Green-Hill to Head ProjectSTEP. Hindrichs to Sing Queen of Night at ENO
Hindrichs as Fire (Rozarii Lynch/Seattle Opera)
Violinist Mariana Green-Hill, an alumna of ProjectSTEP and NEC Preparatory School, has come full circle. She has just been appointed Artistic Director for STEP, the first graduate of the program to lead it. She replaces the retiring William Thomas, and will take over the position June 1.
One of Project STEP’s first and longest-running participants, Green-Hill is currently serving as a teacher in the program’s “Greenhouse” pre-training division. She studied at NEC from 1990-1997 where her teachers included Farhoud Moshfegh, Marylou Speaker Churchill, and Tamara Smirnova. While at NEC, she played with the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and as a member of the highly regarded Amaryllis Quartet. Coached by the late Eugene Lehner, the Amaryllis won the 1995 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition (Junior division). In 1996, Green-Hill won the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Concerto Competition and was a featured soloist with the BSO. That same year, she performed with the Boston Pops and the Civic Symphony of Boston.
Founded in 1982, Project STEP (String Training and Education Program) was created to address the scarcity of black and Hispanic musicians in major symphony orchestras. It currently supports 47 students in its intensive training program and more than 80 students in its FOCUS program for younger children. Students range from age 5-18 and come from the Greater Boston area, with the majority residing in Dorchester, Roxbury, Hyde Park and Mattapan.
Soprano Emily Hindrichs, a third-year DMA candidate and a member of Seattle Opera’s Young Artists program, almost blew off (literally) a recent audition with an agent from the English National Opera. It seems the trees had just leafed out in Seattle and, her allergies primed, she was “a little stuffy.” She considered not singing. However, one of her Young Artist mentors in Seattle set her straight. “Get yourself in there,” she was told, “they’re looking for a Queen of the Night.
Hindrichs sang. Then the ENO people wanted to hear her again—in London. But, in the middle of a Seattle production, she couldn’t find a date that worked. So they compromised. The Brits flew to New York. Hindrichs, after a Monday evening performance in Seattle, took the red-eye, auditioned on Tuesday, flew back that night, and performed on Wednesday. The reward for conquering allergies and jet lag? She has been offered eight performances of the Queen of the Night in a 2008-09 production of Die Zauberflöte, opening January 24, 2009 and running through March 1.
The Mozart gig caps off a very good year for Hindrichs. With the Seattle program (which offers training to 12 young singers), she has performed in two productions. The first was a touring double bill of Donizetti’s Rita and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. She sang the title role in Rita and was the soprano in the jazz trio that serves as Greek chorus in Tahiti. On Seattle’s mainstage, the Young Artists performed another double bill, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges. In the former, she sang Nella and Lauretta and in the latter, the Princess, the Nightingale, and—outfitted in Mohawk and punk attire—Fire
Still a student at NEC, Hindrichs has studied with James McDonald and coached with John Greer. In 2006, Hindrichs sang the title role in the NEC Opera Theater production of Poulenc’s The Breasts of Tiresias. The previous year, she sang Amy in Adamo’s Little Women. On April 15, she sings the premiere of the chamber version of John Harbison’s Milosz Songs in NEC’s Jordan Hall.
Hindrichs was recently awarded second place at the Washington International Competition for Voice. Her professional performances include Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at Opera Providence and Bach’s St. John Passion in Stuttgart. She returned to Stuttgart in January 2008 to perform and record the Angel in Handel’s Jephtha with the International Bachakademie. Upcoming engagements include appearances at Syracuse Opera, Boston Pops, Tanglewood Music Festival, and Seattle Symphony.
Pianist Veronica Jochum has performed Mozart: A Journey, her program of musical selections interspersed with readings from Mozart’s letters, in Europe, the United States, and now in Venezuela. In early April, she spent a week in Caracas with the musicians of El Sistema, the extraordinary music education and social development program of Venezuela. She is the latest NEC faculty member to visit the program with which the Conservatory has a friendship agreement and deep artistic ties.
Jochum, who has served on the NEC faculty for 40 years, performed her Mozart retrospective concert with Isabel Palacios narrating the composer’s letters. Palacios is a mezzo soprano, conductor, and early music specialist who heads the Camerata Foundation of Caracas. Jochum also played the Mozart E-flat Major Piano Concerto with the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Sung Kwak.
Cellist and Prep faculty Emmanuel Feldman offers performance tips on playing Virgil Thomson’s Cello Concerto in the “Master Class” section of Strings Magazine’s April issue. Completed in 1950, the Concerto was given its first performance that year by Paul Olefsky, the 23-year old cello principal of the Philadelphia Orchestra. According to the magazine, the Concerto slipped into obscurity after an initial flurry of performances. “Perhaps cellists were discouraged by the difficult passagework in the outer movements or the dangerously exposed harmonics in the slow movement,” writes Laurence Vittes. Undaunted, Feldman has, however, revived the work and it has just been released on a new recording by Albany Hybrid. Based on Feldman's performance, the writer concludes that the Thomson piece is “an excellent candidate for revival and widespread popularity. It’s a delight from beginning to end…”