LEONTYNE PRICE AS ‘MASTERCLASSER’

SAN FRANCISCO —  A Times photographer suggested Leontyne Price pose before a dressing-room mirror in San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. Price, at the opera house to conduct a master class but not to sing, pivoted away from the large mirror and its frame of naked light bulbs.

“No, that will just look as if I’m making up for opera again,” she said. “I’ve had that.”

Turning from the mirror, Price insisted that she has no regrets about having taken the final bows of her 30-year operatic career in 1985. Price, 59, spoke excitedly of her “virgin voyage” as a teacher this month with the Merola program at San Francisco Opera, which trains singers starting their careers.

But she emphasized that as “a great singer, which is what I am,” she still sings as well as ever and maintains a heavy schedule of concerts. “These two weeks I teach,” she said, deliberately. “The next two weeks I sing.”

On Sept. 3, Price will sing at the 75th anniversary concert of the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall here, followed by a recital on Sept. 7.

On Oct. 1, she will perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the first time in 10 years--Kurt Sanderling conducting--during a week of concerts inaugurating the new Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. A Price recital on the same stage is scheduled Oct. 4, and she plans to be at UCLA for another recital next May..

On her Los Angeles Philharmonic program is the last scene from Richard Strauss’ “Salome,” and his “Four Last Songs,” one of the few non-operatic pieces about which Price has been giving advice since the classes here started in early August.

“These two weeks, I will share my expertise, experience and generosity, artistically, with a group of very talented young people,” Price said, before a class last week. “Why not add the teaching dimension back to back with the active performing, to show whether I have it as a masterclasser?”

Price said although she taught a master class in Salzburg, Austria, in 1982, she accepted the invitation to teach at the Merola program to see how much she likes working with young singers--and how good she is at it. Asked how the classes were going so far, she declared, with customary modesty: “Brilliantly.”

For the most part, these were highly polished singers, performing selections that demonstrated their strengths. Price usually reached past the well-rehearsed notes to aspects of operatic character the student singers had overlooked. She told Emily Manhart, a 26-year-old mezzo-soprano from Detroit, to light a fire under her Carmen. A certain passage should have “not just accents, but smoldering accents,” Price said, before suggesting that the two sing it together.

After a few measures, Manhart fell silent and only the husky, hotly sensual voice of Price’s Carmen remained. “Be sexy,” Price said, when she stopped. “Seething sex!”

“Think of it as a voyage upward, vocally,” Price told Donna Zapola, 28, from Queens, N.Y., trying to help Zapola give her performance of Strauss’ “Four Last Songs” the ethereal, soaring quality for which Price’s high register has been celebrated. “Like a bird. Think soaring like a bird . . . over the orchestra.”

To a soprano who had sung an aria from Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” Price said: “You have this enormous instrument. You are more preoccupied with the enormity of it than with what you can do artistically. Be elastic. Intensity doesn’t mean forte . “

While she is regarded by many as one of the great singers of her time, writers have frequently placed Price in a historical context as the first black American to become an operatic superstar.

The soprano, whose roots are in Laurel, Miss., gained nationwide recognition for the first time in the title role of “Tosca,” an NBC broadcast in 1955. Price herself describes the telecast as “pioneering” and “controversial.” But when a reporter attempted to elicit her views about opportunities for blacks generally in the 1980s, compared to the 1950s when she started her career, Price grew angry.

She resented any politically oriented questions, she said. Questions that tried to get at her feelings about being a black artist, as opposed to simply a great artist, have become “boring,” and she chooses not to answer them.

“I prefer to be interviewed as an artist,” she said. “I prefer to be interviewed as the best American artist that you are interviewing at this time. I am very proud. I am very proud of being a human being. I am very proud of being an American. And I am very proud of being black. They are all one and the same.”

Another question brought peals of laughter. Did she have any regrets, looking back on her life, about having sacrificed the raising of a family to having a career? (Price was married shortly to Baritone William Warfield in the 1950s. She has no children, although she is known to be very close to the family of her brother, George Price, a retired U.S. Army general who is her personal manager.)

Amid her laughter, she asked, “Do I look unfulfilled to you?” Then she doubled over again.

Recovering, she addressed the question. “ I’m a born overachiever. . . . I did what I chose to do. . . . To date, I consider that particularly (her marriage) as my first failure which I don’t want to talk about a lot. There have been none in my career. It’s been totally positive.

“If I want to linger on the fact that I have no children,” she continued, “if this teaching works, I do. Nothing would be more wonderful than to mother-hen these great talents. It’s even another dimension, more than motherhood.”

She speaks in deftly modulated sonorities that come close to song, and she uses words and phrases from virtually every language in which grand opera was written. She described a passage from Strauss’ “Four Last Songs” to Zapola as gemischte Salat (German for “mixed salad”) and, announcing her departure from the interview there was no simple “Let’s go,” but the voluptuous Italian of “Andiamo!” The English word still seems to be a sensitive one in Price’s vocabulary these days. John Schauer, a publicist for San Francisco Opera, recalled that when he offered Price a choice of two dressing rooms for an interview, she chose Room 10, the one for lead sopranos.

“She said, ‘I’ll take that one because I can still hit high C,’ ” Schauer recalled.

“I can still deliver,” she said in an interview. “I can still sing extremely well. Still is ridiculous. I sing well.”

At one point, Price tentatively described herself as having entered a “reflective stage” of her career, although she quickly insisted the phrase should not be interpreted to suggest retirement. Price is at work on an autobiography, but has not yet signed with a publisher.

Price described teaching as an activity full of reflections. She said she can see her own youthful beginnings in the talent and enthusiasm of her students, while counseling them also makes her acutely aware of the distance she has traveled.

“I can see me as a neophyte in the eyes of the young artists and I can see me as a seasoned professional at the same time,” she said. “That’s kind of heavy. I can see myself in two dimensions . . . “

How much teaching does she plan to do?

“I will do it periodically,” she said. “I don’t depend on this (teaching) for my self-expression.”

For the students, to whom she was clearly an inspiration, it is expression enough. “I think Leontyne Price represents to a lot of people here where they want to go,” said Mark Coles, 31, a baritone from New York City. “It’s like looking your goal in the face.”

“She glitters and she gleams,” said Brenda Wimberly, 30, a soprano from Shreveport, La. “I admire her so much. She still sings wonderfully.

“I do think she misses the opera stage,” Wimberly added. “You can feel it. But if you asked me she could go back tomorrow and she’d still be great.”