Master Singers : Advice from the Stage

There is often a dichotomy between the academic approach to singing that voice students learn in the studio and what professional singers do on the operatic and concert stage. Great singers at the top of the performing profession achieve their place with much analysis and awareness of their technique, art, interpretation and stagecraft that goes far beyond academic study and develops over years of experience, exposure, and the occasional embarrassing error. Master Singers brings these insights to the student, teacher, and emerging professional singer, giving them many needed signs and signals along the road to achieving their own artistry and established career.

Through interviews with some of today's most accomplished and renowned concert and operatic singers, including Stephanie Blythe, David Daniels, Joyce DiDonato, Denyce Graves, Thomas Hampson, Jonas Kaufmann, Simon Keenlyside, and Ewa Podles´, Master Singers provides vocalists making the transition from student to professional with indispensable advice on matters ranging from technique and its practical application for effective stage projection to the practicalities of the business of professional singing and maintaining a career to recommendations for vocal hygiene and longevity in singing. Rather than relying on a traditional one-singer-at-a-time structure, Donald George and Lucy Mauro distill answers to a range of essential, probing questions into a thematic approach, creating not a standard interview book but a true reference for emerging professional singers. An indispensable resource and reliable guide, Master Singers will find its place on the bookshelf of singers of this generation and the next.

Donald George's career as a lyric tenor has spanned the great opera and concert stages of the world, from La Scala, Milan to Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, among many others, working with such conductors as Bernstein, Masur, Tate, Menuhin and Jurowski. He has recorded for such labels as Sony, Phillips Classic, Naxos, Delos, Bavarian Radio, and Teldec. In 2008 he joined the faculty of The Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam as Professor of Voice. His students are regional and national competition winners and are singing in numerous professional venues in Europe and North America. He resides in Germany and New York.

Lucy Mauro, pianist, is an Associate Professor at West Virginia University. The Journal of Singing calls her "a perfect partner". Her recordings with tenor Donald George on the Delos label have been acclaimed in Gramophone and selected as a Recording of the Year 2011 by MusicWeb International, among other recognitions. Their latest CD, Songs and Arias of Joseph Weigl, was recorded in conjunction with the Esterházy Festival in Austria. Her website with Donald George is www.duodrama.net.