By Jeronimo Boza, April 12, 2013
It was a cold and cloudy day in 2005, and Lloyd Reshard Jr.’s Marine Corps unit had just finished a hard day of training at Camp Lejeune. N.C.
To boost morale, Reshard — who was a University of Miami music student as well as a Marine — burst out singing Time to Say Goodbyeby Andrea Bochelli.
That’s when he knew for sure that his career would be as a singer.
“We were all depressed, miserable and unhappy,” Reshard said. “So I started to sing and you could see their facial expressions changing. That was when I realized that my purpose in life was to sing.”
Reshard, 29, grew up in Niceville, near Pensacola, but moved to Miami in 2001 to pursue a career in music at University of Miami.
He joined the Marine Corps at the same time as he started college, and remained in the service through 2009. But his passion lies in music.
“I refer to that day after training in North Carolina as the turning point in my life because I found music again,” he said.
Reshard is performing his sixth season with the Florida Grand Opera for and will be participating in Verdi’s La Traviata as a professional chorister from April 20 through May 5 at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami.
And like him, there are many singers in South Florida whose lives have been changed by music.
Megan Barrera, 25, is an opera singer from Miami, whose fondest dream has been to become a world-renowned soprano.
She says she discovered her vocation as a performing artist when she was 7, which later led her to New World School of the Arts in Miami.
“I always felt I was going to fall somewhere within the performing arts,” she said.
Barrera has sung on several stages around the country with professional opera companies like the Wichita Grand Opera and the Florida Grand Opera.
She has played leading roles in various areas, including the character of Susanna in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaroand Musetta in Puccini’s La Boheme.
For this south Floridian singer, music is the drive behind her decisions.
“I cannot picture my life without music,” she said.
It was in 2008 when her love for music gained more importance over the relationship with her fiancé, and later became a “wall” between them.
But she didn’t realize it until her dream of saying “I do” in front of the altar came to an end, leaving her eyes soaked in tears.
“I was devastated and depressed,” she said. “However, those hours of practicing were how I survived reality.”
Last year, she debuted in the performance of Don Pascuale with the Wichita Grand Opera as Norina, and this May she will appear on Kiss me, Kate at the Natchez Music Festival in Mississippi.
Like Reshard and Barrera, La-Nell “Leo” Williams’s life has been “saved” by music.
“Music saved me from being out in the streets,” Williams said. “Where I come from, people don’t go to college or have any ambitions for the future.”
Williams, 25, grew up in a low-income family in Mangonia Park, in Palm Beach County.
He was a high school dancer when he discovered that his true passion was opera.
“I was dancing until I saw the pianist of the school practicing,” he said. “At that moment, classical music captivated me.”
Last February he was selected by Florida Grand Opera to participate as a professional choir singer in La Sonnambula by Vellini at the Arsht Center in Miami.
But passion is not the only force these singers have because persistence also plays a key role.
In 2011, Sandra Marante, 26, faced a situation where her dream of becoming a singer was at risk of never becoming a reality,
One day after vocal practice, Marante suffered a seizure caused by a malformation between the arteries and the veins in the part of the brain that controls speech, memory and music. This abnormality is known as Arteriovenous Malformation, or AVM.
The medical condition represented for Marante the risk of never being able to sing again.
The only choice she had was to get surgery immediately, and because of the place where the abnormality was found, there was a great risk involved.
“My doctor did a lot of analysis before the surgery,” she said. “I was really scared of not being able to speak correctly, but, even worse not being able to sing again.”
More than a year has passed, and now, Marante has officially become part of Dicapo Opera Theatre in New York City and, in April, will be part of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
“As a musician, music is the driving force behind my success,” said the singer.