“‘Local’ fest singers face decisions on their careers” from the August 8, 1974 Door County Advocate
‘Local’ fest singers face decisions on their careers
By HENRY F. SHEA
Opera, straight and clear and understandable, is an artistic goal for the two young singers who will be featured at Concert No. 2, Sunday, Aug. 11 in the Peninsula Music Festival series. The two, Teresa Seidl and Brad Liebl, will make the evening not only a highlight of this year’s concerts but a kind of Ode to Luxemburg. Both received their first experience in vocal music in and around their home town.
Miss Seidl began in her church choir and had the good luck and inheritance of a musical mother who early saw her daughter’s talent and arranged for good teachers. Brad, as a boy soprano, performed at farm organization banquets and fraternal social affairs until his voice changed and he found he was a baritone.
Both are graduates of St. Norbert College, Miss Seidl in 1970 with a Theater Arts degree, Liebl in the same year. It was also a special honor for him to be selected by St. Norbert professors for membership to “Who’s Who in Small American Colleges.”
The path of both, since leaving St. Norbert, have been divergent. Liebl went on to the College-Conservatory of Music, Cincinnati, Ohio, where he earned a master’s degree in 1972. His summer experience in that city has been as a member of the chorus of the summer Opera company and singing relatively small roles in their productions. Previously he had done some night club singing and had been in the chorus of the Milwaukee Skylite Opera which performed condensed versions of popular operatic productions.
With his current studies for a doctorate in music he has found time to be a professional soloist at the Walnut Hills-Avondale United Methodist church and the Isaac M. Wise Temple, both in Cincinnati. In the latter he also had opportunity to conduct ritual music of the Jewish High Holy Days. His interest in this may well stem from association with Dr. Joseph Cohen who with Marshall Moss as vocal and choral instructor were among his principal teachers at St. Norbert.
Miss Seidl, after her St. Norbert studies, went to Vienna. There in the Vienna Observatory she had vocal preparation with Hilde Zadek, training for German lieder with Erike Werbe and participated in summer opera workshop sessions. Vienna retains much of the background and tradition that have made it, with Salzburg and Bayreuth, centers of musical inspiration for German speaking peoples. Miss Seidl merged with two of these traditions, finding herself after a few years very much at home in such an atmosphere. She was soloist with the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg, had a private recital in the Palais Palffy, one of the various Baroque miniature theaters available in Vienna to young artists. In addition she kept up her work as soprano soloist at the St. Leopold (R.C.) Church of Vienna.
To make her summer a happy one she has just learned that she has a contract to sing lead roles in an opera company at Gelsenkirchen in Germany’s industrial Rhineland. She had not known, she says, that the agent who made the recommendation was in the audience of one of her recent performances. And she is glad now she did not know. The tension of being under scrutiny might have cost her the appointment. Currently, while full of pleasure at being home she is a little intimidated by the size of American autos after living in a land where motor scooters, cycles, bicycles and mini-cars, driven often by seeming madmen, she notes, are the rule.
Both young singers find themselves now in a period of decision-making. Brad looks at what is ahead, the difficult task of competition with others his age. He comments that people in any form of show business tend to have psychological problems that can either flatten them or spur them to prove their worth to themselves and others. A part of this outlook may be the fact that he began college at a time that may later be known as “The Era of the Hippie,” a period of student withdrawal from conventional, materialistic achievement and active combat against it. It would seem natural that whatever might be a student’s natural drives and ambitions in that time, they could not escape being colored by such anti-materialistic attitudes.
Miss Seidl, however, being a woman, has to take a little more practical attitude. So far, she notes, there is only one way of producing a family and for show people of any kind there are real obstacles. Looming large for her is travel since budding opera singers must go the traditional route of apprenticeship in European opera choruses, choirs and theaters.
Travel is a constant necessity to reach the centers where the funds and talents are concentrated to produce the right showcase for the theatrical or musical artist. Under these conditions she admits marriage and a lasting one is more than difficult, it sometimes becomes nearly impossible. She is not despondent about this. You sense she has confidence that in her case no real problems will occur. To the interviewer the possibility seems slight also. Miss Seidl, bouncy, apple-cheeked and forthright besides having not only a thrilling voice and figure to match, possesses an ample supply of mental clarity.
Both Brad and Miss Seidl unite in one complaint about facilities for classical musicians in the United States. Simply, there are not enough where the young artist can take his knocks, learn to profit from them. Brad, especially, would like to have Americans know more about opera. He admits that the acting, on-stage, has frequently been artificial and overdone which may be their cliche-ridden tradition. He would like to change that with a more naturalistic style of acting.
Last week one of the visitors to Door county was George C. Izenour. This gentleman was fresh from consulting work on a Three and a Half million dollar theatrical-concert hall project in Dallas, Tex. He began his college studies of drama in the traditional way, acting, play-reading, literature of the theater. His interests soon focused on what has made him famous…theatrical lighting, stage design...in short, what the performers need to build illusions, earn a living and carry on a tradition that, illusive as it may seem, does grow and include more viewers, every year in our affluent society. Would you like to hear Mozart, Rossini and Dvorak at $2 per ticket?
It costs a bit more right now but Thor Johnson, Teresa Seidl and Brad Liebl are going to let you hear some of each Sunday evening.
Concert singers Teresa Seidl and Brad Liebl are usually seen in the paper in more formal poses but close to home something more casual seemed appropriate. —Henry Shea
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
[Obituary for Brad Liebl: https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/obituaries/pwix1047814
Obituary for George Izenour: http://sightlines.usitt.org/archive/v47/n05/stories/InMemoriamIzenour.html ]
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