Jamie Barton Releases First Solo Album, 'All Who Wander'
City Lights
November 2016
Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton is equally at home in the concert hall and on the opera stage.
While Barton quite literally calls Atlanta home, the Rome, Ga., native is a world-traveling opera star on the rise. After winning both the Main and Song Prizes at the 2013 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, and in 2015 winning the coveted Richard Tucker Award, to say that Barton’s career has taken off is quite the understatement.
With each performance, audience demand for a solo album only grows. Now, as the saying goes, the wait is finally over.
On Friday, Barton, with pianist Brian Zeger, will release “All Who Wander.” The album features songs from three composers – Gustav Mahler, Antonín Dvořák and Jean Sibelius. Barton’s interpretation of these songs, like all of her work, is driven by storytelling.
She recently spoke with “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes about the album’s theme of wanderlust, calling the sensation a “common thread throughout all of us.” The album culminates in the Sibelius song “Var der en dröm?”, or “Was it a dream?”
Barton admits that the Sibelius works in particular on this album are “not the happiest songs in the world,” but they’re irresistible all the same, “like catnip” to this consummate storyteller of words and music.