Brian Asawa (October 1, 1966 – April 18, 2016) was an American countertenor. Opera News said that "in his prime, Asawa was an electric performer, his fearless performing style supported by a voice of arresting beauty and expressivity."[1]
Brian Asawa was born in Fullerton, California, and grew up in Los Angeles. He sang in the choir at a Methodist church with a Japanese congregation.[2] He began his studies as a piano major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then changed his studies to voice, studying under tenor Harlan Hokin.[3] After two semesters there he transferred to UCLA.
In 1989, he began a master's degree in early-music interpretation at the University of Southern California where he was a pupil of the American lutenist James Tyler. However, Asawa never finished this program as his performance career began to take off.[4]
The most impressive of the winners was Brian Asawa, a countertenor with an unusually rich, rounded sound and the power to fill the house with no sacrifice in timbre or suppleness. Mr. Asawa's meltingly beautiful accounts of "Chiamo il mio ben cosi", from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and "Welcome, Wanderer," from Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream, were subtly shaped and graced with a slight but fully expressive vibrato. There is not much call for countertenors at the Met. But the voice is flourishing in the early-music world, where singers of Mr. Asawa's musicality are needed.
In a remarkable recital ... Brian Asawa showed the kind of pure, effortless countertenor voice that comes along only once in a long while. It is hard to convey the uncanny effect of his full, fluid, lustrous tone, poised in the extreme upper register without the slightest strain.... His ventures into 20th-century music hold particular interest; although modern operatic roles for countertenors are few and far between ... a singer of this magnitude might cause all that to change.
Asawa not only performed in opera, but was interested in expanding the art song literature for countertenor, supporting living composers by commissioning, performing, and recording works by them. Perhaps best known is the song cycle "Encountertenor", commissioned from Jake Heggie and premiered at London's Wigmore Hall in 1995 (later recording it for the RCA Red Seal label). Asawa also recorded a disc of songs by Ned Rorem with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for RCA. More recently, Asawa sang San Francisco composer Kurt Erickson's "Four Arab Love Songs" (a mini-cycle of medieval Arab poems from Spain’s Andalusia region dating from 900 to 1100 AD) on a premiere tour consisting of concerts in Long Beach, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, California and in Washington State.[11] At the time of his death, Asawa was slated to premiere the song cycle "O Mistress Mine" (12 songs on texts from the plays of Shakespeare) written for him by Connecticut composer Juliana Hall at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.[12][13]
In May 2014, Asawa performed a recital program with mezzo-soprano Diana Tash at the Festival de Mayo in Guadalajara, Mexico.[14] In 2014, Asawa and Peter Somogyi established Asawa and Associates,[15] an operatic artists' management agency.
Personal life and death
Asawa was openly gay and believed this had helped him discover his voice type. "Heterosexual men don't feel comfortable singing in a treble register because it's not butch", he told an interviewer in 1998. "Gay men feel quite comfortable singing in their falsetto registers."[2] He was married to Keith Fisher; the marriage ended in divorce.[16]
Asawa was the nephew of sculptor Ruth Asawa. His cause of death was reported as heart[17] and liver failure.[18] He died in Mission Hills on April 18, 2016, at the age of 49.[1][16]
Asawa's discography includes solo recital discs for RCA Victor Red Seal ranging from Dowland and Edmund Campion to Rachmaninoff and Ned Rorem. His opera recordings include Farnace in Mitridate for Decca, Arsamene in Serse for Conifer and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream for Philips with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis.
Asawa appeared on DVD in Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre" Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, Monteverdi's "Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria" Opus Arte, Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" Kultur, as well as both a CD and DVD release of Handel's "Messiah" directed by Marc Minkowski. In 2014, Asawa and mezzo-soprano Diana Tash released an album of duets on the LML Music label that included works by Handel, Monteverdi, Purcell, A. Scarlatti and Marco da Gagliano.
Discography
The Dark Is My Delight and other 16th Century Lute Songs, RCA Red Seal, 1997;
↑ Later that year, reviewing a performance at New York's Mostly Mozart Festival conducted by Jane Glover, Kozinn wrote that the arias he sang "demand a direct emotionalism that is often beyond a countertenor's grasp. Mr. Asawa has no deficit in that regard, nor in questions of technique and coloristic subtlety. His voice is powerful and fully supported. He produced pianissimo high notes that floated easily through the large hall, and his more forceful ones showed no sign of strain. He used vibrato judiciously, and even the brightest edge of his palette has a velvety smoothness. All opera singing is manufactured, and the greatest singers are those who can create the illusion that it is not. Mr. Asawa's greatest asset, apart from sheer vocal beauty, is that both his tone and his expressive gestures sound entirely natural."[9]
↑ Kozinn, Allen (August 9, 1993). "Seekers of the Unusual Find It Twice at Santa Fe". The New York Times. Retrieved April 20, 2016. Few countertenors produce a timbre as beautiful, as fully supported or as consistently well-projected as Mr. Asawa's, and his portrayal was as dramatically sensitive as it was firmly sung.
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