EUGENE - Only her friends know her nickname (that was true until now,
anyway), but even without the panda reference, Amanda Mace makes people
smile.

When she makes her professional singing debut tonight as the soprano
soloist in the Oregon Bach Festival's season-opening "Messa per Rossini,"
the smiles may well be accompanied by much applause and a "brava!" or two.

The smiles greeting Mandy-Pandy are layered:  first, you laugh at the open,
unpretentious, quirky, unusual things about her:  asked for her age, she
doesn't say 24, but that she will be 25 (in September, further research
shows); she saw her first opera only a few years ago, but she is hell-bent
on singing Tosca, all the soprano roles in Wagner's "Ring" AND Isolde NOW.
Naturally, the second smile is somewhat patronizing, tolerant, concerned
even.  Smart singers are cautious, fearless ones are usually dumb - Mace is
clearly not the former and she is obviously as bright as they come.  There
is simple resolution:  she sings, and the smile becomes one of pleasure and
appreciation - she is fearless and bright.  (And still, any voice teacher
worth the name is cringing badly just now.)

Mace has spunk, hutzpah even - such as singing "Du bist die Lenz" and
"Pace, Pace" at the audition before Helmuth Rilling, which got her the
gig here - but then she has the goods to back up outrageous, dangerous
ambitions.  Other 24-year-old office temps breathe.  Mace sings the same
way:  naturally, without working up to high notes, scooping, showing
effort.  She stands and delivers music as if she were in an informal
conversation.

The voice is not huge - certainly not a "Wagnerian soprano" at first blush
- but it carries, it projects, and Mace communicates the text and the music
without any distractions.  No wonder Rilling took her under his wings; she
is Rilling's kind of singer.

Preposterous as those Wagnerian plans may sound, Mace has already sang
Sieglinde in university concert performance of Act 1 of "Die Walkuere,"
and - in her spare time - the title role of Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos."
Not bad for a trumpet player from Rolla, Missouri ("don't feel bad,
nobody knows where it is"), on a class outing to Kansas City and "Madama
Butterfly" there in 1993, a year before graduating from high school.  It
wasn't just her first opera, it was the first time she became aware of the
genre, of classical singing.

"The curtain went up," she recalls, "and I started crying.  Then when I
heard the singing, it hit me like a ton of bricks - it was an indescribable
experience, and I knew there and then that this is what I want to do." She
switched from trumpet to singing lessons, sang in all the choirs she could
get into, last year she spent six weeks in Europe and somehow created
audition opportunities for herself all around, from the Vienna Staatsoper
to Rilling in Stuttgart.  In the same year, she also moved to New Jersey
and won first price of the Meistersinger Competition and a grant from the
Wagner Society of New York.  So who's laughing now?

If all that were not unusual enough, consider that Mace is making her debut
in "Messa" segments written by not only Verdi, but also Carlo Pedrotti and
Antonio Cagnoni.  No other Wagner soprano (established diva or prospective
star) can make that claim.

Janos Gereben/SF
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