“With the voice, it’s the same thing,” she said. You can think of it as fitness, if you want to get fit, you need to go to the gym and do certain exercises. “The daily bread is the vocal training,” she said. Soon she was working with a voice teacher to refine her vocal technique and diction, making sure, as she put it, “you are being true to the pronunciation.” In time, “I realized singing is what I really want to do,’” she said. “I kept saying ‘no, no, maybe I’m wrong,’ I put so much work into playing piano, I studied for so many years, what am I doing starting all over? I’m too old to start all over.” While she had managed to change her piano technique by then and finish her Master’s in piano performance, “I realized I found the most joy and the most fun in singing.” “I loved the work, the theater, the joy, and people were hiring me to sing, and then I started working on actually improving my voice,” she said. She sang in a chorus for “Madama Butterfly.” “People were telling me ‘you have a nice voice,’ ‘maybe you should sing opera.’”

James Episcopal Church in Farmington as a section leader “just for fun,” she said. That was when she started singing at the St. “For two years, I was on hiatus from playing,” she said.

She opted against surgery, preferring to work toward changing her piano technique, however long it took.

“There was also carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis, all of those things together,” she said. It was while pursuing her Master’s in Piano Performance at the University of Hartford that she discovered a cyst in her wrist. The path de Almeida followed to her role as Carmen is one perhaps worthy of opera.Ī native of Rio de Janeiro, she began piano at 11, eventually studying with the internationally renowned Luiz Henrique Senise. “As far as we know, this collaboration, to this level of integration of opera and dressage, hasn’t been done anywhere in the States,” he said. The event, which the OTC is presenting with Patricia Norcia Dressage and High Hopes Therapeutic Riding, is unprecedented, according to Mann.

Carmen opera photos