Homegrown soprano star plans Sunday recital – Knight Foundation
Arts

Homegrown soprano star plans Sunday recital

Nadine Sierra.

It’s another very busy weekend for classical music in South Florida, and one that includes the Simone Dinnerstein Goldberg Variations recital at the Knight Concert Hall, which promises to be a memorable piano event.

But among the other things happening that same Sunday is the appearance in the Sunday Afternoons of Music series of the young and rising soprano Nadine Sierra. She’s a South Florida-born singer who’s had a good young career so far, and every time I’ve heard her, I’ve been impressed.

She made a very fine Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto for Florida Grand Opera, a moving Euridice for Palm Beach Opera’s mounting of Gluck’s Orfeo, and next month she takes on the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony for Palm Beach Symphony. But those are just her most recent local concerts.

She’s reprising her Gilda with the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples this May (one of the Rigolettos in the double-cast show is Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky), and last month gave a farewell recital in San Francisco, having spent two years at the San Francisco Opera as an Adler Fellow. A graduate of the Mannes College of Music in New York, she’s a won an armful of prestigious awards including the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2009.

This Sunday, Sierra will be joined by her younger sister Melanie – a two-time winner of the Savarick Competition at Florida Atlantic University ― for a program of favorites from opera, light opera and Broadway. The program includes showpieces such as Glitter and Be Gay from Bernstein’s Candide, Summertime from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and arias from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Puccini’s La Boheme (Musetta’s aria). Show tunes include music by Richard Rodgers (Falling in Love With Love), Harold Arlen (A Sleepin’ Bee), Stephen Schwartz (For Good) and Frederick Loewe (I Could Have Danced All Night).

Also included on the recital, accompanied by pianist Gordon Roberts, are What Good Would the Moon Be, from Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, and Vilja, from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow.

The program begins at 4 p.m. Sunday at Gusman Hall on the campus of the University of Miami. Tickets are $35; call 305-271-7150 or visit sundaymusicals.org.