I can only apologize for the quality of the sound, but it's still worth listening to. There are a lot of big dreams for this girl.
At Santa Fe they reported that "someone from the Adler Fellows in San Francisco" had substituted for Christine Brewer. I immediately said, that would be Heidi Melton. This impressed whoever it was. It could have been no one else.
I've done a little of just about everything: sung in choirs, conducted them, sung in amateur and professional opera, performed as the ingenue in Chu Chin Chow, played the mother in a long list of operas, sung solos with professional orchestras, sung recitals, taught pop and classical singing, worked as a professional music critic, acted in and directed plays, and I'm sure other things I have forgotten.
I hold the Doctor of Music with distinction from Indiana University where I studied voice, choral conducting and music history.
As a young person I performed briefly in a German opera company. Later I became interested in musical performance by a computer-synthesizer. My day job was as a systems analyst. I am now retired.
I often proposed this as the title of my autobiography. All my German friends would say "no, it's not Kinderkuchen, it's LebkuchenKinder." I couldn't explain why Kinderkuchen was funnier in English.
It was a brief summary of my operatic career. I was a member of the chorus of the Ulmer Theater and made my first appearance as one of the children in Hansel and Gretel. You'll recall that the children have all been turned into cookies. "For the FBI" was a feeble attempt at self-aggrandizement. I was not singing in the chorus; I was infiltrating it. In this guise I discovered nothing at all political, but found out a lot about German beer and wine. I learned the beer may contain only 7 possible ingredients, for instance. That a Mosel is heaven.
I also learned that I was not destined to set the operatic world aflame.
Picture is of the ceiling of the Metropolitan Opera House with a little color added.
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