To register, contact the Salt Marsh Office by phone: 860.535.3456 or email: info@saltmarshopera.org
Click for more information about joining the Guild.

James Kuslan will look at Bellini's La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), as an operatic fantasy of rustic life and rustic people set, paradoxically, to some of the most sophisticated and refined melodies in the bel canto canon. Rare sound clips of some of the most renowned exponents of the story about a sleepwalking heroine will be played.   Mr. Kuslan wrote the essays included with the Metropolitan Opera's recent DVD releases of Lucia di Lammermoor and Don Pasquale, both starring Anna Netrebko.

Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library
2 Library Lane
Old Lyme, CT 06371
Please RSVP

A Conversation with Thomas Wolf and Soprano, Lucine Amara
Private Residence in Mystic, CT

Susan von Reichenbach
The Cosmic Song~a Lecture/Performance by Susan von Reichenbach, internationally acclaimed soprano

"All life is vibration. The entire Universe is Music--we are living in a Cosmic Song!"

Private Residence in Stonington, CT

James Kuslan
La Sonnambula
Westerly Public Library/Open to the Public

Mr. Kuslan, well-known in the opera world, will discuss Bellini's La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), as an operatic fantasy of rustic life and rustic people set, paradoxically, to some of the most sophisticated and refined melodies in the bel canto canon.  Rare sound clips of some of the most renowned exponents of the sleepwalking heroine (soprano) will be played. 

Thomas Wolf
Lyric Tenor
Thomas Wolf is a native of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He received his Bachelor of Music and his Master's of Music Degrees from Cleveland State University and subsequently studied with Nancy Stokes-Milnes in New York City. Other teachers have included the late Cornelio Cairati of Zürich, Switzerland and Patricia Göhl of Munich, Germany.

He has performed on several stages in the United States and abroad, and is especially appreciated for his vocal and dramatic portrayals of Tamino in Die Zauberflöte and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni. Mr. Wolf has also received acclaimed for performances as Pelléas in Pelléas et Melisande, Lionel in Martha, Belmonte in Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Alfredo in La Traviata. A frequent visitor to the recital platform and a proficient linguist, Mr. Wolf possesses a repertoire of some 350 songs in seven different languages. He made his European recital and operatic debuts in 1991 in Germany. On the occasion of his recital debut, Mr. Wolf's singing led the Münchner Merkur, Southwest Germany's largest newspaper, to comment on, "a particularly beautiful and warm tenor voice, wonderfully controlled throughout a very wide range and with an almost baritonal foundation." The same writer further averred, "His considerable musical and interpretive abilities are beyond any question." Mr. Wolf has also been much in demand on the concert stage, performing the Masses of Mozart, the great Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach and especially Uriel in Haydn's The Creation, the role in which he made his debut at Carnegie Hall.

Thomas Wolf has coached extensively the art song and operatic repertoires and lectures frequently for professional organizations and universities in New York City including Columbia University, the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall. His great knowledge of the 18th and 19th century works for the operatic stage and of vocal ornamentation is widely recognized. Mr. Wolf is also a frequent guest on the famed Opera Quiz heard internationally every Saturday afternoon during the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. He is also the author of scholarly musical articles, some of which have been published in Germany and France. Thomas Wolf is a founding Board Member and was for ten years Executive Director of American Singers' Opera Project. Mr. Wolf is also an Independent associate with Usana Health Sciences. Lucine Amara
Lucine Amara graced the stage of the Met for forty-one consecutive seasons during what has come to be known as the Golden Age of the Metropolitan Opera. She made her debut at the Met on November 6, 1951 as the Celestial Voice in Verdi's Don Carlo. Time Magazine averred, "she brought to the stage the kind of dazzling vocal splendor that made the Met famous." At the Met she has taken part in almost 1,000 performances; still a house record for a leading artist. She has also starred in five opening nights and nine new productions. Miss Amara has a vast repertoire consisting of 56 different roles and has taken part in 57 Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. She has been heard in every major opera house in the world from the Wiener Staatsoper to La Scala in Milan, from the San Francisco Opera to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Susan von Reichenbach
Susan von Reichenbach, New York-born soprano of German descent, has enjoyed enthusiastic acclaim throughout her international career as an opera singer, recitalist and symphony soloist. Her extensive and varied operatic repertoire includes the title role of Beethoven's Fidelio, Wagner's heroines Elisabeth and Venus in Tannhäuser, Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer and Ariadne and Composer in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, Amneris in Verdi's Aïda, Eglantine in Weber's Euryanthe ("She mastered the colossally difficult part with dazzling exactitude of intonation and with fascinating temperament." Svenska Dagbladet), Marguerite in Berlioz's Damnation de Faust (".her singing borders on perfection." Salt Lake Tribune) and the title role of Cherubini's Médée in the original French version. (Of her Médée, as fierce a role as was ever composed for soprano, New York magazine wrote, "Her gleaming soprano and generous spirit illuminated the title role-a wonderful singer.") She has performed in the opera houses of Seattle, Pittsburgh, Miami, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Colorado, Mexico City, Hamburg and at Finland's Savonlinna Festival. ("As Venus, Susan von Reichenbach brought a beautiful, soft-hued and full voice as befits a Goddess."-Hufvudsladsbladet, Helsinki.) She has appeared with orchestras across this country and abroad, including St. Louis (in a PBS broadcast of Beethoven's 9th), Cincinnati, San Francisco (where "Reichenbach raised the performance to its most expressive significance, "San Francisco Examiner), Milwaukee, Detroit, Utah, Syracuse, Pacific, San Antonio, Hartford, New Haven, Québec and with the Orchestre Nationale de France and Stockholm Philharmonic, at New York's Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center and in concert halls in Düsseldorf, Paris, Rome and Venice. She has also performed with the St. Lawrence Quartet, the Berne String Quartet, Musica Sacra, Clarion Concerts and at the Chautauqua and Bellingham Festivals.

Miss Reichenbach has received glowing reviews for her recitals at such distinguished venues as New York's Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center (occasioning the New York Times to salute her as "that rarity, a genuine Lieder singer"), at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery and Phillips Collection, at Pittsburgh's Frick Museum, Detroit's Art Institute, on New York's Rockefeller University's Distinguished Artists Series, Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on its prestigious Concert Series, at Chamber Music at Tannery Pond, the Lobero in Santa Barbara and in concert halls in Berlin, Zürich, Istanbul, Los Angeles (where the Los Angeles Times hailed her singing as "beauteous sounds at all levels") and at Vienna's Konzerthaus (where her singing was described in Der Kurier as "reminiscent of the great Viennese sopranos"). Miss Reichenbach's CD of Lieder and chansons, with Christian Steiner at the piano, has recently been released on Sonoris, the label of the chief sound engineer of Carnegie Hall.

Locally, Miss Reichenbach performed as a guest artist with Salt Marsh Opera in its production of Strauss' Die Fledermaus in RI and CT and participated in SMO's Broadway in the Park Concerts at the Kate. Recently, she launched the 2011 Music and More series with an art song recital at Chester's CBSRZ, and she will perform again in the Lower Connecticut River Valley on Sunday, May 29 at 5 when she and Joseph D'Eugenio offer an evening of gems from the American Songbook at Old Saybrook's Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center. James Kuslan
As artistic producer, James Kuslan is creating a series of vocal CDs for Deutsche Grammophon to feature some of the German classical record company's most glamorous stars. Mr. Kuslan has been a voice scout in the US for DG and has written the marketing copy and headlines for its annual product release books since 2009. Among his credits as a writer of liner notes for such record labels as London and Philips is London's 20 CD collection, Opera Made Easy, which highlights the artistry of Luciano Pavarotti. Locally, Mr. Kuslan has lectured on operatic disasters and on madness in opera (and mad modern stagings). Connecticut-born, he holds a B.A., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. His stage works have been performed in New York at the Grove Street Playhouse, Theatre Matrix, the Harold Clurman Theatre, on the Dramatists Series at the Yale Club and elsewhere. He early demonstrated his devotion to music by renouncing his study of the violin before causing the instrument or his auditors lasting damage.