There was a very grand concert this afternoon at the Met and we the Jury were a very small part of the story. A practically full house for such an event is really remarkable and it says much for the effectiveness of the Met machine. The Met orchestra played with Marco Armiliato conducting and excelled themselves as always - and the Principal Horn prominently above all the others. What a fine orchestra James Levine has built over the years!
But the point of the whole event was to identify the 6 top prizewinners from a field which I imagine must have been more than a thousand given the 17 regions, each with two or three districts, which started this whole thing off way back in September last year. The jury was remarkably unanimous about the winners so we took little time in our deliberations. The others were all old friends - what a small world we live in. Sarah Billinghurst, Jonathan Friend and Craig Rutenberg from the Met, and Diane Zola, Sheri Greenawald and me from the rest of the country.
We concluded that we would have six $15,000 prizewinners - and they were sopranos Amber Wagner and Angela Meade, Mezzo Jamie Barton, and tenors Ryan Smith, Michael Fabiano and Alek Schrader. Jamie Barton was the remarkable young mezzo we put through from the Indianapolis auditions in January. And Michael Fabiano is a babe of 22 of mind blowing gifts whom I first heard a couple of years ago in a competition in Florida which I was jurying when he was just 20 and just graduating from the U of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Prodigious indeed.
Alek Schrader is that rare bird, a tenor who can sing that stratospheric Rossini and Donizetti stuff. It was good to see the amazing Barry Banks there - an English tenor who was in the Glyndebourne chorus in my day at Glyndebourne who is in the Donna del Lago at the NY City Opera just now. He can do this too and, together with Juan Diego Florez, better than anyone around. But he thinks Schrader will get there!
Before the auditions I popped in to O'Neals at the old Ginger Man location on 64th Street to have the best Cobb salad of my life. No exaggeration - O'Neals remains alive and well even if not still at its old locations in the former Empire and on 57th Street.
And then dinner this evening at Thalia on the corner of 50th and 8th Avenue. And now back here doing this!
FINALLY saw the documentary today ! Gorgeous voices ! Was very sad to hear of the passing of Ryan though. What a pity. He was so talented. Anyway I came back to this post coz I was doing some research about the winners and 'An Unamplified Voice' linked this post. Just wanted to throw in my two cents :-).
Posted by: Alison | March 12, 2012 at 09:05 PM