Young soprano is taking opera world by storm

CHICAGO — With her dancer's body, huge brown eyes and California-casual personal style, soprano Danielle de Niese hardly fits the stereotype of an opera star.

No horned helmet for her, as this season's poster outside Lyric Opera of Chicago attests. It shows the 27-year-old de Niese in a jewel-encrusted brassiere — and little else.

She blogs. She has a MySpace page. She had a cameo in a movie you've probably heard of. You can download wallpaper of her from her Web site.

Oh, and she can sing. The Wall Street Journal review of "Giulio Cesare" a few weeks ago gushed about the "astonishing" de Niese who sang brilliantly even as she danced effortlessly.

Besides pulling in audiences, de Niese says, her youth and glamor are useful tools in recruiting young people as potential opera audiences and performers — something the art form needs to survive.

"Outreach appearances in the schools are usually part of my contracts, and I love doing them," de Niese said in a recent interview backstage. "If I get just one little girl interested, I feel that I've done something there."

De Niese says she was that little girl herself not that long ago. Now, she has already been performing professionally for a dozen years.

S. Paul Driscoll, editor in chief of the magazine Opera News, recalled seeing video of de Niese's performance in the Glyndebourne production of "Giulio Cesare" that "blew me away."

"She is not only very pretty with a great voice, a great figure and amazing sex appeal, but she has the confidence that comes with having spent most of your life on stage — something you normally see only in a much older performer," he said.

"And this is not only musical and vocal confidence — some other young singers have that — but it's physical confidence. It's when she launches off into one of those dance routines or the way she wears a costume. She fills the stage."

Her life seems so charmed that even an encounter with Hannibal Lecter turned out pleasantly.

"No, he didn't eat me," she said recently of her appearance in the 2001 movie "Hannibal."

The first half of the movie was set in Florence and the producers commissioned a short opera from German composer Hans Zimmer and Irish composer Patrick Cassidy, de Niese said.