Recital: JAMIE BARTON. This was a great year for the art of the song... The prodigiously talented mezzo-soprano is still at the beginning of her career but already deployed a vast range of colors and emotions in a program that confidently included music in many languages, styles and moods.
Read MoreA leader of a new generation of opera stars at 33, Ms. Barton is a giggly cat-video lover, with a tendency to burp when she’s nervous and the kind of exuberance that leads someone impulsively to get a nose piercing to match her publicist’s. She’s also self-possessed in the midst of a jam-packed schedule, and realistic about her future. “There’s a big part of me that’s inched away from the idea of fame, from being a household name,” she said recently at a Midtown Manhattan cafe, mulling the difficulty of a 21st-century opera singer’s becoming a celebrity like Pavarotti or Sills. But even if mezzos traditionally receive less attention than sopranos or tenors, Ms. Barton has as good a chance at greatness as anyone.
Read MoreWith the season's first performance of Donizetti's ANNA BOLENA – that's Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn to all you Masterpiece Theatre fans – at the Met, the big news is that it's soprano Sondra Radvanovsky's first part of the Tudor Trilogy, with MARIA STUARDA and ROBERTO DEVEREUX to come later in the season. Alongside her, as Jane (here, Giovanna) Seymour, Boleyn's successor as consort to Henry, is mezzo Jamie Barton, this year's winner of the Richard Tucker Award, a past winner of the Met Council Auditions (and many other major awards) and a sensation when she sang her first big role at the Met two years ago, Adalgisa in Bellini's NORMA, opposite soprano Angela Meade.
Read MoreOpera singer Jamie Barton is one of Georgia’s greatest talents. A Rome native and Atlanta resident, the mezzo-soprano won the prestigious BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in 2013 and the Richard Tucker Award earlier this year. She has graced opera houses and recital halls around the globe. Barton is gearing up for her role as Giovanna Seymour in “Anna Bolena” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, but she is also performing a new recital program in Atlanta next week. Barton spoke with "City Lights" executive producer Noel Morris about what she will be singing.
Read MoreIt’s not often that the words “down-to-earth” and “opera star” are spoken in the same breath, but both terms fit mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton perfectly. The Rome native and Atlanta resident has kept her winningly level-headed and humble outlook, even as the past few years have brought her dazzling success.
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