“Can we fly you out tomorrow morning to sing for Yanni?” Soprano Lauren Jelencovich was a recent graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and was beginning to make a name for herself but this was an audition unlike anything she had experienced before. “I landed at the airport, and they went to go fit me for in ear monitors… I hadn’t even sung for him and I was like ‘So did I get the job?’”
Within a week Lauren was in Puerto Rico performing onstage. “When I first did that gig in Puerto Rico, I didn’t tell anyone. I just didn’t know what it was gonna be like and it was an arena of almost 16,000 people or something, you know, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I’m a very nervous person, too, sometimes it’s like, I don’t want to tell anyone and have it be horrible. I ended up getting a video from a friend of mine that was like, ‘um, did you just walk out on stage and sing with Yanni?! I’m pretty sure that was you’.”
Soon she began hearing about tours in Mexico and the US, and was wondering if she would be involved. “What’s the story here?” Lauren asked before discovering that she indeed would be accompanying Yanni and that a whole new world of opportunities was opening up for her.
It all started as a kid when Lauren would corral the neighborhood kids into one of her productions. “I have cassette tapes that are like, ‘Sing, sing a song’ and I’d make people take their own parts. Then I would come in and be like, ‘Alright, everybody stop singing it’s my solo.’ I’m very bossy, if you can imagine. I heard music all the time, like in malls and stuff. My mom always says, ‘when you were younger, you’d be like, ‘Oh, I have a song on my ear.‘ And meanwhile, like, nobody else can really hear the music. But I was like, ‘I hear music’.”
Lauren is a bright personality that immediately lights up the Zoom screen when we chatted, warm and friendly, immediately wanting to get to know you. She also spontaneously bursts into song during many of her answers with a perfect-pitch soprano. Lauren told me that as a child she also likely sung many of her answers and notes, “Some things never change.”
As a child, Lauren was in the church choir, and in school productions. She did the NATS exam and Star Search and was more interested in chatting with the bus driver who had toured with LeAnn Rimes than attending her prom. “I loved watching Star Search when I was a kid,” Lauren says and those home videos reveal a young kid practicing for her big audition someday. The opportunity came in high school for Ed McMahon’s Star Search. “I went and then ended up getting onto the show, and I ended up winning the grand prize on the show, which was really kind of cool. I was like totally floored.” The success made her realize her dreams might be within reach after all.
There were other markers along the way to show Lauren she was indeed on the right path. She was a recipient of Andrea Bocelli’s National Italian American Foundation World Scholarship, “They flew me out to LA when they had a big dinner, and I got to meet some of the writers of the song like Tony Renis, David Foster was there and Andrea Bocelli was there. I had to sing ‘The Prayer’ in front of these people.” It was a surreal moment for an eighteen-year-old. “Andrea was maybe like five or ten feet away from me and he’s mouthing all the words, as I’m singing, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t like I’m having a moment’.”
During university, Lauren juggled real-world gigs with maintaining her regular class schedule at the Manhattan School of Music. While working on the off-Broadway show “The Music Teacher” with Wallace Shawn, Lauren spent her lunch break running to the subway, then into class and back again. “That’s what I did. You know, crazy. It’s like, can we please get a little slack here?” but she is still grateful for the experience. “It definitely was a stepping stone.”
Lauren made her Carnegie Hall debut in Benjamin Britten’s Te Deum in C with the Oratorio Society of New York and has performed in various other onstage roles including Mrs. Nordstrom in A Little Night Music, Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi, Sophie in Werther and a cover for the role of Violet Beauregard in the world premiere of the opera The Golden Ticket, based on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Lauren has what she describes as a “freakishly high voice” but has worked to develop all parts of her range and master different styles. Being a good mimic helped. “I wanted to be able to do theater and not sound like an opera person or you know, use different parts of my voice within whatever genre I’m in. Obviously, some classic musical theater uses all of that high soprano stuff but I can also do a little belting, which people don’t really realize that I do have a lower register as well. So sometimes I like to highlight that too. It’s not always about the high note. We like to call them our money notes because they are impressive, I guess. My thing is just like I hope I don’t just constantly sing something high. That could probably get a little shrill and annoying after a while and I don’t want that.”
Yanni was in fact one of those people who was unaware of the extent of Lauren’s range. He heard her one day warming up and quickly pulled her aside right before soundcheck. “He was like, ‘Come on stage. I want to know, how high can you sing?’ And I told him and he’s like, ‘Okay, we’ll sing this melody’ so I sang it. And then he said, ‘Okay, now sing it up the octave’.” The piece it turns out was a special one Yanni had written especially to be performed in China and Lauren’s voice would be the final piece, “You’re going to be the nightingale.”
The song titled “Unsignolo (Nightingale)” was featured on Yanni’s “Inspirato” album which also featured a who’s-who list of classical crossover stars such as Renee Fleming, Placido Domingo, Russell Watson, Katherine Jenkins, and Pretty Yende and is a treasured piece in Lauren’s collection.
“It’s a song that I really feel every single night. It’s not just the same thing. It doesn’t feel the same way… every night you have a new experience with it.”
You can listen to more of Lauren’s full range in her “Wildest Dreams” album available to stream on Spotify and stay tuned for more touring announcements on her website.
www.laurenjelencovich.com
