Nancy DeLong has come a
Nancy DeLong has come a long way since she sang j"orcanayatagej"ourj"or the local storekeeper in Kingston, Nova Scotia. Now a respected perfonner and teacher, a fonner voice teacher at the Royal Conservatory ofMusic and a cofounder of pro Voce Studios, where she now teaches, she possesses a voice described by a colleague as one of the most beautiful she has ever heard. In her early teens Nancy had decided to be a jazz singer. She was already singing jazz and popular music with her father's band in Kentville Nova Scotia. Then at 15 she began voice lessoos at nearby Acadia University, where she was ftrst exposed to classical music, and realized that the musical career she wanted to pursue was in classical music. She majored in both piano and voice at Acadia, and after graduation toured the Nova Scotia club circuit doing folk and soft rock. Determined to develop as a singer she moved to London, England to study with Audrey Langford for four years, returning to Canada, this time to Montreal, where she sang with the Tudor Singers under Wayne Riddell, with Jeunesses Musicales and with the Opera de Montreal. A turning point in her career was her move to Toronto, where she began studies with Helen Sirnmie, who along with formidable diagnostic ability offered a concrete method of developing the voice. Studies with Miss Sirnmie led to her appointment as a singing teacher at the RCM. And there she met Tina Torlone and Katherine Scott, who steered her towards studies with the renowned American voice teacher, Dr. Michael Warren whose method of training and balancing the registers of the voice was just what she was looking for. Two years ago Torlone, Scott and DeLong merged their private studios into pro Voce Studios, where they teach Michael Warren's method and provide comprehensive vocal training, complete with voice workshops and operatic productions. "The essence of music" says Nancy "is to make people feel something, to reach them emotionally." This understanding is what lay behind her lengthy search for the right teacher and the right technique, and is what infonns her own work as a teacher and as a perfonner. Nancy is very active as a perfonner. She sang Suzuki in Opera York's recent Madame Butterfly, and two big arias as well as several duets and quartets in Centuries Opera's "Opera Magic '99" onApril28. Her aflinity for Rossini and the baroque era notwithstanding, she has just taken on a major role in a contemporary work, Brenda Muller's "Artemis Cafe", opening on April 30 and running to May 9 at St. Stephen in-the Fields Church. Musicians in our Midst is photographed by Michael Shaw, Ashley & Crippen, Photographers 200 Davenport Rd. 416 925-2222 O'Rrr.EY, DAWES & KATZ TRIO MARTIN BEAVER JON KIMURA PARKER DONNA BROWN ANGELA HEWITT MARTIN CHALIFOUR STEVEN DANN 84 Concerts also featuring and many of hers! GRYPHON TRIO GERALD FINLEY ANTON KUERTI JAMES CAMPBELL ANTONIO LYSY QUARTETTO GELATO ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET f eshval Passport Single Tickets Pass-Plus Concerts Adults Students Adults Students Adults Students RAMADA. Hotel a Suites OTTAWA 1-800.267-8378 Call for special ~estival rates. (j) AIR CANADA 1-800.268-0024 (or call your travel agent) Savings of up to 35% in Canada, 15% in the United States and 10% internationally for traveling to the Festival Please quote Event Number CV991266 Info: (613) 234-8008 fox: (613) 234-7692 Web Site: www.chamberfest.com
Music THEATRE continued from page 4 those City politicians leading the grand charge (tamntam!) to have the COC abandon its plans for an opera house at University and Queen and move instead into the Ford Centre at Mel Lastman ~,'. '-"fuare. You can see where they're coming from: with the COC planning to leave the City-owned Hummingbird, and the Ford Centre shaken by Livent's woes, the City is plagued by fears for both its big houses. And it's a temptingly simple argument. The Ford Centre has an appealing track record as a home of well attended, amplified, private enterprise middle-brow musicals. Why not flatten the public's distinction between this kind of musical theatre and the highbrow, unamplified, government-funded type? Marry the two musical solitudes-separated only by artificial barriers of fmance and snobbery-and think what walls would come crashing down! Heck, stick a microphone on Margison and he could do the troubador every night for months! Bye bye deficits! (If you get the uneasy sensation as you read this that you can faintly hear applause for the idea, don't worry. It's only the shades of G&S spooking you the way they have been haunting us! You can rest easy, though. The dividing wall remains toweringly intact. Mind you, one way of starting to undermine it would be for the media, especially the dailies, to start sending the same critic to cover both genres. As it was, reviews of the Golden Ass tended either to lean toward scolding the composer for stooping to hurnmability in the second act, or chastising him for not hitting enough top forty show tune high notes in the first. So, to retain some perspective of your own, in the meanwhile, we recommend a dram ofG&S. You might start with The Canadian Children's Opera Chorus production of The Pirates ofPenzance (May 8 and 9), directed by Allison Grant, whose Stratford experience as "dancer/ actor/singer" puts her in the best tradition of Broadway versatility. If her work with the choir gets them moving the way they sing, we're in for a treat. There's also the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir's An Evening ofGilbert and Sullivan with selections from Pirates, as well as Pinafore, Mikado, Gondoliers, Ruddigore, and an audience singalong. And, there's the tail end Toronto Operetta Theatre's current run of HMS Pinafore at the Jane Mallett Theatre. But returning to the subject of ghosts, for a moment, spare a thought for Toronto's longestresident operatic spectre. As you probably know, September brings to an end the reign of Lloyd Webber'sPhantom of the Opera at the Pantages. Some of you, we know, have shunned it on the assumption that said Phantom only wears a mask to hide the fact that his brow has slipped so low it could be mistaken for a mustache. Well, think again (and consider taking the show in before it's gone). How many thousands of people, we wonder, have been turned on to music theatre in all its forms by seeing Phantom? Hey, G&S would go! ZebraSchvungk In Concert - May 8, 1999 The Zebras (Lori Klassen, Andy Morris and Patricia O'Callaghan) will be remounting the program that won them the 1st prize in the Competition of ,Young Culture in Dusseldorf, Germany this past fall. It includes music by Kurt Weill, Leonard Cohen, Linda C. Smith and Hope Lee, as well as the "Stomp-like" arrangements of Aperghis, Mary Ellen Childs and Zebra Schvungk. Toronto First Unitarian Church 175 St. Clair Ave. West (just west of Avenue Rd) Sunderland Hall 8:00pm Ticket Prices Adults: .00 Students/Seniors: .00
