The acclaimed opera singer Jay Hunter Morris has traveled the globe, performing Wagner, Puccini, and Bizet. And yet he still feels like a hick from Paris, Texas.
Opera
An unusual production of Handel’s English-language opera “Acis and Galatea” is the latest expression of a century-old link between the University of Texas at El Paso and the Himalayan kingdom.
One day when I was in the seventh grade at Christ the King School in Dallas, the Ursuline nun who taught our class dragged in a phonograph with 78 rpm records from the convent. She put on an album of Puccini love duets sung by Licia Albanese and James Milton.
“I play a lot of boys,” reports Susan Graham, a svelte but buxom mezzo-soprano. Schooled for opera’s mischievous “trouser” roles by climbing trees and toilet-papering houses while she grew up in Midland, the 36-year-old earned a master’s degree in music at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and went on to…
From the Paris Bastille to a duet with Pavarotti to a PBS documentary: Amarillo’s resident opera star, Mary Jane Johnson, has had a career full of high notes, and she has savored every one of them.
