Eugene Onegin’s Rhoslyn Jones didn’t take a direct route into opera; now she’s starring on her hometown stage

Rhoslyn Jones can barely recall the first opera production she ever saw. It was a high-school-band field trip to Vancouver Opera’s Don Giovanni in 1994, and “the only thing I remember about it was talking to my friend the whole time about this boy that she liked,” she admits. Far from inspiring her, the experience left her cold.

“I wanted to be a jazz singer,” she says. Opera singer? Not so much. And yet here is Jones, a decade and a half later, preparing for her company debut with Vancouver Opera as Tatyana in Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which opens the company’s season on Saturday (November 22) at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and runs to November 29.

So what was it, exactly, that helped steer the now 28-year-old, Aldergrove-raised Jones into the classical realm? In a nutshell: Nancy Hermiston. When Jones, having been told the best way to pursue a career in jazz was to learn to sing “properly”, auditioned for the UBC School of Music, the head of the voice and opera division took charge.

“I had ticked off ‘general music’ [on the application form], and she was having none of that,” says Jones, interviewed at the hall of Holy Rosary Cathedral on Richards Street, where the cast rehearses. “She was like, ‘No! Opera!’ She threw me on-stage, and I was in choruses for a couple of years, and I didn’t like it at all at first. Not at all.”

The aha moment came when Jones watched a classmate, Lambroula Pappas, compete in the regional round of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. “She won the competition and I remember sitting and watching her and thinking, ‘I can totally do that.’ I went back home and had a lesson the next week, and Nancy was like, ‘What happened?’ ”

With a renewed sense of purpose, Jones completed six years of study at UBC; won the Mario Lanza Vocal Competition, the CBC Debut Competition, and the Vancouver Women’s Musical Society Competition; and last year was a semifinalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Six months ago, after taking part in San Francisco Opera’s prestigious Adler Fellowship program, she moved to New York to be closer to her management team and auditioning opportunities.

Her burgeoning career has led her to sing in plenty of productions, but Jones confesses there’s something particularly thrilling about stepping onto the Vancouver Opera stage for the first time. “It’s a huge deal,” she says. “I mean, my whole family and all of my friends are really excited.”

As far as Jones is concerned, there are few better roles with which to make her company debut than that of Tatyana, the shy, romantic 17-year-old who falls madly in love with the dashing Eugene Onegin, who’ll be played by acclaimed Canadian baritone Brett Polegato. “It’s like honey,” she raves of the opera, which hasn’t been brought to Vancouver since 1985. “It’s like ice cream. Nancy always says: ‘I think you must have been Russian in another life.’ For some reason this music comes so easily to me and my voice.”

Playing Tatyana also demands that Jones pull out her acting chops, as Manhattan-based director Pamela Berlin, who conceived the new Vancouver Opera production with set designer Neil Patel, is quick to point out. “It’s not a plot-driven story,” says Berlin, who’s also on her lunch break. “It is a character-driven story, which is always the best.…You can just explore who these people are. Just as people are incredibly complicated, the characters are too, and Tchaikovsky honoured that in the music.”

Tatyana, in particular, grows enormously over the course of the opera, which is set in 19th-century Czarist Russia and based on the classic novel by Aleksandr Pushkin. In Act 1, she’s a daydreamy young girl, smitten at first sight by Onegin, who rebuffs her advances. But by Act 3 she’s a worldly married woman; when Onegin comes crawling back to her begging for her affections, she acknowledges her feelings but maintains her honour and self-control to turn him down.

It’s a complex role that requires a singer who can act, a common demand in today’s opera world. With the genre enjoying increased popularity among young audiences—thanks in part to the Metropolitan Opera’s recent high-definition broadcasts in movie theatres worldwide—the days of “park and bark”, as Jones calls it, are over. And as opera companies strive to deliver the goods to a generation reared on American sitcoms and Hollywood movies, many singers, including Jones, are feeling increased pressure to maintain a starlet’s physique. (In 2004, the American soprano Deborah Voigt famously underwent gastric bypass surgery after she was cut from a production of Ariadne at Covent Garden when she couldn’t fit into a little black costume dress; young Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman confessed this past April to undergoing a similar procedure, and is now 150 pounds lighter.)

“Image is important,” concedes Jones, “but at the same time, great singers come in all different shapes and sizes and packages. I do worry that great voices are being left out sometimes.”

Not that Jones should be concerned about her own looks—she may not be sporting a Kate Moss–sized waist, but she’s nowhere near preoperative-Brueggergosman proportions. And she’s got plenty of gigs lined up; after Eugene Onegin, she’ll be headed back south for another role debut as Musetta in La Bohème with Pittsburgh Opera.

It’s a far cry from the scene 14 years ago, when the young Jones sat, bored and unmoved, in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, oblivious to Don Giovanni’s charms. What would she have said back then if someone had told her that one day she, too, would be up on that stage, singing the music of Tchaikovsky? “No way!” she responds. As audiences will see this Saturday, when Jones transforms into Tatyana, fate, on-stage and off-, is a funny thing.