Opera

CU Opera Songbirds Hit the High Notes

Anna Tolette — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:47:05 +0000

CU Opera Songbirds Hit the High Notes Anna Tolette Tue, 11/12/2024 - 13:47

Helen Olsson

In June, two renowned opera singers from CU were inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. Cynthia Lawrence (Mus’83; MM’87) studied music at CU and went on to share the stage with Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti more than 70 times. Keith Miller (Art’97), on the other hand, was a star football player who pivoted to opera after graduation. They have both performed stints as principal artists at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Soprano, equestrian, stunt woman

“When I heard about [the Hall of Fame induction], I couldn’t believe it,” Lawrence said. “To be recognized is beyond an honor.” But the honor is no surprise to those in the singer’s orbit. Lawrence has performed with virtually every opera company in Colorado and worldwide, from Paris to Prague, with legendary performers like Plácido Domingo and Mirella Freni.

"Cynthia has a world-class voice. People say she was kissed in the throat,” said acclaimed tenor Mark Calkins (MMus’87), who met Lawrence at CU. (They married in 1985.) “She won the Metropolitan Opera contest in 1984 at age 23 — a stunning achievement.”

Lawrence credits her success, in part, to her time at CU. “It’s a great school with great facilities. Barbara Doscher was one of the best voice teachers in the world,” said Lawrence. She also points to her background as a competitive equestrian. “If you’re nervous on horseback, that horse may dump you in the dirt,” she said. “In opera, you also have to keep your nerves underneath you. That discipline, concentration and preparation made me a better performer on stage.”

In addition to jumping horses, Lawrence credits childhood time on the trampoline with her ability to perform dramatic free-flying leaps in Puccini’s “Tosca.” Lawrence, who insisted on doing her own stunts, perfected numerous daring feats on stage. She frequently plummeted backward (into a hidden foam pit), and her most notable stunt was a 26-foot forward jump at Royal Albert Hall.

Bass-baritone, athlete, thespian

Keith Miller grew up on a beet farm in Ovid, Colorado, a town so small that its high school football team consisted of six players and there was no school choir. A football scholarship recipient and three-year starter as a fullback, Miller played opera music in the locker room and sang in the shower.

He was inspired by varsity players singing the CU fight song on the sidelines. “These guys, my idols, were singing like they were warrior poets,” he said. Not long after the 1994 Michigan game, when CU made one of the greatest comebacks in Buff history, Miller took his then-girlfriend to see “Phantom of the Opera” in Denver. “I felt the same emotion at the opera that I had during the Michigan game,” he said.

In 2001, while working out with the Denver Broncos at North Dakota State University, Miller took refuge from a snowstorm in a music practice room. “I started singing along to “Don Giovanni” — and someone knocked on the door.” He was offered a scholarship on the spot. He declined, but decided it was time to start following the music. On the way out, he saw a flier for the Pine Mountain Music Festival in Minneapolis and decided to audition. Suddenly, Miller had a dozen job offers to sing and decided to pursue singing full-time.

The next fall, Miller enrolled at the prestigious Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and, after graduation in 2006, auditioned for the Met in New York. He made his debut at the opera’s opening-night gala. At the reception, he bumped into someone who remarked, “Wonderful performance,” in a familiar Scottish accent. It was Sean Connery.

Beyond the Hall of Fame

Today, the inductees are still showing off their versatility. Miller serves as founder and CEO of CedoHealth and has recently moved back to Colorado to re-engage with the Crested Butte Music Festival (CBMF). (For six years, he served as director of opera and oversaw the CBMF’s Opera Young Artists Program.) He also has his sights set on film acting. “There are things out there creatively I want to do,” he said. “My journey’s not done.”

Meanwhile, Lawrence works as the endowed chair professor for voice and opera at the University of Kentucky, where she’s teaching the next generation of opera singers. “I love teaching. When students have that ’Aha’ moment, when they finally get it — that’s the prize.”

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Illustration by Chris Buzelli

This year, CU songbirds Cynthia Lawrence (Mus’83; MM’87) and Keith Miller (Art’97) made the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.

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Off to the Opera (and On to the Grammys)

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:21:18 +0000

Off to the Opera (and On to the Grammys) Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/03/2019 - 11:21

Jessie Bauters

Wei Wu came to the U.S. from China in 2007. Now he's got a Grammy.

Growing up in post-Cultural Revolution China, Wei Wu (MMus’13) might have been the only kid in Beijing listening to both Giuseppe Verdi and Miles Davis.

“My grandfather was a trumpeter in a jazz band in 1920s Shanghai,” said Wu, now a professional opera singer living in New York. “Even after most Western music in China was destroyed, he and my parents still had classical and jazz music around.”

From his earliest years, Wu, a bass, loved singing. He nurtured that love through choirs, voice lessons and undergraduate studies at People’s University of China. In 2007, legendary bass Hao Jiang Tian, his future mentor, offered him an opportunity he and his tight-knit family knew he ought to take — in Colorado.

“Chinese composer Guo Wenjing had written an opera specifically for my teacher, to be premiered at Central City Opera,” Wu said. “Tian brought me to the United States as his understudy.”

The move proved fortuitous: That summer, Wu met his future CU voice teacher, Julie Simson, and auditioned for graduate work at the College of Music. By fall, he was a master’s and voice performance certificate student.

A hop, skip and a couple of young artist programs later, Wu can call himself a Grammy Award winner.

In February, Wu and the cast of “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” — an opera about the Apple co-founder written by composer Mason Bates and librettist Mark Campbell (Thtr’75) — beat out five heavy-hitting contenders in the “Best Opera Recording” category. Wu played Jobs’ spiritual advisor, Japanese zen master Kôbun Chino Otogawa, in the opera’s 2017 world premiere in Santa Fe.

“We were never really expecting it,” said Wu, who landed the gig after graduating from Washington National Opera’s young artist program and a Metropolitan Opera debut. “A nomination is already quite an honor. Then we won.”

If other singers have to give 100 percent to be cast in an opera, we have to give 200 percent. I have 10 minutes in an audition to make them see past my face and see me as a singer first.

Bringing Otogawa’s story to the stage was an honor — but only a handful of people in the U.S. were likely to get the role, he said, and they’re all Asian.

“The people from China who are making it here as professional singers are all my best friends,” he said, “and I can count them on one hand.”

As in film and television, singers of Asian descent are often considered mainly for Asian roles, like Kôbun or the soprano in “Madame Butterfly.” That means there’s an added challenge when auditioning for parts like King Philip in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Wu’s dream role.

“My teacher told me that if other singers have to give 100 percent to be cast in an opera, we have to give 200 percent,” Wu said. “I have 10 minutes in an audition to make them see past my face and see me as a singer first.”

But Wu said he’s seeing more and more Asian singers coming to the U.S. to take advantage of growing opportunities in opera, and he views this as a good sign, cautiously.

“This is where the training and opportunities are,” he said. “But it is still very competitive.”

Wu said the language, diction and voice training he received at CU have made a big difference for him, along with encouragement from his parents and CU supporters John and Anna Sie.

“They always want me to keep working toward the next thing,” he said. “Even after I won the Grammy, two days later my father told me not to let the opportunity for this fresh start pass me by.”

Next year, Wu will reprise his “(R)evolution” role at San Francisco Opera, close to Steve Jobs’ old Silicon Valley stomping grounds.

Other CU alumni also fared well at the 2019 Grammys. Record producer Erica Brenner’s (Mus’82) album Songs of Orpheus, with chamber ensemble Apollo’s Fire and vocalist Karim Sulayman, won Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. Tia Fuller’s (MMus’00) Diamond Cut was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, and CU Director of Bands Donald McKinney was nominated as a producer in the Best Classical Compendium category for the Dallas Winds’ album John Williams at the Movies.

Where there’s great music, said College of Music Dean Robert Shay, there’s probably a Music Buff.

“All this recognition is an incredible honor,” he said, “but it’s no surprise to us!”

Comment on this story? Email editor@colorado.edu.

Photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Wei Wu came to the U.S. from China in 2007. Now he's got a Grammy.

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Opera Librettist Mark Campbell

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 18:14:15 +0000

Opera Librettist Mark Campbell Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/01/2016 - 11:14

William Weir

The Librettist

Mark Campbell (Thtr'75)

It’s a rare thing to be a full-time librettist today. Mark Campbell (Thtr’75) would like to make it less so.

“One reason I mentor is to find other writers to help do all this work — it’s getting hard to keep up,” he says with a laugh at a favorite wine bar in his Manhattan neighborhood.

One of the best-known librettists in American opera, Campbell has written the words for more than 15 operas, including Silent Night, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. His newest, with music composed by Paul Moravec, is based on Stephen King’s novel The Shining and premieres this May.

Campbell’s entry to opera was roundabout. His family was somewhat musical but never exposed him to opera. Initially he didn’t take to it either. But he also didn’t care for the self-promotion necessary for an acting career. After graduating from CU, he began writing lyrics for musicals. Despite early success, including an award from Stephen Sondheim, Campbell was wary about where contemporary musicals were heading.

“I started watching opera and seeing the potential of the form,” he says. “And I thought: ‘this is where I want to be.’”

In 2004 he teamed with composer John Musto on his first full-length opera, Volpone, which the Washington Post deemed “a masterpiece.” Not bad, for a start.

It took him a while to give up his day job in advertising, but he finally did at his husband’s encouragement, shortly after Silent Night, written with composer Kevin Puts, won the Pulitzer. He’s kept busy since: Four of his operas debut this year, with four others scheduled for 2017, including one about Steve Jobs for the Santa Fe Opera.

Opera may be old, but it’s thriving. According to Opera America, professional opera companies in North America have produced 950 new operatic works since 1900. More than half are from the 21st century.

Still, misconceptions abound. Since it’s opera, people ask him, does he write everything in Italian? (No, only in English.)

Last year, Campbell returned to CU for the first time since graduation to work with students.

He says he’s heartened by CU’s New Opera Workshop (CU NOW), one of few places for aspiring librettists to train.

Always he emphasizes to students why the audience is there.

“We go to Sweeney Todd because we could never commit that kind of revenge in our own lives, and we can never fall in love as intensely as Tosca does,” he says.

That means distilling the story down to the characters’ passions and ambitions, making them bigger than life for song.

At CU, he says, “I learned where a story can go and how to examine the arc of a character. One thing I hope I’m doing in my writing is helping break down the public’s perceptions of contemporary opera as pretentious and boring. Like many of my colleagues, I care about my audience above everything else.”

Photo courtesy Mark Campbell

It’s a rare thing to be a full-time librettist today. Mark Campbell (Thtr’75) would like to make it less so.

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See You at the Met

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 17:00:00 +0000

See You at the Met Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 03/01/2015 - 10:00

Eric Gershon

Ambition. Amor. Seduction. Betrayal. For CU’s opera singers, it’s all in a semester’s work. For some, it’ll be a life.

Così director Leigh Holman leads the cast in an early (and spirited) reading of the libretto.

Meagan Mahlberg (Mus’08,MA’11) knew bliss would come, and almost precisely when.

It was late fall and the 28-year-old soprano was preparing for her role in CU-Boulder’s spring production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Group rehearsals had barely begun. Orchestral accompaniment was months away. But she’d done her homework and sensed already that her second-act aria would deliver a drawn-out moment of pure transcendence as scores of musicians reached full throttle and she drew out a high note in a hall seating thousands.

“She’s essentially asking for forgiveness from her fiancé, maybe from God, maybe from herself,” Mahlberg says of her character, Fiordiligi, a young lover losing a battle against temptation. “She’s already realized she’s going to betray.”

Dramatic, athletic, fantastic and, above all, musical, opera induces the immersive state of total engagement that drives Mahlberg. One of four singers enrolled in the College of Music’s professional certificate program in opera and solo vocal performance, she’s already performed in more than a dozen fully-staged productions, including professional work in Boulder and New York.

“I am trying to make a life out of this,” she says.

That’s not an easy thing to do.

Keith Miller (Art ex’97), a former CU and professional football player who reinvented himself as an opera singer and has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, puts it this way on his website: “A million-to-one to make it in professional football, two-million-to-one to succeed in opera.”

Despite long odds, CU alumni voices sound in opera halls near and far. Mezzo-soprano Megan Marino (MMus’08), soprano Christie Hageman (MMus’10) and tenor John Lindsey (MMus’11) all perform with major U.S. opera companies. Bass-baritone Ashraf Sewailam (Mus’94,DMA’08) has been called a “standout” by The New York Times. Soprano Cynthia Lawrence (MMus’87) — a bona fide star who performs at famous opera houses around the world — appeared with Italian tenor Luciano Pavoratti more than 70 times.

There’s no foolproof recipe for an opera career, of course. University training, talent agents and vocal contest victories are common ingredients. Many of CU’s current aspirants hope to join a major opera company’s young artist program, basically in-house troupes of early-career singers.

Competition is fierce. Singers apply to audition, which amounts to auditioning to audition. After the initial winnowing there can still be hundreds of singers vying for fewer than a dozen slots. The tryouts are brief and no-nonsense. In October Max Hosmer (MMus’14), a tenor from California cast as Ferrando in CU’s Così, flew to New York for an eight-minute tryout.

Even success — a junior spot in a professional company — is just a start. Singers in young artist programs get short-term contracts and typically undertake duties far from the spotlight, as community ambassadors for the opera, for example. But there’s also the possibility of small roles and chorus appearances, and the incalculable benefit of being an insider.

Says Hosmer, “You never know when you might get a call — ‘We need a Ferrando tomorrow!’”

Experience Counts

Holman and Carthy, director and conductor.

Training professional opera singers is one aim of the College of Music and the Eklund Family Opera Program, which helps support three campus productions each year. A broader goal, says program director Leigh Holman, is to provide music students with meaningful exposure to a major category of theater music. Many students will become teachers; to be good ones, she says, they need to know opera.

For the professional aspirants in the Così cast, performing big roles in famous operas is vital currency in the job market. Opera companies want more than talent; they want singers intimate with specific roles in a small pool of popular operas that includes Così fan tutte.

“Management will like to see that you’ve done the role before,” says Holman, a mezzo-soprano who sang professionally and directed Opera Colorado’s young artist program before joining the CU music faculty in 2007. “It gives them confidence the singer has the goods to pull it off.”

CU’s professional performance program offers young singers the extra benefit of helping them expand their repertoires as they await developments that can’t be rushed: The human voice doesn’t fully mature until the early 30s, in some cases later.

That’s one reason why Così is a college favorite: It’s meant for young voices.

Mozart Meets Monroe

Mozart wrote Così, a comedy about love and fidelity, late in his short life — he died in 1791 at age 35, the year after the opera’s debut. It became a fixture in the international opera cannon just before World War II, according to Nicholas Carthy, the music professor who conducts CU’s opera orchestras.

A veteran of the Salzburg Festival, in Mozart’s hometown, Carthy calls Così “the ultimate ensemble opera,” because all six characters figure prominently in the action and “everybody gets to play with everyone else.” It ends ambiguously, leaving a modernist whisper of doubt about the central tension’s resolution. Then there’s the music, he says — “the most sublime… that Mozart ever wrote.”

Until March, CU had last performed Così in 2004, in a traditional production set in the 18th century. Think velvet and white stockings. Holman, who directed the latest show, set the action in 1959, in a suave Rat Pack milieu intended to serve as a 20th-century analog to the risqué 18th-century original. For inspiration, she encouraged the cast to watch Pillow Talk, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson film, and How to Marry a Millionaire, which starred Marilyn Monroe.

The opera’s plot revolves around a scheme by two young men, Ferrando (Hosmer and Michael Hoffman) and Guglielmo (James Held and Frank Fainer) to test the fidelity of their lovers, the sisters Fiordiligi (Mahlberg and Rebecca Kidnie) and Dorabella (Rebecca Robinson and Megan Schirado).

Prompted by Don Alfonso (doctoral student Luke Williams), an old man who doubts woman’s capacity for fidelity, Ferrando and Guglielmo falsely report that they’ve been called to war. As the sisters rue the situation, the men return in disguise and try to seduce the other’s girlfriend. A spunky maid, Despina (Nadya Hill and Sara Yoder), stokes the girls’ latent interest.

CU has tended to stage operas in their original time and setting. But in the spirit of fun and to broaden opera’s appeal, professional companies today often opt for anachronistic productions — The Marriage of Figaro set in a Trump Tower, for instance, or Rigoletto in Al Capone’s Chicago. Holman, enchanted by the popular culture of the 1950s, decided 2015 was as good a time as any to try a Sinatra-era Così.

The approach can disappoint traditionalists, she says, but it can also win new fans for an old art form that is, at core, a play with live music.

“When you set it close to the present day, it becomes more tangible and more relatable,” says Mahlberg. “It demonstrates that the stories that take place in opera take place anywhere, anytime.”

Team Sport

Before there’s a set to speak of, there’s a model to play with.

Dueling pianos at an early stage rehearsal of Così fan tutte.

An opera is a massively collaborative undertaking involving scores of faculty, students and staff, including the director, conductor, stage manager, voice coaches, set and costume designers, singers, 46-person orchestra and many others. Holman says producing three operas a year is like “planning three daughters’ weddings.”

“It’s theater and music, orchestras, language, costumes, acting all mixed together,” she says. “It’s big.”

In the latest Così, all but one role was double-cast — two singers for each character — mainly to provide more students with experience. This had the extra benefit of ensuring the show could go on in case of unforeseen events. Only the role of Don Alfonso, the philosopher-instigator, was performed by a lone singer, Williams. The role requires a deep voice — he’s a bass-baritone — which can be hard to find. The scarcity works out in his favor: “Someone always needs a bass.”

Singers do a lot of early work alone or in small groups and are expected to have memorized their lines and learned their songs before they begin rehearsing the action. Hosmer uses flashcards. Williams translates into English all the dialogue his character hears (as well as what he says). Many sing in the shower, though not always opera.

All the singers have studied foreign languages, typically Italian, German or French, perhaps 91��Ƭ��n, too, another opera favorite. They analyze the story’s historical context and the origins of the text (libretto). They know respiratory anatomy, the subtleties of larynx, vocal cords and windpipe.

“In the process of doing what’s necessary to pull off the opera,” says Mahlberg, who designed and sewed her favorite audition dress, “you find that you’ve learned so much about everything else.”

Separately, the orchestra rehearses the score. There are tens of thousands of individual notes to play in Così and countless instrumental combinations to coordinate. The first violinist’s portions run to 90 pages.

“On young hands, it can be very wearing,” says Carthy, who conducted professional Così productions at Salzburg. “It really is a tribute to the people in the orchestra that they can do it.”

Before the Macky Auditorium curtain rose on March 13 for the first of three public performances, the singers and the full orchestra had rehearsed together about half a dozen times.

Off Stage

Except for the professional certificate students, performing in operas at CU is extracurricular work. Life off stage goes on.

Some singers take classes, or teach them, or both. Many in the cast have part-time jobs, often as singers. Mahlberg, Williams and others perform on Sundays in a church choir. Hill, a master’s student, sings in her father’s Grammy-nominated jazz band and plays violin as a substitute in the Boulder Philharmonic. She also keeps up with an interest in computer programming. Hosmer had gigs lined up with the Colorado Repertory Singers and a role in an April production of Verdi’s Tosca at the Townsend Opera in Modesto, Calif., his hometown.

Over Thanksgiving break, on a Cape Cod beach, Williams proposed (successfully) to girlfriend and fellow opera singer Siena Forest, a resident artist with Minnesota Opera. Carthy went a step further — during the December break, he got married, in Vienna.

And, of course, the singers audition.

At 6:30 one October morning, Hosmer awoke in the New York borough of Queens to begin warming his voice for a 10:30 tryout in Manhattan. Through Airbnb he’d rented a room in the apartment of two sisters. They were still home. He’d warned them of the ritual to come.

Hosmer began with a few minutes of humming and lip trills, then moved on to a series of exercises emphasizing vowels and consonants. He warmed the middle of his voice, then ranged low and high.

Afterward, he stepped into a dark charcoal, pinstripe Jos. Bank suit and hopped a Manhattan-bound Q train. He put ear buds in and zoned out.

In a sixth-floor hallway at Chelsea Studios, a rehearsal space, he took a seat on a folding chair and awaited his turn.

A door opened. He heard his own name.

It was a 48-hour trip. These were his eight minutes.

Soprano Meagan Mahlberg’s character, Fiordiligi, knows what will come: “She’s going to betray.”

Photography by Glenn Asakawa

Ambition. Amor. Seduction. Betrayal. For CU’s opera singers, it’s all in a semester’s work. For some, it’ll be a life.

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Fullbacking an Aria

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Fullbacking an Aria Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/01/2009 - 00:00

Robert Strauss

Metropolitan Opera

It was one of those crossroads moments that defines a life. Former University of Colorado fullback Keith Miller (Art ex’96) faced two divergent paths in 2001. He had been offered a spot as a bass/baritone in Michigan’s Pine Mountain Music Festival, but he had just finished a good workout with the Denver Broncos.

Having grown up in tiny Ovid, Colo., and attended CU-Boulder, playing for the Broncos was a chance to fulfill the kid-athlete dream of playing for the hometown team.

“By Wednesday at 9 a.m., the Broncos were going to call. I was all set,” Miller says. “They called all right.”

The Broncos had decided to go with a different offensive set and had no need for a fullback.

But the folks at Pine Mountain loved his low voice.

“Funny thing, too, was I had been all about football my whole life, and now it was really going to be something else,” Miller recalls.

While he had a decent amount of success in football — he played on CU’s winning teams of the mid-1990s and in Europe and minor American pro leagues — Miller is at the top of the opera world these days. He is singing for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, a place he never could have imagined being a decade ago.

“It has a history of being the greatest opera house in the world,” says Miller, 35, by phone from New York. “Everything there is the best. The guy who moves the table from left to right is the best. The sets are the best. The audiences, the costumes, just being in New York — that is the best.”

Miller’s story is a dreamy one, full of epiphanies and fortuitous turns. It starts back in Ovid, in the northeastern corner of Colorado where, like in some grainy rah-rah movie, he grew up on a sugar-beet farm and became the star student and fullback. He won a Presidents Leadership Class scholarship to CU and enrolled with the goal of becoming a professional football player.

“I had always been football, football, football,” Miller says.

It all became worth it during the 1994 Michigan game and the famed Hail Mary winning pass as the clock stopped.

“The funny thing about that was we all knew we were going to win that game,” he says. “There is no explanation — just it was going to happen.”

But one evening midway through his college career, a girlfriend insisted he take her to see the musical Phantom of the Opera.

Former Buff football player Keith Miller (Art ex’96) pursued a career in opera and sings at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

“It had the same energy and passion [playing football gave him], and that was coursing through me,” he says.

He rented countless tapes of movie musicals and then, one day, got a copy of The Three Tenors, featuring Spanish singers Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and the Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti who sang in concerts during the 1990s and early 2000s.

“I saw Pavarotti and he had this look on his face,” Miller recalls. “The sound, the excitement, the energy. This was the big leagues of singing.”

Still, opera was just a pastime — nothing more than singing in the shower. He took opera tapes into the locker room to rev up, but he was still a football guy. He set his sights on becoming an NFL back and had a successful postgraduation workout camp.

But then his coach, Ben Gregory, died.

“I had no one to advocate for me,” he says. “My stock just plummeted.”

He played in Finland and with NFL Europe and had workouts with the Raiders and Broncos.

But he was playing for a minor league team in Fargo,N.D., when he saw an ad for opera tryouts in neighboring Moorhead, Minn. That led to the Pine Mountain gig in Hancock, Mich., which led to a connection with an agent, which led to attending the prestigious Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.

From singing in the shower to performing at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in just a few years is amazing, admits Miller, and he is not loath to say he is supremely fortunate.

“I was a bass when they needed one several times. The tenors and sopranos are like quarterbacks. A bass, well, you get your best parts when you are between 40 and 60, so I am still looking ahead.”

In fact, he is not too far off his football playing weight, carrying 225 pounds on his six-foot frame.

But Carrie-Ann Matheson, his voice coach at the Metropolitan Opera, notes Miller’s talent is more than his voice.

“I think Keith has a great voice, but what is most important about him is that he knows what he wants to accomplish with it,” Matheson says. “He has a curiosity about acting and singing that is rare. I have seen him at orchestra rehearsals for operas he is not in, taking the score and sitting in the seats studying it. He is always trying to broaden his palate.”

Opera also led him to love. Miller met his wife, Joyce El-Khoury, who also sings at the Metropolitan Opera, when they were performing at a small festival in Tuscany. That, too, is a storybook tale.

She was being courted by a baritone in the company and Miller was the third wheel at dinner one night. Miller left them alone for a moment and when he returned, the baritone had left, but an Italian suitor was ambling toward El-Khoury.

“I saw she was uncomfortable, so I told her we should take a short walk for gelato,” he says. “In that 150 yards was a bridge off a country road over a beautiful river like in a painting. I turned to her and said, ‘I love you.’

“I guess it was just like an opera, and I am one lucky guy,” Miller says.

Former football player pursues opera career.

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Singer Soars to New Heights

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Singer Soars to New Heights Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2009 - 00:00

Marty Coffin Evans

Lyric soprano Cynthia Lawrence (MMus’87) practices with CU-Boulder College of Music students in February in preparation for the music college annual gala performance.

During the last time Cynthia Lawrence (MMus’87) sang with world-renowned operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, he gave her a one-eyed glance to see where she was going to land before she plunged backward off a wall in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca.

Evoking gasps from the audience in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the ever-daring Lawrence landed without incident. For 18 years, she had shared the stage with Italian master Pavarotti, spending hours with circus flyers in preparation for jumping as high as 26 feet in her various roles with him. She remembers their last outstanding performance as if it were yesterday.

“I learned he was always observant, always aware and searching for subtle performance nuances,” Lawrence, a lyric soprano, says. “He knew the strengths of those around him and gave them power, responsibility. What a showman.”

One of the most commercially successful tenors of all time, Pavarotti died on Sept. 6, 2007.

Lawrence herself has had a memorable career, performing in starring roles on the world’s most important opera stages from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London to the Deutsche Opera in Berlin. From jumping off walls, stabbing a few famous baritones and throwing herself on others, her life is full of exciting and dramatic scenes that don’t tend to be a part of the average 9 to 5 job.

Lawrence loves performing, meeting people and putting disparate singers together in different roles. She also teaches master classes around the country and serves as a voice faculty member at the University of Minnesota.

She tells her students they all have to make choices. Choosing to be really good or only okay is up to them.

“Unless you choose, you’ll never know,” she reflects.

For Lawrence it all started at CU when undergraduate dean Charles Byers encouraged her to abandon her dreams of playing piano and being a country western and Broadway show tunes singer.

Before long, she launched into operatic repertoire with voice professor Barbara Doscher. Doscher’s world-class instruction later surprised both Pavarotti and Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo who assumed Lawrence gained her vocal technique from a New York studio.

Lawrence developed her character and fortitude, however, from her early years spent working with horses. The mental preparation of riding beside 30 horses helped her stay calm.

“It’s similar to being on the operatic stage,” she says, noting getting nervous is useless. “You have to stay composed. I get up and I’m energized.”

Two decades ago, the accomplished singer almost missed Pavarotti’s competition in Philadelphia because of a flight she needed to catch. A conference call with Pavarotti, Opera Company Philadelphia and her soon-to-be-agent resulted in her participating in “Pavarotti Plus — Live from Lincoln Center” in 1989. Another call followed, asking her to join him in singing the lead roles in Gaetano Donizetti’s Elixir of Love.

“I’ve never learned so much in such a concentrated time,” she reminisces. “It was just the two of us on stage. He was always a friend, mentor, very demanding, sympathetic and kind.”

Lawrence learned some important life lessons from the big-hearted Italian. When you are a performer, you perform and leave the baggage of your personal life off stage, she says. Pavarotti wanted others to be “on” 100 percent for a performance just as he was, regardless of their personal issues. Audiences expected no less.

“You wallow or you rise and do the job the best you can,” she says. “Both our public and private faces are real and come from within. You have to explore and develop them.”

In October 2008, Pavarotti’s widow created a concert in his memory. Singing in the ruins of Petra, Jordan, Lawrence joined the Jordanian royal family, Plácido Domingo, Spanish tenor José Carreras and American operatic baritone Sherrill Milnes and rehearsed with Sting. A newly released DVD, A Tribute to Pavarotti: One Amazing Weekend in Petra, includes Lawrence as a soloist and speaker.

Singing with other great artists, she observes their high standards as well. Their focus is on performance quality and the ability to transport the audience through their singing.

“It takes years to get there — some never do,” she reflects.

Lawrence subscribes to the philosophy of her husband Mark Calkins (MMus’87), whom she met at CU when they both performed in a campus production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme: “Amateurs practice until they get it right,” she says. “Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.

Marty Coffin Evans (Engl’64) is a frequent contributor to the Coloradan.

<p>The last time Cynthia Lawrence sang with world-renowned operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, he gave her a one-eyed glance to see where she was going to land before she plunged backward off a wall in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca.</p>

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