Brian Asawa

Brian Asawa became among the world’s leading countertenors before he was 30 years. He was known for his wide selection of roles as well as for a exclusively dark sound for his tone of voice range. Asawa was an American of Japanese ancestry, raised in LA. He became thinking about music young and had taken piano lessons. He started his collegiate research being a piano main at the School of California Santa Cruz, where he sang in the choir being a tenor. It had been during this time period that Asawa produced the transition towards the countertenor tone of voice range, carefully seeking research with Harlan Hokin, Virginia Fox, and Jane Randolph. He traveled to SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, where he joined up with the Merola Opera plan of the SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA Opera Plan, the Western Coast’s leading schooling ground for youthful vocal performers. He was asked back again as an Adler Fellow for 1991-1992. His debut function is at Henze’s Das Verratene Meer, shortly accompanied by the function of Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Wish. Meanwhile, he previously become the initial countertenor ever to earn the Metropolitan Opera Auditions (1991), and in 1994 he gained the Plácido Domingo International Operalia Competition. He sang in various European houses, mainly in previously operas. These included the tasks of Farnace in Mozart’s Mitridate; Tolomeo in Giulio Cesare, Arsamene in Serse, and Polinesse in Ariodante (simply by Handel); and in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria and L’Incoronazione di Poppea. He also sang some so-called “jeans” roles designed for feminine singers, such as for example Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Baba the Turk in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Improvement. In addition to many opera recordings (including Midsummer Night’s Fantasy, Mitridate, and Serse), he released single Compact disc albums of sixteenth hundred years tracks (“The Dark can be My Pleasure”) and Romantic-era tracks (“Vocalise,” which include Rachmaninov’s eponymous are well as Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5). He was regarded among the leading exponents of a more recent method of the countertenor tone of voice, stressing feeling and individual build quality, instead of the 100 % pure “uncolored” tone of voice long in fashion among early music professionals.