A concert of art songs and arias well over half a decade in the making will take place in Davis Bay later this month, as a globetrotting professional soprano now living on the Coast raises her voice again after a five-year hiatus.
Soprano Teresa Sedlmair completed her degree in opera performance at UBC in 2010 under the instruction of Nancy Hermiston. In her last semester, Sedlmair was accepted into the young artist program at the Zurich Opera House. From her base in Switzerland, she spent the next two years studying and performing in numerous productions, such as The Magic Flute, Le Comte Ory and Hansel and Gretel.
“The Zurich Opera is a middle-sized opera house, but it’s where a lot of very well-known singers will come in,” said Sedlmair. “They will often try out there before going to [New York City’s] Metropolitan Opera or something else that’s very high-pressure.” One day Sedlmair entered the opera canteen to buy lunch and discovered American superstar soprano Renée Fleming sitting at a table. Fleming was in Zurich performing La Traviata and Der Rosenkavalier.
“She was very approachable and gave some wise words of wisdom to me as a really young singer at the time,” recalled Sedlmair. Fleming also asked if she could recommend a good voice doctor in the city.
In 2011, Sedlmair won first prize at the Renata Tebaldi Singing Competition in the cobblestoned European republic of San Marino. It was followed by prizes in numerous other singing competitions.
The following year, she joined the ensemble at Theater Magdeburg in Germany, where she spent the next few years performing leading roles such as Blondchen in Mozart’s Die Entfuehrung aus den Serail (“The Abduction from the Seraglio”), Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro, and Olympia in Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffman, among others. She also freelanced singing roles such as Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Lucy in The Telephone, a 20th-century comic opera written by Gian Carlo Menotti.
“She has the kind of voice that can fill the Place des Arts,” said Tom Kellough, who will be Sedlmair’s piano accompanist for the Aug. 30 recital at St. John’s United Church in Davis Bay. Kellough completed graduate-level education at McGill University and UBC before settling on the Sunshine Coast in 1997. While he was teaching music at Elphinstone and Chatelech secondary schools, Kellough encountered Sedlmair following her move to the Coast in search of a more tranquil life as an elementary school teacher for School District 46.
“We tried rehearsing together then, but I was teaching full-time and she was a beginning teacher. We tried but we didn’t really get anywhere, then came the pandemic,” added Kellough. In the meantime, Sedlmair married fellow teacher Alex McLennan and became a mother to two daughters.
With Kellough now retired and Sedlmair’s daughters more independent, the two musicians resumed their long-deferred preparations in April. They rehearse four hours each week as Sedlmair rebuilds her stamina. “It’s now or never,” she said. “When you have young children, it’s very hard to take that time for yourself and to nurture that [artistic] part of you. Tom was like ‘I’m retired, I’ll let you think about it.’ Well, I didn’t have to think too long.”
The program will feature German lieder (musical poetry) by Schubert, Schumann and Strauss, plus contemporary pieces by Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and Morten Lauridsen. Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium was composed as recently as 1994. Arias by Mozart will round out the concert.
“It’s a real blend,” said Sedlmair. “We love what we’re doing and we’re trying to create something, a program that is going to give others some joy.”
Tickets ($25) for the concert at St. John’s United Church on Friday, August 30 at 7 p.m. can be purchased at the door.
