The American Prize in Vocal Performance—Friedrich and Virginia Schorr Memorial Award honors the memory of the greatest Wagnerian baritone of his age, Friedrich Schorr, who commanded the operatic stage between the world wars, and his wife, Virginia Schorr, who taught studio voice at the Manhattan School of Music and the Hartt School of Music for nearly fifty years. The Prize recognizes and rewards the best performances by classically trained vocalists in America, based on submitted recordings.
The American Prize in Vocal Performance—women in opera (professional division), 2022, The Friedrich and Virginia Schorr Memorial Awards
The American Prize Winner: Olga Perez Flora, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
Opera roles include performances with Opera Company Middlebury/A Streetcar Named Desire (Eunice), Opera Columbus/Madama Butterfly (Suzuki), Arizona Opera/Die Zauberflöte (Third Lady), Opera in the Heights/Don Giovanni (Zerlina), and more.
Internationally known as a recitalist, Dr. Flora has performed several recitals with companies across the United States, Cuba, and Italy. She has most recently created a Cuban Song Recital named Canciones de mi Isla: Songs from my Island.
Dr. José Luis Hurtado awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Composer and pianist José Luis Hurtado, an associate professor in The University of New Mexico’s Department of Music in the College of Fine Arts, is one of the 2020 winners of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
You Can’t Tell It Like I Can: Black Women, Music, and the Struggle for Social Justice in America
This lecture/performance explores how black women have used music as a method of shaping the public rhetoric and sentiment surrounding the black civil rights struggle in America. Through a historical framework that moves through the height of the abolitionist movement, the Popular front during the 1930s and 1940s, the frontlines of the direct action campaigns of the 1960s, and the proliferation of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.