ISU news release:

Idaho State University will again host the Metropolitan Opera National Council District Auditions this Saturday, Nov. 1 at 10 a.m.

Judges for this competition will be MET stage director Bruce Donnell, internationally-renowned baritone Timothy Noble, and award-winning director Carroll Freeman (see bios. below). The National Council Auditions program is designed to discover promising young opera singers and assist in the development of their careers. The auditions are held annually in fourteen regions of the United States and Canada. There are 42 districts within these regions of which ISU is part of the Idaho/Montana district.

Four students from the ISU Department of Music will compete within the district: Jerrica Matthews, Samantha Parkinson, John Punt and Shaun Stubblefield. Other participants will travel from California, Colorado, New York and Oregon to sing in Jensen Grand Concert Hall.

Audience members will have the opportunity to vote on their favorite performer after all the contestants have sung. On Sunday, November 2 there will be a masterclass featuring ISU music majors working with baritone Timothy Noble in the Marshall Rotunda beginning at 10 a.m. Tickets for the competition on Saturday are: $8 (adults), $6 (faculty and staff), $4 (pre-college students) and ISU students are admitted free of charge. The master class with Timothy Noble is sponsored by ISU’s Cultural Events Council, and the College of Arts and Letters, and therefore open to the public free of charge.

For more information on how to get involved, contact Dr. Diana Livingston Friedley at lividian@isu.edu or 282-2611.

BRUCE DONNELL

A stage director at the Metropolitan Opera since 1975, Bruce Donnell studied at Friedelind Wagner’s Master Classes in Bayreuth in 1965 before joining the staff of the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program and spending a summer as an apprentice technician at the Santa Fe Opera. His work at the Metropolitan includes Die Frau ohne Schatten with Birgit Nilsson, La Gioconda, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, Arabella, Don Giovanni, La Fille du Regiment and Fidelio, among many others. Winner of two Emmy Awards, his television credits from the Metropolitan include Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland and Alfredo Kraus, Der Rosenkavalier with Kiri Te Kanawa and Tatiana Troyanos, Billy Budd and the Aida that marked Leontyne Price’s farewell to opera.

He has directed several productions for the Santa Fe Opera including Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, La Traviata, Die Fledermaus, Die Liebe der Danae, Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Aegyptische Helena. He has also directed productions for the New York City Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, San Diego Opera, Nevada Opera, Teatro de la Opera in San Juan, Illinois Opera Theater and the San Francisco Opera.

Internationally, he has directed La Forza del Destino for the Paris Opera, I Vespri Siciliani for the Netherlands Opera and Le Nozze di Figaro and Der Rosenkavalier for the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. He has also directed Manon Lescaut and Idomeneo for the Canadian Opera in Toronto. In the spring of 2001 he took Der Rosenkavlier on tour to Japan with the Metropolitan Opera. He directed Tosca to open the 2004 season of the Austin Lyric Opera. He returned to the Metropolitan Opera in 2005 and made his debut with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in February of 2006, directing Der Rosenkavalier. He directed Salome for the fiftieth anniversary season of the Santa Fe Opera that summer, a production which was dedicated to the memory of the late founder of the company, John Crosby. He returned to the Lyric Opera of Chicago in December of 2006 to direct Die Fledermaus. The Parsifal he directed at the Metropolitan in 1985 with Leonie Rysanek and Jon Vickers was released in 2006 by the Metropolitan Opera as that season’s Historic Broadcast. He directed Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara in the summer of 2011, a very successful Le Nozze di Figaro for the Santa Fe Opera in the summer of 2013 and a new La Cenerentola for the Livermore Valley Opera in the spring of 2014.

CARROLL FREEMAN

Carroll Freeman is currently the first Valerie Adams Distinguished Professor in Opera Studies at Atlanta’s Georgia State University. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, he came to GSU after serving as director of opera at the University of Tennessee and artistic director of the Knoxville Opera Studio. He also serves as artistic director of the Harrower Summer Opera Workshop, which recently celebrated its 30th Anniversary with a guest appearance by Frederica von Stade.

Though chosen in his early 30s by Opera News as one of America’s most exciting young talents, Mr. Freeman actually began his professional singing career as a soloist with the Columbus Boychoir touring the US, Canada, and Japan. As a boy he also soloed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic; New York City Opera; and The Bell Telephone Hour on NBC-TV. He starred as Peter in “Peter, the Chorister” on the CBS-TV series Look Up and Live.

Mr. Freeman made his adult New York City Opera debut as Alfredo in La traviata and his European debut at the Edinburgh Festival in The Postman Always Rings Twice, repeating the success he enjoyed in its world premiere with Opera Theatre of St. Louis. His performance of Don Ottavio in Peter Sellars’ IMZ OperaFilm award-winning production of Don Giovanni was seen worldwide on ORF and BBC television and on PBS-TV’s Great Performances; live in New York, Vienna, and Paris; and on Deutsche-Grammophon DVD, released by Polygram. Among his many successful appearances in Asia, Mr. Freeman performed at the Nissei Theater in Tokyo in the Japanese premiere of Miki’s Joruri. He is featured on the Pro Arte CD, HMS Gilbert & Sullivan, chosen by CD Review as one of the best classical CDs of 1990. Mr. Freeman performed with Houston Grand Opera, Baltimore Opera, San Diego Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Atlanta Opera, Opera Omaha, New Orleans Opera, Portland Opera, Minnesota Opera, Michigan Opera Theater, Kentucky Opera, and Opera Pacific, to name a few, and appeared with the festivals of Wolf Trap Farm Park, Pepsico Summerfare, Saratoga Springs, Lake George Opera, Chautauqua, Central City Opera, ArtPark, and Des Moines Metro Opera (where he was featured in two broadcasts on Iowa Public Television).

In concert, he has soloed with Eduardo Mata and the Dallas Symphony; Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony; Sergiù Comissiona and the Houston Symphony; Philadelphia Orchestra; Minnesota Symphony; National Symphony; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and made several appearances at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall. He has also performed recitals and masterclasses from Hong Kong to Minneapolis, from Pesaro, Italy, to Houston. Mr. Freeman was a two-time winner of the illustrious National Opera Institute Award given at the Kennedy Center by Beverly Sills and Harold Prince.

Mr. Freeman received his BM in vocal performance from the University of Southern Mississippi and his MPA in opera performance from Oklahoma City University. He is the past artistic director of Mississippi Opera and Opera in the Ozarks and a past co-director of the Des Moines Metro Opera apprentice program. Mr. Freeman has stage-directed for Knoxville Opera, Opera Grand Rapids, Nashville Opera, El Paso Opera, Mobile Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Company of Mid-Michigan, Mississippi Opera, Phoenix Metropolitan Opera, Opera Festival of Oklahoma, Birmingham Opera, and Lyric Opera of Dallas, not to mention the international venues of Opera Aegean (Athens and Syros, Greece), Voci nel Montefeltro (Novafeltria, Italy), and the Festival of International Opera/Americas (Campinas, Brazil).

His directing has also taken him to Cleveland Institute of Music; Rising Star Vocal Works; University of Missouri/Kansas City Conservatory of Music; Lyric Opera of Oklahoma City University, and countless other universities and training programs. Mr. Freeman also worked as an assistant to Francesca Zambello at Theater des Westens, Berlin, Germany, and Theater im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen, Germany, on the well-known HGO production of Street Scene in its Berlin premiere.

A member of the Wall of Fame at Oklahoma City University and the Knoxville Opera Hall of Fame, Mr. Freeman has also been honored by the National Federation of Music Clubs with a Presidential Citation and by Classical Singer magazine as their 2010 Stage Director of the Year.

Mr. Freeman has repeatedly enjoyed judging the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in Cincinnati, New Orleans, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Houston, Orlando, Buffalo, Tulsa, Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, Lexington, KY, Birmingham, AL, and Northern Mississippi. These auditions mark his first time to visit Pocatello.

TIMOTHY NOBLE

Baritone Timothy Noble has enjoyed an international vocal

Tim Noble

Tim Noble

career spanning fifty years. He has performed over fifty leading roles in major opera houses around the world including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, La Fenice in Venice, Netherlands Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival. He has also debuted four world premieres, including Philip Glass’ “The Voyage” for the Metropolitan Opera. He has performed as baritone soloist with London Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, and the Cincinnati Symphony, to name a few, and appeared at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl and the Ravinia Festival. His operatic/concert collaborations include some of the great maestri of the last half century, including James Levine, Sir Georg Solti, Riccardo Chailly, James Conlon and Nello Santi. Professor Noble also toured with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians for seven years as soloist, arranger, rehearsal conductor and percussionist, appeared on Broadway in the 1972 production of “The Selling of the President,” numerous television shows such as Ed Sullivan and Mike Douglas, and received a Grammy nomination for his performance of Harold Hill in the Telarc recording of “The Music Man.” Noble also recently completed a twenty year project of writing the music and lyrics for his first musical, “Alamo,” which premiered at a public workshop performance at Indiana University in the spring of 2012 and will hopefully be headed to Broadway in the not too distant future.

In the fall of 2014 Professor Noble began his sixteenth year at the Jacobs School of Music, where he was elevated in rank from full professor to Distinguished Professor of Music in 2004. He presently serves as a vocal trainer for the Canadian Opera Company and is in high demand as a clinician and adjudicator throughout North America. During the summer of 2014 Noble taught in Sulmona, Italy for the COSI Program, The Torggler Institute in Newport News, the Banff Music Centre, and the Highlands Opera Studio in Haliburton, Ontario.

Noble’s students, have won the Metropolitan Opera Council Auditions at the district, regional, semi-final and grand finals levels, the Palm Beach Competition, the George London Competition, the Liederkranz Competition, the Bel Canto Competition, the Orpheus Competition and the Matinee Musicale. During the summer of 2009, his student, Jordan Bisch, won second prize of $20,000 in Placido Domingo’s Operalia International Competition, and Michael Brandenburg was a winner of the MONC Finals at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013 and the Bel Canto Competition in Chicago.

Professor Noble’s students hold or have held positions with virtually every young artist program in North America. His students have also gone on to appear in major roles with the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, New York City Opera, Central City Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Sarasota Opera, San Diego Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, Canadian Opera, Zurich Opera, Cologne Opera, Canadian Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera. Mr. Noble is the guest clinician for ISU's MET Masterclass, Sunday, November 2, at 10:00 am in the Marshall Rotunda.