Sherrill Milnes gave master classes and lectures about his life and career.

Opera star visits UMKC

By: Teresa Sheffield

Posted: 3/10/08

What do you get when you put a world-famous opera singer and students from the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance performing opera arias in one room together?

No, you don't get a funny punch line; you get a master class with baritone Sherrill Milnes.

Milnes has sung in every major opera house, has more than 40 CDs to his name and has performed with opera superstars like Luciano Pavarotti, Beverly Sills, Leontyne Price, Placido Domingo and Joan Sutherland.

Milnes came to UMKC for many reasons.

"UMKC is known as a fine music school in the United States," he said. "It has a national reputation. I know some of the faculty and some of the former faculty here and they asked."

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 students from the vocal department of the Conservatory had the opportunity to sing for Milnes in a master class at Grant Hall.

A master class is where students perform for an experienced and knowledgeable artist, who then critiques, corrects or compliments their performance.

Milnes worked on things like stage etiquette and presence, vocal technique, repertoire choices and acting with the singers.

He tried to keep the atmosphere light by telling jokes and "being silly."

"Sometimes I make suggestions off the seat of my pants but my pants have been around a lot," he said.

Milnes has done more than 400 master classes at every major American music school in the United States, and in cities all over the world, like Shanghai, Prague, London and Moscow.

"I bring a lot of experience from years and years of singing around the world with some of the world's most famous conductors," he said. "So they have the benefit of my experience, my knowledge and my sense of performance and all of that, and hopefully they can take it away and use it."

Milnes gave a lecture at the Kansas City Library on Thursday where he talked about his life, showed audio and visual clips of his career, and took questions from the audience.

When he was growing up, Milnes never dreamed he would ever be the opera star he is today.

"I have music education degrees so I didn't go to school to have a career. I wanted to teach. … I was a good worker. I was a good hustler, in the best American sense of that word," Milnes said. "I'm from a small family dairy farm west of Chicago, and so being in that big metropolitan area, there was a lot of singing to do, so little by little my voice evolved."

Milnes is a big fan of working hard, step by step to achieve goals.

"I was never was the dreamer. I would hear the Met [Metropolitan Opera] broadcasts … and they inspired me. I loved them, but I wasn't the dreamer in the sense that I thought or said 'Some day mark my words, I'm going to be there singing.' … I was never that person," Milnes said. "I was good at taking the little intermediate steps. Many people dream about something that is a mile away and ten years later, they're still dreaming about that thing a mile away and they've not taken any of the steps. … I was good at those little steps."

Milnes has sung hundreds of roles in his lifetime, but his favorites are the "quintessential bad guys" of Scarpia in Puccini's "Tosca," Giovanni in Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Iago in Verdi's "Otello."

tsheffield@unews.com