Janna Baty

Last updated

Janna Baty (January 1, 1968) [1] is an American mezzo-soprano opera singer. She is best known for her singing in contemporary music and operas. Baty is also a professor at the Yale School of Music where she directs the student opera.

Contents

Biography

Baty is from Lexington, Massachusetts. [1] She attended Oberlin College and the Yale School of Music. [2] At Yale, she studied with Doris Yarick Cross. [3] After graduating, she moved to New York City and lives in Highbridge, Bronx. [1] [4]

Career

Baty has performed with many major opera companies and orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hamburg State Opera, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera North, and Boston Lyric Opera. Among the numerous conductors with whom she has sung are James Levine, Seiji Ozawa, Michel Plasson, Carl Davis, Robert Spano, Steuart Bedford, Stephen Lord, Gil Rose, and Shinik Hahm.

She has made appearances around the world as a soloist, chamber musician, and recitalist, including at the Aldeburgh Festival in the U.K. and the Tanglewood Festival and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival [5] in the United States.

Noted for her work in new music, [1] Baty has collaborated with many contemporary composers, among them John Harbison, Bernard Rands, Yehudi Wyner, Peter Child, Reza Vali, and Paul Moravec.

Baty has served as a professor of undergraduate and secondary voice at her alma mater, Yale School of Music, since 2008. She is a director of student opera there. [6]

Work

Baty's voice has been described by The Washington Post as an "earth, dusky timbre." [7] Baty's recordings include Reza Vali's Folk Songs; [8] Lukas Foss’s opera Griffelkin; the world-premiere recording of Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin; [9] and John Harbison's Mirabai Songs, all with Boston Modern Orchestra Project. [10] American Record Guide wrote that Baty was "a vocally and interpretively commanding presence as the principal actress of the company" for Our American Cousin. [9] Guide to Records' Payton MacDonald, wrote that "I was especially taken with Janna Baty's expressive and silvky voice on the Folk Songs" on the recording of Vali's flute concerto. [11]

In 2012, Baty performed in The Face by Donald Crockett, where The Boston Globe wrote that she "found a neat intersection of Broadway brass and the dark richness of opera's long list of mezzo-soprano antagonists" in her role as Infanta. [12]

Related Research Articles

John Harris Harbison is an American composer, known for his symphonies, operas, and large choral works.

Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tod Machover</span> American classical composer

Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist.

Harold Farberman was an American conductor, composer and percussionist.

Harold Meltzer is an American composer. Harold is inspired by a wide variety of stimuli, from architectural spaces to postmodern fairy tales and messages inscribed in fortune cookies. In Fanfare Magazine, Robert Carl commented that he "seems to write pieces of scrupulous craft and exceptional freshness, which makes each seem like an important contribution." The first recording devoted to his music, released in 2010 by Naxos on its American Classics label, was named one of the CDs of the year in The New York Times and in Fanfare; new all-Meltzer recordings will issue from Open G Records (2017), Bridge Records (2018), and BMOP/Sound (2019). A Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2009 for his sextet Brion, Meltzer has been awarded the Rome Prize, the Barlow Prize;, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and both the Arts and Letters Award in Music and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

D'Anna Fortunato is an American mezzo-soprano. She has long been an admired favorite on the American orchestral-concert scene, while establishing herself as a respected operatic artist as well. Of her New York City Opera debut in Handel's Alcina, the New Yorker called her "a Handelian of crisp accomplishment".

Dalit Hadass Warshaw is a New York-based composer, pianist, thereminist. Previously on the composition and music theory faculty of Boston Conservatory, she currently serves on the composition faculty at Juilliard and CUNY-Brooklyn College. Her works have been performed by dozens of orchestral ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic Orchestras, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the Y Chamber Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. In April 2006, her piece After the Victory for orchestra and chorus, was premiered by the Grand Rapids Symphony and the North American Choral Company. Her first recording, entitled "Invocations" was released by Albany Records in 2011. Her first piano concerto, Conjuring Tristan, was commissioned by the Grand Rapids Symphony in 2014. The work was inspired by Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as well as by Thomas Mann's novella Tristan. The piece received its world premiere in January 2015, with Warshaw as the soloist.

<i>Our American Cousin</i> (opera)

Our American Cousin is a 2008 opera in three acts by American composer Eric Sawyer with libretto by poet John Shoptaw. The opera depicts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln from the standpoint of the actors presenting Tom Taylor's play of the same name at Ford's Theatre at the end of the American Civil War. It aims to offer something new in the realm of American contemporary opera, an American myth told in an unfamiliar way, with both poetic and musical language drawing from the past but refracted through the present.

Eric W. Sawyer is an American orchestral composer, pianist and professor of music at Amherst College. He has studied as an undergraduate at Harvard College, where he was selected as a Harvard Junior Fellow. He undertook graduate studies at both Columbia University and the University of California, Davis. Before taking up the position at Amherst, Sawyer spent four years as Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music.

Reza Vali is an Iranian musician and composer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Beaser</span> American composer

Robert Beaser is an American composer.

Founded as the Lexington Sinfonietta in 1995 by conductor Hisao Watanabe, the Lexington Symphony is a group of musicians from the Lexington, Massachusetts, area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kati Agócs</span> Canadian-American composer (born 1975)

Kati Ilona Agócs is an Canadian-American composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Bielawa</span> American composer

Lisa Carol Bielawa is a composer and vocalist. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and spent a year composing as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Gil Rose is the founder and conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), founder and General-Artistic Director of Odyssey Opera, Artistic Director of Monadnock Music Festival, Professor of Practice at Northeastern University, and Executive Producer of the record label "BMOP/sound."

Pamela Dellal is an American mezzo-soprano in opera and concert, a musicologist and academic teacher. She has performed classical music from the medieval Hildegard von Bingen to contemporary. She is on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, Brandeis University, and the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She is known for having translated all texts that Johann Sebastian Bach set to music.

Martin Suckling is a British composer. He is also a violinist and teacher.

The Requiem is a composition for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra by the American composer John Harbison. Composed over a period of seventeen years, the complete work was finished in 2002 on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Its world premiere was given by the soprano Christine Brewer, mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore, tenor Paul Groves, baritone Jonathan Lemalu the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Bernard Haitink on March 6, 2003.

Paula Murrihy is an Irish operatic mezzo-soprano who has made an international career. A member of the Oper Frankfurt, she has appeared also in Europe and the US, including the Metropolitan Opera and the Santa Fe Opera.

Karol Bennett is an American soprano known for her performances of lieder, chanson, and oratorio and her championing of music by living composers.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Medrek, T. J. (9 January 2004). "This Diva Scales Mozart and Modern". Boston Herald . Archived from the original on 2017-12-22. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  2. ↑ "Baty, Janna". Yale School of Music. Retrieved 2017-10-30.
  3. ↑ Dyer, Richard (5 March 1993). "Grove wins New England Met auditions". The Boston Globe .
  4. ↑ Constance Rosenblum (November 13, 2009). "Bought for a Song (Many, Actually)". The New York Times . Retrieved March 25, 2020.
  5. ↑ "Meet Janna Baty". The Alexander String Quartet. 2015-07-24. Retrieved 2017-10-30.
  6. ↑ "First directorial effort from YSM faculty member Janna Baty wins award – Yale School of Music". Yale School of Music. 2014-10-29. Retrieved 2017-10-30.
  7. ↑ "Montage Gives New Life To Zemlinsky's Cello Sonata". The Washington Post . 2006-10-20. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2017-12-19.
  8. ↑ Carl, Robert (2013). "Folk Songs/Toward That Endless Plain: Concerto for Persian Ney and Orchestra". Fanfare. 37 (1): 468 – via EBSCOhost.
  9. 1 2 Parsons (November 2008). "Our American Cousin" . American Record Guide . 71 (6): 154 – via EBSCOhost.
  10. ↑ "Janna Baty | BMOP". www.bmop.org. Retrieved 2017-10-30.
  11. ↑ Macdonald, Payton (September 2004). "Guide to Records" . American Record Guide. 67 (5): 213 – via EBSCOhost.
  12. ↑ Guerrieri, Matthew (3 September 2012). "In Concert Performance, Face Lacks Definition ; Music Review". The Boston Globe . Archived from the original on 2017-12-22. Retrieved 18 December 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.