The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: The 7th annual Handel Aria Competition, which has grown in international stature and ties, will take place this Friday night at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall. Here are the 7 finalists and more information
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By Jacob Stockinger
The final round of the seventh annual Handel Aria Competition will be held on this Friday night, June 7, at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music. (Below is soprano Suzanne Karpov, the winner last year. You can hear her prize-winning performance in the YouTube video at the bottom. To whet your appetite, you can also find many other outstanding competition performances from past years on YouTube.)
As in recent years, the accompaniment will be provided by the Madison Bach Musicians (below), a period instrument Baroque music ensemble under the direction of harpsichordist Trevor Stephenson that uses historically informed performance practices.
Tickets will be $15 each for general admission, and will be available at the door.
The seven finalists were chosen from a field of 100 singers from five countries.
Three prizes are awarded by the guest judges, and the audience also gets to award its own prize — which doesn’t always agree with the judges.
The finalists are (below, from the upper left):
- Emily Yocum Black, soprano
- Jonathan Woody, bass-baritone
- Katherine Cecelia Peck, soprano
- Scott J. Brunscheen, tenor
- Sarah Moyer, soprano
- Morgan Balfour, soprano
- Ryne Cherry, baritone
To read extensive biographies about each of these singers, go to the competition’s home website.
There is other important news to announce. The competition has a new director, Wisconsin native Sarah Brailey (below), a soprano who is pursuing graduate work at the UW-Madison while maintaining a busy concert schedule and blossoming career. She is also a co-founder of the free monthly Just Bach midday concerts that started this past season.
Read her biography and be impressed: https://sarahbrailey.com/about/
This year also saw the competition foster music education with its first showcase concert by high school singers performing Handel arias at the Capitol Lakes Retirement Community near the Capitol Square.
Finally, an international link has been established.
There is a new cooperative initiative with the esteemed London Handel Festival! The first prize winner of this year’s Handel Aria Competition will be invited to give a lunchtime recital in London at Handel’s own parish church, St. George’s in Hanover Square, next spring. (It is contingent, of course, on being able to coordinate the singer’s schedule with that of the London Handel Festival.)
The winner will receive a travel grant of up to $750, and the London Handel Festival will provide a home stay, professional accompaniment and even a small stipend.
The Handel Festival in London, now in its 18th year, was one of the inspirations in starting the Handel Aria Competition in the U.S.
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Classical music: The international Handel Aria Competition launches a new showcase concert for local high school singers
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post:
The Handel Aria Competition (below are the 2017 finalists) was established seven years ago to encourage emerging artists ages 18-35 from around the world to perform Handel’s vocal works.
We are pleased to introduce our newest project, the Handel Aria Competition High School Singers Showcase. Our goal with this event is to encourage high school singers in the Madison, Wisconsin area to explore works from George Frideric Handel’s extensive vocal repertoire.
We are inviting local voice teachers to help one or more of their students prepare a Handel aria or duet to be performed at the Handel Aria Competition High School Singers Showcase.
This concert, which will be free and open to the public, will take place at Capitol Lakes, 333 West Main Street in downtown Madison, at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 26, 2019. Piano accompaniment will be provided, and each singer will receive a $100 scholarship towards voice lessons.
Voice teachers with students who might be interested are encouraged to contact Handel Aria Competition Artistic Director Sarah Brailey (below) — herself a winner of the competition and now a graduate student at the UW-Madison — at handelariacompetition@gmail.com for more information. A limited number of performance slots are available on a first-come basis.
PLEASE NOTE: The 7th annual Handel Aria Competition will be Friday night, June 7, 2019 in Mills Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music. (Below is a soprano Suzanne Karpov, First Prize winner of the 2018 competition. Many other performances from past years are on YouTube.)
Auditions for the competition via YAP Tracker, an online way to audition for opera and vocal competition, will open soon – and the deadline will be April 1, 2019
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Classical music: Here are the winners of Friday night’s sixth annual Handel Aria Competition
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By Jacob Stockinger
The sixth annual Handel Aria Competition took place Friday night in Mills Hall on the UW-Madison campus at the Mead Witter School of Music.
It was, as usual, much fun.
Such serious fun deserved a bigger audience. But The Ear suspects that the opening night of the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society at the Overture Center and the aria competition cut into each other’s audience. Maybe that scheduling conflict can be avoided in the future.
Everyone seems to agree that every year, as word of the competition continues to spread far and wide, the singers get better. This year, the seven finalists – five sopranos and three mezzo-sopranos chosen from 113 international applicants — were all terrific.
Special thanks should also go to the Madison Bach Musicians, who in a short amount of rehearsal time turned in outstanding accompaniment in music that can be hard to follow because or ornaments and embellishments as well as subjective interpretations and the Baroque singing style.
The wide repertoire included recitatives and arias from “Semele,” “Giulio Cesare,” “Rodelinda,” “Theodora,” “Hercules,” “Ariodante,” “Judas Maccabeus” and “Ricardo Primo, re d’Inghilterra” (Richard the First, King of England).
The biggest disappointment – in truth not very big — was that the competition had no male voices. There were no tenors, countertenor, baritones or basses to add to the variety. (You can hear the 2017 Audience Favorite, tenor Gene Stenger, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
But that is how judging on merit works, so who can argue?
Once again, The Ear and many of his voice-savvy friends disagreed with the three professional judges. That seems to happen every year. But there will be more about that, as well as some other observations, another time.
In the meantime, let us celebrate the results.
Here, from left to right in a photo by David Peterson, are this year’s winners: soprano Sarah Hayashi, Second Prize; soprano Suzanne Karpov, First Prize; mezzo-soprano Lindsay Metzger, Audience Favorite; and mezzo-soprano Sarah Coit, Third Prize.
All of the performances will be posted on YouTube at a later date, which The Ear will announce when it happens.
For more information about the seven finalists and the three professional judges, as well as updated news and how you can support the ever-expanding competition, go to:
https://handelariacompetition.com
https://handelariacompetition.com/2018-competition/
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