by KPMLAW | May 24, 2016 | KPMBlog, News, Uncategorized
I originally planned to go straight into law school and had taken the LSATs and sent off applications. My diversion into opera and theater resulted from volunteering during my last semester at UVA to sing a small opera scene for a doctoral student doing some of her research in the music department. She had been unearthing old French operas from the Baroque period and had to direct a scene from one as part of her program. She asked for students from the singing groups to assist her and I volunteered. I sang the tenor part of Sancho from “Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse” by Joseph Boudin de Boismortier. After completing the performance, the doctoral student-director told me she thought I should study opera and contacted four teachers in New York and Philadelphia to have me sing for them. That summer, I sang for two of the teachers in the small practice studios in Carnegie Hall. Although I was not ready to move to New York at that time, I found a teacher in Washington, DC and two years later auditioned for and received a full scholarship to study opera at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. I quickly learned I did not have a Pavarotti-sized voice, but found a lot of good work singing secondary character roles in opera and operetta, lead roles in American musical theater, and oratorio in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Chicago, Dayton, in Wisconsin, and at rotating repertory theaters in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. As with a lot of struggling performers, I did a lot of different things to try to branch out and pay the...
