Dixie Ross-Neill; American vocal coach for Canadian Opera Company
Hyfler/Rosner
June 9, 2007 Saturday
COC vocal coach was Mother Earth for Canada's opera
hopefuls; She grew up on the wrong side of a North Carolina
cotton-mill town, writes Sandra Martin, but gave many
singers their start, including Ben Heppner, who 'learned
more from Dixie than anybody else'
BYLINE: Sandra Martin
Technically, a coach is a pianist who plays the notes on a
piano so the singer can rehearse, but Dixie Ross-Neill had
such a passion for the human voice and was so skilled at
enhancing vocal performance that to say she was a coach is
like saying Joan Sutherland or Ella Fitzgerald were singers.
They epitomize a qualitative difference between the usual
and the sublime.
Part den mother, part taskmistress, she was relentless in
her demands for excellence and her commitment to
encouraging, refining and maximizing a singer's ability to
perform. In the early days of her 40-year career, she played
studio piano in New York for singers such as Eileen Farrell,
Robert Merrill and Beverly Sills; as a coach, she worked as
the musical-studies director for the Canadian Opera
Company's ensemble and as director of opera studies at
McGill University in Montreal. A quick list of her students
includes Benjamin Butterfield, John Fanning, Rebecca Hass,
Joshua Hopkins, Deborah Milsom, Daniel Taylor and Ben
Heppner. As well, she trained many students to follow in her
mould as rehearsal pianists and coaches.
"She was a wonderful musician, an excellent pianist and a
great teacher," said Stuart Hamilton, founding musical
director of the COC ensemble and a prominent vocal coach and
quizmaster on CBC Radio's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.
"Ben Heppner has told me several times that he learned more
from Dixie than anybody else."
Mr. Heppner himself said working with Ms. Ross-Neill and her
husband tenor, Bill Neill, was "phenomenal" because "they
had so much experience from the real world" of opera.
"Things really started to kick off when I started working
with Dixie. They were the team that moved me from not doing
much to being busy."
Dixie Ross-Neil was born into a poor Southern U.S. family,
18 months before Pearl Harbour and America's entrance into
the Second World War. Her mother, Louise Johnson, who had
been married and widowed as a teenager, already had a baby
son when she married William Anderson Ross, a cotton-mill
worker in Lincolnton, N.C. The Rosses had two more children:
Dixie and her younger brother Barney. (Barney became an
airline pilot and was killed in a plane crash in 1976.)
Mr. Ross, who had lost his own parents when he was very
young, sang and played banjo in barbershop quartets and was
a voracious reader who encouraged his daughter's musical
talent and intellectual ability. "He was passionate about
her having both violin and piano lessons," said Ms.
Ross-Neill's husband, tenor Bill Neill. "The family actually
did without food - they had meat only on Sundays - so that
there was enough money so that she could have an education
and music lessons, because he wanted her out of there." As a
child, Dixie went around with her father on his singing
gigs, sitting on a bench in revival tents and soaking up the
atmosphere.
A smart girl, she skipped two grades in elementary school,
played first violin with the Greensboro Symphony as a
teenager and was valedictorian when she graduated from
Lincolnton High School at 16. Scholarships enabled her to
enroll in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
where she played first violin with the university chamber
players. But even with her parents helping, money was so
tight that she still had to work in the cafeteria washing
dishes. Her hands were so raw that she had to slather them
with Vaseline and wear gloves to bed so she could play the
violin and the piano.
In January of her third year, the dean, knowing her
financial plight, arranged for Patty-Jo Higgins, a wealthy
and retired concert pianist, to hear Ms. Ross-Neill play at
a noontime recital. Mrs. Higgins was so impressed that she
became Ms. Ross-Neill's patron, paid for the rest of her
university education - she graduated magna cum laude with a
bachelor of music degree in 1961 - dressed and groomed her,
arranged for three months of private lessons with Edwin
Hughes, a prominent teacher in New York, and installed her
in an apartment with a housekeeper and a cook.
At this point, Mrs. Higgins and her protégé had a
disagreement. Mrs. Higgins wanted her to make her
professional debut as a concert pianist in a recital at the
Town Hall, but Ms. Ross-Neill was set on studying with
Dalies Frantz at the University of Texas, which had offered
her full tuition, plus a salaried assistantship in
accompanying, to do a master's degree. Mrs. Higgins gave her
an ultimatum, saying she would withdraw her financial and
social help if Ms. Ross-Neill didn't follow the course she
had set for her. And so, at 21, Ms. Ross-Neill said goodbye
to her patron and headed to Austin, Tex.
That's where she met her husband, Mr. Neill, and found her
vocation. He can still remembering meeting "this very shy,
very well-dressed woman who played magnificently" and was
the studio pianist for his voice teacher. Two years later,
she had earned a master of music degree in vocal literature
and accompanying and had married Mr. Neill.
After graduation, she taught for three years at San Antonio
College and then moved to Germany with her husband, who made
his operatic debut there, while she worked as a rehearsal
pianist and opera coach in Essen. Their son, Ross Neill, was
born there in July of 1969. In 1970, the Neills moved back
across the Atlantic and established a base in New York. For
the next 11 years, she built her reputation as vocal coach
and rehearsal pianist while he performed in Europe and North
America as an opera singer. In 1981, they moved to Amsterdam
where she took up an appointment as director of musical
studies for the opera studio De Nederlandse Operastichting.
Five years later, Lotfi Mansouri hired her as director of
musical studies for the ensemble (young artist training
program) at the Canadian Opera Company.
"I knew her through her husband," he said from San
Francisco, where he is freelancing as a vocal coach and
opera director after 14 years as general director of the San
Francisco Opera. "Bill was an excellent tenor and I had
engaged him on some major roles at the COC," including the
title role in the COC's first production of Peter Grimes,
the drum major in Wozzeck and Laca in Jenufa. And he "had
heard a great deal about Dixie as a coach," he said. "It is
a delicate position when you are working with young artists.
You want to encourage and stimulate them and criticize them
without making them lose their drive and motivation, and she
was wonderful at that," he said. "I used to call her Mother
Earth."
One of the young singers in the COC ensemble was Mr.
Heppner. He had met her in 1982, when she came from
Amsterdam for about 10 days to coach the ensemble singers,
but it was five years later, after he had left the ensemble,
that he began working privately with the Neills. Mr. Heppner
was a last-minute replacement for an ensemble singer who had
had to cancel a concert in Edmonton. Ms. Ross-Neill prepared
him for the role, then suggested he might want to work with
her husband. "And the natural consequence of doing that was
to work with Dixie as a coach," he said.
"Generally, a coach doesn't mess with a singer's technical
side," Mr. Heppner said. "However, Dixie did, thank God, and
she did it in a most wonderful way."
Instead of the usual one-hour session, he would book two
hours at a time, invariably emerging at the end wringing wet
from exertion. "I literally had to sit down for 10 minutes
to collect my thoughts before allowing myself to drive," he
said. "It was unbelievably intense, and she wouldn't let you
get away with less than your best." Despite her Southern
charm and motherly manner, she was an "insistent
taskmaster." Among her rules: no water bottles in the
studio, because there won't be one on stage.
Working with the Neills filled in the "gaps and missing
links" in Mr. Heppner's practical and musical experience (of
conductors, of roles, of performing as part of an actual
production) and helped him make the transition from lighter
fare to the more powerful repertoire of a Heldentenor. It
readied him to compete successfully at the Metropolitan
Opera auditions in New York in 1988, where he won the first
Birgit Nilsson prize. As a result, "my career literally
happened overnight."
The mood and the direction changed at the COC when Mr.
Mansouri left in 1989 and Brian Dickie took over as general
manager of the company. He "moved the focus away from
training," and "Dixie was simply not happy and didn't want
to stay," her husband said. Mr. Neill had given up
performing to take up an appointment as director of vocal
studies for the music faculty at McGill University in
Montreal in 1989, and Ms. Ross-Neill had coached and taught
the occasional course there. In 1993, McGill hired her to
become director of opera studies. Ten years later, the
Neills won the Opera Educator Award, in recognition of a
lifetime of achievement as vocal teachers.
The Neills applied to be Canadian citizens just before 2001,
but the events of Sept. 11 caused such bureaucratic problems
that their papers didn't come through until 2005. That was
the year that Mr. Neill retired from McGill and established
a voice and performance coaching studio in New York, where
they had lived and worked more than three decades earlier.
The plan was for Ms. Ross-Neill to continue working for
another couple of years at McGill, "for continuity's sake,"
and to see her husband's graduate students through their
studies. Coincidentally, she underwent a routine medical
examination and within days of her husband's retirement she
had beendiagnosed with ovarian cancer.
After surgery and aggressive chemotherapy, she withstood the
ravages of the disease for almost two years, continuing to
teach and coach until this spring.
DIXIE ROSS-NEILL
Dixie Ross-Neill was born in Lincolnton, N.C., on May 28,
1940. She died at Montreal General Hospital of ovarian
cancer on May 28, 2007. She was 67. She is survived by
husband Bill Neill, son Ross and daughter-in-law Kimy
McLaren.