John Malveaux: Opera Fresh: Isola Jones sang at the Met for 16 seasons and more than 500 performances

Isola Jones
(southmountaincc.edu)

John Malveaux of 

www.MusicUNTOLD.com 

writes:

Isola Jones sang at the Met for 16 seasons and more than 500 performances. See.http://operafresh.blogspot.com/2011/08/reflections-on-career-isola jones.html and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg66XM-0G_I

Opera Fresh

Reflections On A Career - Isola Jones                                                                                        

Isola Jones was born December 27, 1949. The mezzo-soprano of American Indian and African American descent started singing at 4-years old. By age 11, while attending a Roman Catholic grade school, she saw a performance of Leontyne Price on television and begged her mother to buy a recording of the soprano. It was at this moment that she determined she wanted to be an opera singer as a career. She attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to receive her undergraduate degree. After school she became a member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. She made her professional debut in 1975 as the mezzo-soprano soloist in Verdi's Requiem with the Chicago Symphony as a last-minute replacement

for Yvonne Minton, who had taken ill. The conductor was Sir Georg Solti and the soprano soloist was none other than her idol Leontyne Price. The subsequent year she was engaged to sing in Wagner's Der Fliegende Holländer in Chicago with Solti and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess with Loren Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra. Within two years of her professional debut, she was headed to New York City for one of the greatest professional relationships of her operatic career: The Metropolitan Opera. Ms. Jones made her MET debut on October 15, 1977, as Olga in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin with fellow castmates Nicolai Gedda, Sherrill Milnes, Teresa Zylis-Gara and conductor James Levine in the company's first performance of the opera in Russian. "During the intermission between the first and second acts, I remember going back to the dressing room and looking in the mirror, and I was visibly shaking. I thought, 'I cannot have a career, this is just too nerve-wracking!'

But I know that I was there for a reason. I needed to be at the Met to get what I needed for my singing. It is a fabulous place to learn, because you are working with the best people in the world. You are hearing, up close, in your face and personal, great singing, and there is no substitute for that." She was also featured in many "Live from Lincoln Center" performances including Francesca da Rimini, La forza del destino, Manon Lescaut, Cavalleria Rusticana and Rigoletto at the MET. She sang over 500 performances at the MET including majorcomprimario roles in such operas as Thaïs, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, Die Zauberflöte, Der Fliegende Holländer, Parsifal, Carmen, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Wozzeck,  L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, I Vespri Siciliani, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Adriana Lecouvreur, Porgy and Bess and Ariadne auf Naxos.

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PLEASE see/hear Isola Jones 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuStIWAgiLA
[John Malveaux]