from place to place. Having that family of people waiting for me at the door was really special.”