The easygoing 28-year-old, with the boyish face and easy grin, jokes about being "my slovenly self at home," when kicking back in jeans, T-shirt and bare feet.
That's quite a contrast to Thorsett the lyric operatic tenor at work: under lights, onstage, wearing "60 pounds of costume, eight pounds of makeup," and sending his clear voice soaring to high F above high C in several languages.
 Lyric tenor Brian Thorsett in his offstage persona at home, at his piano and surrounded by books that he and his wife, soprano Amy Cowan, use for studying and teaching. |
But after all, he says, "opera" is the Italian word for "work."
Love of the art and a trained, crystalline voice are what make opera such a good fit for Thorsett. But those demands? With his philosophy of working hard and never expecting to get by just on talent, Thorsett thrives on them.
"I consider myself very lucky," he said. "There has never been one day that I say, 'I hate my job.'"
Of course, there are adjustments. His is a relaxed persona, versus the formality often associated with opera. He juggles work and home life, and his relatively new marriage (his wife, Amy Cowan, is a recognized soprano, performer, chorale director and music teacher locally and in the Bay Area).
With dedication and grounding, Thorsett has found balance.
"I'm a very casual person," he said. "There are two types of (opera) people: (those for whom) it's all about singing and image, and people who leave it at the front door and come home and be themselves ... I think to find success, is to maintain a sense of self."
Thorsett does that even after an estimated 62 operatic roles, from small ("two lines and I'm gone") to onstage all three hours, and now he says "all of them are fun."
"That's why it's called opera," he said with that grin. "It's a grand work."
It's also a timeless one, he insists: Far from an anachronism in a world of high tech and heavy metal, opera's place is assured.
"It's not a dying art form. There are all these young people out there doing it," he said. "The stories are so timeless and so true. (Mozart's) 'Cosi fan tutte' - you can update (its themes) to anything. Being faithful, love, those are always high human concerns."
That's one of his favorites, for its "complex interaction, great music and the characters are so rich." Other favorites include "The Magic Flute" for its "beauty and nostalgia" and Gaetano Donizetti's "The Elixir of Love" for its "uninhibited, simple characters - a great release for me."
He has done those frequently with Bay Area opera companies. He went blond once for "Cosi" at the Music Academy of the West - but that was OK. "When you do it as a job," he sighed, "you give up all rights to how you look."
That wasn't what his mother, 16-year Half Moon Bay Library assistant Ruth Thorsett, thought his future would be. As a boy, she said, her son loved baseball, building things - she thought he would become an architect - and he did always like to sing.
But singing never came that easily to him, Thosett said. So he focused on other skills: At Santa Clara University, he got degrees in piano and mathematics.
Math came in handy for him. "There's beauty and form to math that I identify in music," he said.
And, when playing music, he said, "I can count like nobody's business."
In studying piano, he had to learn to sight-sing - sing a passage of music by reading only, sans accompaniment - so he decided he might as well study voice. The timing was right: his parents were divorcing, and "singing became a new challenge, fun, interesting, distracting to me."
In his junior year, he was asked to step into a Peninsula teen opera production of "The Magic Flute."
"I had no idea what I was doing," he said. "I just fell in love with it."
Joining a musical ensemble brought him closer to opera. A virtuoso pianist plays alone, he said, but making music with others was gratifying. "It's an exchange. Incomparable to anything," he said.
After Santa Clara, he took a year off to sell computer parts, which proved "not a good year in my life." A turning point came in a music competition when he met an elderly man who told him, "'You're good, but you can get better.'"
That man was James Schwabacher Jr., founder of a recital series and of San Francisco's prestigious Merola training program for promising singers.
Schwabacher invited Thorsett to dinner and in time, the two chatted about opera, famous singers Schwabacher had helped launch like Carol Vaness or Elly Ameling - and how he could help Thorsett.
"He had the best stories," Thorsett said fondly of his mentor, who died in July. "He instilled in me a passion to make music with words."
That's something Thorsett says all great opera composers do - create music to fit around stirring words - and it carried him to graduate studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
"It took me to grad school to gain confidence, to say 'This is what I want to do,'" he said.
In time he mastered the trick of soaring, effortless voice production. "All singing is yawning and singing words through that space," he said. "You have to be a master of just letting go."
Or, as Schwabacher told him, "Just sing."
After getting his master's degree in voice in 2004, he gave himself a "kick start" at the Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara) summer program, where he met respected mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, who remains a friend today. Thorsett says he often e-mails her with questions, to which she responds generously. "She's been very good to me," he said.
Last summer he participated in the 11-week Merola summer program through the San Francisco Opera, which covers singing as a business and other aspects of opera like stage combat or costuming. There, he met opera directors or company representatives who "come to cherry-pick people."
His career now includes teaching and coaching. His students include teens looking to rap, people who simply want to sing, retirees and CEOs who want to sing at the next company party. He is also preparing for the opera "Martha" with Pocket Opera in San Francisco, some Mozart selections with Berkeley Opera and the majestic "St. Matthew Passion" in San Francisco.
He wants to pursue oratorio, and is planning a 12-week summertime trip to New York, for the Glimmerglass American Opera Festival, which he calls the East Coast equivalent of Merola. "That's going to open some doors," he said.
His biggest challenge, he said, is surviving rejection at auditions, but he faces it with equilibrium. "You need to maintain a healthy view of rejection," he said. "Maintain a sense of self so you don't lose the sense of your own artistry."
Something else he keeps in perspective is his marriage. Wife Amy Cowan, who recently starred as Maria in Coastal Repertory Theatre's "The Sound of Music," helps him keep balance.
"We want to be in harmony, in tune with each other," he said.
He cherishes the large artistic network that is an opera. "Making music with other people - it's a living being," he said.
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