Out & About
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Kate Lindsey’s Happy Day
“Enfin, je suis ici,” mezzosoprano Kate Lindsey sang from Massenet’s “Cendrillon.” Her audience at Lincoln Center yesterday exchanged approving glances that showed she had indeed arrived.
The 26-year-old Richmond, Va., native, who is in her third and final year in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, received a champagne send-off yesterday along with a $5,000 check and a bud vase. Last month, she won the prestigious George London Foundation Award for outstanding young North American singers.
Ms. Lindsey and the Daedalus Quartet were the recipients of the 2007 Martin E. Segal Awards, which Mr. Segal, a former chairman of Lincoln Center, has presented to young talents nurtured by the center’s constituents. The bud vase is a reminder of Mr. Segal’s daily habit of wearing a red tea rose in his lapel. Ms. Lindsey plans to put a white rose in her vase, which she’ll display in her apartment.
“Today represents a graduation of sorts,” Ms. Lindsey said at the podium. “I walked by the fountain yesterday, and I remembered being there in September 2003, looking up at the Metropolitan Opera house, and realizing how badly I wanted to sing in the building.”
Ms. Lindsey’s opera career started in 1995, when she was 15 years old. “I was originally a soccer player, but I tore two ligaments,” Ms. Lindsey said. “I took that as a sign to try singing, which I’d always loved, but had been too shy, too introverted to pursue,” she said.
She won a part in a school production of “Crazy For You,” eventually focusing on opera while earning a bachelor’s degree at Indiana University’s school of music.
Opera had not been too much a part of her childhood. “We’re southerners at heart, campers,” Ms. Lindsey said. “I learned to sing harmonies in the backseat of the car with my two older siblings. We used to stage variety shows together.”
These days, her parents are avid opera fans: They subscribe to Opera News and have bought gift subscriptions to the publication for friends. They also subscribe to Sirius radio so they can listen to the Met Opera’s performances and intermission interviews.
They have listened closely to their daughter, who made her Met debut as Javotte in “Manon” and performed in the Met productions of Don Carlo and the Magic Flute.
Next month she’ll play Cherubino in the Marriage of Figaro at the Boston Lyric Opera starting April 27. In June, she will appear as Siébel in “Faust” at the Metropolitan Opera Concerts in the Parks.
“It’s been two years almost to the day since I made my Met debut singing on stage with Renée Fleming. The irony of life amazes me every day,” she said.
The co-director of the Chamber Music Society, Wu Han, accepted the award for the members of the Daedalus Quartet, who could not be present because of an engagement at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
A statement from the quartet indicated Lincoln Center’s influence on their development. The members recalled coming to Lincoln Center for Juilliard’s precollege program, then receiving undergraduate and master’s degrees there. They have also taught music in New York City public schools through the Lincoln Center Institute.
