Natalja Sticco may seem just like any other professional woman. She works in the IT field as a technical writer, is a wife and mother but then again, she just happens to have appeared in over 30 operas. Growing up, her parents had always enjoyed music and were determined to provide their daughter the opportunity to study it. Natalja remembers that the family “went into debt” to buy her a piano and squeeze it into their studio apartment. There she would be as a young girl playing piano in the kitchen. “I learned to play the piano, I learned solfeggio, how to read music, music theory and musical literature.” She was also taught about Latvian culture and traditional music and “how this folk culture developed into some more serious music that Latvia is very famous of nowadays.”
Natalja also sang but at the time it wasn’t too serious. “To my mind, before you reach a certain age, and go through the puberty period, you can’t really think of serious training. I sang for fun. I participated in choirs.” For her the most important thing teachers can do during these early years “is just to not make kids lose interest, to introduce the kids to various music, so they like it… all the fun starts very much later” She took lessons at this time with a choir director. “I loved it a lot because we tried different music.” She recalls singing Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise. “Yes, it happened, yes It did. It’s considered to be a very difficult piece but we managed it, like I’m saying we were having fun. He explained to me the basics of breath and I did really good music with him. So I’m really very grateful to him for all this basic he input as a voice teacher for me.”
Natalja continued to train with other teachers from her hometown. In the Latvian school system after students graduate from middle school talented young performers have the opportunity to attend a specialized high school to begin studying music. Fourteen-year-old Natalja joined the try-outs and while most of the reactions were positive one of the teachers asked her “Can you do anything else? You’re just too young.” Far from being discouraged, she was actually delighted at the opportunity to attend “normal” high school, though she tells us she “took extra math classes physics, and was very much immersed in science.”
Upon graduation, Natalja once again decided to attend the Technical University over the musical one. Still, despite her desire to obtain a more rounded education, Natalja tells us she never stopped singing but continued to take lessons and participate in choirs and master classes with professors from many different countries. “You didn’t have to be a student of the academy; you could just participate. And that’s what I did… That was my lifesaver.”
This balanced approach ended up benefiting her. “As a fourteen-year-old, I was considered to be a full lyric soprano / lyric coloratura.” She would sing the Queen of the Night Aria with its famously high F’s but as Natalja matured her voice took on a much darker and richer color. She began to sing professionally as a mezzo-soprano but shares that she is still discovering her full range. “Right now I work with another teacher who tries to combine it all together and says ‘You literally are a dramatic soprano’.” Its moments like this were Natalja is especially grateful that she didn’t push herself too quickly. “That’s all I’m telling you just give it time. Don’t rush, especially with kids, if the kid wants to sing, of course, give them an opportunity, but never push the training because you need their body to be mature enough.” She notes one of the most difficult things for singers is the inability to accurately judge the sound they are producing. “This is the problem of this profession, right? Because we don’t hear ourselves… that’s why when I’m asked whether you need a voice coach I’m like, yes, because you don’t hear yourself, you don’t.”
Natalja worked for a time as a software engineer before committing to give music a chance. She started off in the opera chorus and also participated in young artists programs. “The most challenging thing was when you join a choir, you are literally giving five or six operas you have to learn how to do.” The conductor would make them sing the part one by one so there was no room for mistakes. “It was just like, a school of life. Honestly, if you asked me nowadays what’s easier, to sing a concert or do that test, I would say a concert.”
Working in the opera chorus also brought the opportunity for Natalja to travel. “I was lucky, because some of the operas I had to learn, I had additional motivation… for example for Carmen, which is actually a huge opera for choir in terms of this French text, and if you’re not a native speaker, it’s quite challenging, let me say. I learned this in three days because I was told if you do it and if you pass the test, we are taking you on a tour to Monte Carlo.”
In the opera chorus, Natalja was able to observe some of the biggest stars in classical music today like Elina Garanca and Jonas Kaufmann. “It was very interesting. When you stand on the same stage you just can’t believe it. You know, what I mean? It’s like I saw this person on TV so many times on YouTube and everything and now you’re just standing near.” Kaufmann especially left a strong impression. “He’s just so down to earth, based on what I have experienced myself. He was super nice,” she describes him as being casual arriving for rehearsal in a tee shirt and jeans. “Super normal and super easy going to work with.” People always want to hear stories about divas but her experience has been different. “There’s a huge bunch of people who love their job, and are actually nice to their colleagues. And for me, I could learn from them. It was amazing that really, they’re normal people – they’re not devious or something, you know, they just want to come do their job, sing and make us happy. That’s all.”
Love brought Natalja to America but she quickly realized the opera system was completely different from Europe. While in European countries the soloists and choir members are employed full-time, in America that is only true of the most successful opera house, The Metropolitan Opera. Making a living with music in America was not going to be easy. “I’m a mathematician so I always calculate what’s the probability of everything.” Natalja knew that she didn’t want to live full-time in New York City so she started thinking of other options. “I just wanted to continue singing, and I had to figure out how to do it in another way. So not a full-time choir or soloist. Right. So how to do it so I can still sing what I want and still make a living out of that, and find my audience?”
She started by performing as a cantor for local Catholic congregations and quickly learned the routine and how to read the old Georgian musical notation. It made her confident that “now I can do anything,” and with that thought in mind Natalja tried performing jazz. “I figured out if you have this technique, you can just adapt it for something else, and you make it work.”
Natalja soon found herself collaborating with Steinway international artist, BK Davis on “Let Me Comfort You.” She says, “It was nice because when it’s opera I’m always controlling and thinking but in jazz, you don’t do that. You just go have fun, you just belt it out and I can use your chest voice as much as I want.”
Crossover was the next logical genre to try. She started learning the classics like “Time to Say Goodbye” and tells us that she remembers even as a child listening to Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli. Her first classical crossover release was “Requiem for a Solider.” The single has gone on to have a very special place in Natalja’s heart especially as the war in Ukraine started. “I’m married to a US Air Force veteran. So my stepson is currently in Slovakia, he is an army captain, and he’s working in the embassy in Slovakia helping with the refugees. Both my grandfathers participated in WWII and they were killed. So, my grandmothers raised their children on their own and never got remarried.” Her young son longs to follow in their footsteps. “He’s dreaming of becoming a fighter pilot himself.”
The conflict seems especially strange to her seeing how Ukraine and Russia fought together with the Allied forces during WWII. “Now Russia is attacking the people who literally fought like on their side… it’s heartbreaking. I still want to help as much as I can, especially the people who protect their motherland.”
Natalja is donating the profits from her “Requiem for a Solider” single to TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors www.taps.org) to support military families who have either lost a love one or currently have a family member in the Ukrainian military.
Natalja has also released a self-titled album consisting mainly of opera arias. “Every song is dedicated to a certain event in my life… whenever I sing it, there are reflections which come along with that.” She includes a modern version of “Ave Maria” by William Gomez and dedicates it to loved ones she has lost, including her father.
Her focus now is on a brand-new show entitled Vincero Opera. “This is something which is also very close to me, because it’s an Italian show. My husband is Italian American and my current voice coach is from Italy. Overall, for me, it’s a tribute to Italian culture because to my mind, this is how it’s all started.” This coupled with the devastation Italy faced due to covid makes it an important story to tell.
Vincero Opera will feature music that the public may have heard many times in films and TV commercials. “We want to make it an experience for the audience so they can immerse themselves into this process of a transformation. Starting from a happy mood, like in a party and then go to all these hard, dramatic Italian arias which make people lose their minds. It’s all the spectrum of emotions that the opera heroes are experiencing on stage… we just want to bring our audience on our journey to feel the same emotions as we are feeling singing these arias and make sure they are not bored. I always say opera is not boring, it just has to be done properly. So, it’s organized as a concert.”
Vincero Opera serves as a first course as it were. “Our goal is just to have more fans. Because that’s how people get interested. That’s how a child gets interested, he listens to somebody singing or playing an instrument and thinks, ‘I want to try it myself’. It’s exactly the same with opera, and hopefully we will just have more people who love it and Italian culture. That’s how we can preserve it.”
Purchase our special edition Vincero Opera program
www.nataljasticco.com
