When a performer's career is about to rocket launch, the audience seems to sense it. The appearance of mezzo-soprano Rose-Ellen Nichols had that effect. The majestic diva sang operatic selections accompanied by harpsichord and piano in a program that included the Renaissance Singers and the Soundwaves Chorus last Sunday at the Heritage Playhouse. It was a super, two-hour concert produced by the reconstituted Sunshine Coast Music Society, and it held something for everyone.
I've been trying to catch up with the Pender Harbour-born Nichols for a few years now, ever since she first revealed great promise and was awarded a scholarship from the Coast Recital Society. But she moved off-Coast to study at the University of British Columbia.
Since then, she has earned a degree and is now working on her diploma, she has been to Europe three times in various singing roles, and she has made her opera debut at UBC in Purcell's Dide and Aeneas. Most recently, she performed at the Chan Centre in Vancouver for a taped show in which she was reportedly superb. Her next role will be the part of Buttercup in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, HMS Pinafore. Her latest dream is to enter the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, an annual vocal competition for young opera singers. Auditions take place across the country. "That's how Judith Forst got her start," she says.
Though opera is her forte, the 25 year old enjoys all music and was listening to Patsy Kline on the way to her Sunday performance.
The concert program opened with the newly formed Renaissance Singers who performed liturgical music and a particularly lovely The Silver Swan by Gibbons. Towards their last number, Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, Gibsons' musician Patricia Greenfield, dressed in an old-fashioned gown, slipped into her straight-backed chair at her harpsichord to bring a delightful sense of the 18th century to the stage. The instrument was Greenfield's own and had never left home before. It had been delivered to the theatre in music conductor Joe Hatherill's truck. The strings are plucked much like a harp, rather than being struck, as in a piano. Greenfield demonstrated on a solo piece, the Gavotte from Violin Sonata No. 6 by Bach, before accompanying Rose-Ellen Nichols on her selections.
With her majestic stance, dressed in a cream satin gown with foot-long glittery earrings, Nichols showed a stunning stage presence that is able to portray equally well a man in agony at the loss of his lover to the more gentle Edward Elgar tunes, Sea Pictures. Her nod to Mozart in his anniversary year was a selection from Cosi Fan Tutte.
The Soundwaves Chorus, directed by Hatherill, opened the second half with John Jacob Niles' Go Away from my Window. The chorus, originally founded under Lin Vernon, is "a group that does everything from spiritual to pop," said singer Gloria Fyles. The group is avidly seeking new participants, particularly tenors.
The performance closed with two encores from Nichols, including an audience favourite drawn from the opera Carmen.
