CHRISTINE GOERKE

News! Christine Goerke was chosen as the recipient of the 2001 Richard Tucker Award, an award given to a singer poised on the edge of a major national and international opera career. The award carries with it a $30,000 cash prize and participation in Tucker Foundation events in the future. Christine was supported by the Foundation in 1994 with a Robert Jacobson Study Grant and in 1997 by a Richard Tucker Career Grant, the two other levels of awards granted by the Foundation. She joins in a very disinguished group of winners including, in the past five years, Greg Turay (2000 Award winner), Stephanie Blythe (1999), Patricia Racette (1998) , David Daniels (1997) and Dwayne Croft (1996).

It is hoped that she will be able to perform at the November 11, 2001 Gala at Avery Fisher Hall .

At Covent Garden on June 10, 2001 she performed as part of the Gala there. Tim Oldroyd worte: Christine Goerke, clearly a huge talent and who tossed off a fearless "come scoglio" with excellent runs and big tone.

Ms. Goerke's upcoming engagements include Cosi with Ozawa in Japan (April), the War Requiem with the National Symphony under Slatkin (May), Vitellia at the Paris Opera (Garnier) in late May and June, and this summer, the Female Chorus in the Rape of Lucretia at Glimmerglass (July/Aug) and, with Mostly Mozart, Schumann's Paradies un die Peri (early August).

The following release by her agent is dated and does no justice to the recent successes that this soprano has enjoyed. Also, hardly a mention is made of her recital career which is active both live and in recordings.

Here is what appears from her management:

Already she has appeared as a vocal soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Florida Orchestra, the National Symphony, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Dallas Symphony, the Oratorio Society of Washington, the San Francisco Symphony, the Saito Kinen Orchestra of Japan, and the Boston Symphony - needless to say, under the direction of the world's great conductors. And it's a sure bet that the list of her concert appearances will keep getting longer and longer.

Christine Goerke's most extensive collaboration to date has been with the renowned conductor Robert Shaw. He conducted her concert debut at Carnegie Hall where she sang the soprano solo in Britten's War Requiem to great acclaim. They also appeared together in a performance with the Cleveland Orchestra of Mahler's Symphony #8 both in Cleveland and Carnegie Hall. She has also recorded the following works with Maestro Shaw: Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes and the Stabat Maters of Poulenc and Szymanowski - all on the Telarc label, and will again perform in concert with Shaw and the Minnesota Orchestra later in the 1998-99 season.

Today the young soprano, whose voice has been described as "... big, with a mezzo-like richness at the lower end, wonderfully secure high notes, ... capable of a variety of attacks from laser-like stabs to delicate coloratura." (Boston Herald, 4/28/97), is also a recitalist. In the 1997-98 season, she appeared in recital at the University of Alabama and then again with Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel at New York's Morgan Library in a program presented by the George London Foundation for Singers. In the current (1998-99) season she will again appear in recital at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall.

As a recent alumna of the Metropolitan's Young Artist Development Program, Christine is expected to build a major presence in the opera scene. Clearly she is headed in that direction. In the 1997-98 season, she sang her first major role at the MET - Donna Elvira in Mozart's Don Giovanni, a leap from her roles in earlier seasons: the First Lady in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, the High Priestess in Verdi's Aida, and the Ships' Doctor/Space Twin in Philip Glass' The Voyage. She has appeared in other venues as well: with the New Japan Philharmonic under Maestro Seiji Ozawa in Die Zauberflöte, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis as the Female Chorus in Britten's The Rape Of Lucretia, and the Glimmerglass Opera first as Juno in Cavalli's La Calisto and more recently - in the summer of 1997- in the title role of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, a role she reprised at the New York City Opera in the Fall. For her portrayal of Iphigénie, she received only spectacular reviews:

"... An ideal Iphigénie. The voice is big but full of delicate shadings; she's everything the much-touted Wagnerian Jane Eaglen is supposed to be." (-USA Today 8/14/97)

If past is prelude to the future, then clearly this young American soprano with the "opulent and plaintive" voice, a "dusky low range many mezzos would envy", and "the gleaming high notes" has nowhere to go but up. (Quotes from NY Times review of 8/19/97).