Musical Offerings

Faith Sherman of Wilton, Connecticut, is a first-year artist with the Houston Grand Opera Studio. Last season she performed with the New York Festival of Song at Juilliard and sang Clytemnestre in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Ramiro in Mozart’s La finta giardiniera with Juilliard Opera Center. She also sang Erminella in Musto’s Volpone and Second Lady in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at Wolf Trap Opera Company this past summer. Highlights of the 2005–06 season included appearances with Juilliard Opera Center as Fay Doyle in the world premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In summer 2006 she sang Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Gertrude in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette and Alice in Rossini’s Le Comte d’Ory with Wolf Trap Opera. Ms. Sherman received her bachelor’s degree in voice from the Eastman School of Music, her master’s degree from the Juilliard School, and did post-graduate work at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. She is a finalist in the 2007 National Metropolitan Opera Auditions. She won the 2004 Dayton Opera Competition and the Norman Treigle Memorial Award at CCM, and was a 2005 Merola Young Artist with San Francisco Opera.

This season, Kathleen Kelly returns to the Houston Grand Opera with the dual titles Head of Music Staff and Music Director of the HGO Studio. She continues as Artistic Director of the Berkshire Opera in Pittsfield MA, where in August she led performances of La Bohéme and this year will lead Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro. Her HGO podium debut was last season’s critically acclaimed Hansel and Gretel, which she led in her own arrangement for chamber ensemble. Ms. Kelly has been a guest coach for the Lindemann Young Artist Program, Peabody Conservatory, and at the University of Michigan, and a master class clinician at Baylor University, Arizona State University, and the University of Washington. She is an active recitalist, most notably with the HGO Studio and with Marilyn Horne’s On Wings of Song series. She will make her Carnegie Hall debut on that series in January 2009. Ms. Kelly served for nearly a decade as a coach and prompter at the Metropolitan Opera. Her long association with the San Francisco Opera includes her training in the Merola Opera Program. She was Director of Musical Studies for the Glimmerglass Opera’s Young American Artists in 2000 and 2001.