Senior Ian Castro has been accepted with a full scholarship by The Juilliard School in New York City for graduate studies in opera performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cIan\u2019s achievement, a first for the Cali Voice program, is also an acknowledgement of the rising prestige of voice training at Montclair State,\u201d says Jeffrey Gall, Director of Opera and Professor of Music at the University\u2019s John J. Cali School of Music.<\/p>\n
Castro\u2019s teacher, Professor Stephen Oosting, describes him as a lyric tenor whose voice has a lot of presence and a unique range and color. \u201cThere is a tremendous amount of energy in his sound,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe came out of the Musical Theatre program into the Opera program after he realized his voice is better suited to opera,\u201d Oosting says. \u201cHe made a remarkable transition over three-and-a-half years and is the finest student I\u2019ve had in all my years of teaching, in terms of work ethic, application \u2013 plus the nature of his voice.\u201d Oosting notes that Castro recently sang for celebrated tenor and general director of the Los Angeles Opera Pl\u00e1cido Domingo \u2013 who invited him to sing for him again in two years.<\/p>\n
Castro spent about four months preparing for auditions at six different graduate programs in five different states over a month and a half. \u201cThis, in my opinion, is a comical amount of time for an eight-minute audition slot,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Yet his preparations paid off. While he was also accepted and offered full scholarships by graduate programs in Houston and Cincinnati, he ultimately elected to attend Juilliard as a full-time student beginning in the fall semester.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to the performance opportunities both New York and Juilliard have to offer,\u201d Castro says. \u201cI\u2019m also looking forward to working with Dr. Edith Wiens, who will be my voice teacher. I\u2019m happy to get a head start working with her this summer as well, while I\u2019m attending her program in Germany at the Internationale Meistersinger Akademie.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a student at Montclair State, Castro appeared in University opera productions of Maurice Ravel\u2019s\u00a0L\u2019enfant et les sortileges<\/em>, Benjamin Britten\u2019s\u00a0The Rape of Lucretia<\/em>, as well as in various campus opera workshop performances. Giving back to the community is also important to Castro, who has performed in concerts to raise money for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve also always had an affinity for the works of Donizetti,\u201d Castro confesses. \u201cI\u2019ve sung excerpts and arias from\u00a0Lucia di Lammermoor<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0L\u2019elisir d\u2019amore<\/em>\u00a0before. His works sit very naturally in my voice and the operas, whether comedic or serious, stand as some of the most beautiful works of art in the repertoire.\u201d<\/p>\n Oosting agrees that Donizetti and lighter Verdi operas are good fits for the young tenor. \u201cWhat\u2019s interesting is that he also has a voice that fits in the French repertoire as a Romeo or Faust,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Castro\u2019s dream role? Tackling Massenet\u2019s\u00a0Werther<\/em>\u00a0in the future. \u201cThe music, story and language allow so much heart-wrenching emotion to pour out of every musical line \u2013 which solidifies it as one of my favorite operas,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vocal performance major receives full scholarship to study opera performance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":207939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[51,64,57,61,62,63],"class_list":["post-207938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-308_alumni-success-stories","category-153_music","tag-cali","tag-julliard","tag-music","tag-opera","tag-performance","tag-voice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207938"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207940,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207938\/revisions\/207940"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}